E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates

by E. Hoffmann Price

  We were animalculisms before that lordly head whose tall, many-terraced miter towered in the weaving, dancing grayness. The satanic rug glowed and smoldered and twinkled in the dim light. It mocked us for having spared it.

  The Presence was fading. The grayness was now a multitude of fine, wavering tongues that wove an impassable barrier. The awful personality had departed.

  I turned to d’Artois. He sensed my question before I spoke.

  “The Master and all his adepts were concentrating. That face was either the Master, or a composite of all his hierarchy of adepts. They will be here in physical presence at any moment, now that their projected minds know where we are. They know the secret of this mist they have created, and can penetrate it.

  “Think, while you can yet think,” he concluded with a gesture of despair, “and picture an enemy who can surround us with a wall of thought-concentration as infrangible as granite!”

  The mists were closing in and engulfing us. The doom was settling.

  “Good God!” I gasped, as a hand clutched my arm, and another seized my pistol.

  D’Artois nodded. I could barely see him.

  “They are here,” he murmured. “Resistance is vain.”

  I wondered at the gleam in his eye, and the glance he shot at Father Martin. The priest saw, and nodded almost imperceptibly.

  We were drawn into the impenetrable blackness of everlasting night. But the hands that clutched us were human: and that in a degree relieved the horror.

  I felt the paving of the courtyard beneath my feet.

  “Not a word!” growled a harsh voice at my side. The muzzle of a pistol prodded my ribs.

  We were on Saint Peter Street, in front of my house. Our captors were thrusting us into a sedan. The Master, it seemed, had not thus far developed enough power to whisk us through space and into his sanctum. The awful grayness ended at the door leading to the court.

  As we seated ourselves, with two of our captors facing us, pistols leveled, we saw that they were stalwart fellows with grim, Mongoloid features. Resistance would be futile. And the rug was in the hands of the one who sat next to the driver, commanding the party.

  “I wonder why they don’t blindfold us?” I asked d’Artois.

  His smile was grim and despairing.

  “They do not intend for us to leave our next stopping-point,” he replied. “What harm if we see?”

  Then he slumped back against the upholstery.

  * * * *

  Pierre seemed resigned, but I felt that he had not yet abandoned hope. Father Martin’s face was white and stern. Nothing but his faith remained after that terrific demonstration by the Master. As for me, I was numbed by the enormity of it all. The mighty utterance of that awful Presence, the fearful weaving grayness that had overwhelmed us, the throbbing, surging hammer-blows of psychic force that had shattered the concerted attack of d’Artois and Father Martin: these were but preliminaries to what would happen when the Master unleashed the full armory of his powers, rent the veil, and loosed into the world those monsters from beyond the Border, those ultra-dimensional horrors whose existence Pierre had but suggested.

  “The neophyte, the insignificant servant of Him who is beyond the scope of our God who rules a universe of three dimensions.”

  And if this dreadful master were the neophyte, then what would emerge from the Gateway that led from the Fourth Plane?

  In the meanwhile, the police were looking for three men who had impersonated Federal Agents! They were seeking to arrest the servants of the Last Scourge for impersonating customs officials: and the Golden Horde was about to swarm over the earth again, slaying and pillaging and spreading ruin as even the Grand Khan had never dreamed when he heaped 70,000 heads into one ghastly pyramid.

  The envoys of the Last Conqueror, liable to arrest!

  I laughed. The laugh was too terrible and mocking for the despair that one expresses in the face of disasters that men have heretofore faced.

  Pierre started, then understood: not my words, for I had not spoken, but rather my mood.

  “Mon ami,” he whispered, “you are right. Even with what I once saw in High Asia, I am at a loss to predict what will come next, except that we have seen but a vague glimpse of the terror to come. This fog was but a trifle.”

  We were driving out toward the Chef Menteur Pass that connects Lake Pontchartrain with the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere in those marshes was the rendezvous of the Master. Somewhere in that maze of swamps and bayous was the sanctum of the Last Conqueror. He would rise triumphant from the mud and sweep dazzlingly across the earth, followed by his acolytes and those forces from across the Border.

  Our captors left the highway as we approached the bridge that spans the Chef, and drew up on the elevated ground near the abandoned fort that years ago commanded this one of the two approaches to New Orleans from the Gulf via Lake Pontchartrain. In the moonlight we could see the brick bastions with their gunports that commanded the surrounding marshes. Dismantled cannon lay on the crumbling gun emplacements.

  From the parapet we could look down into the area. It was all overgrown with weeds and shrubbery. Trees had taken root and forced the masonry apart in spots.

  “Where are we?” whispered d’Artois.

  “Chef Menteur fort,” I replied in a low voice, although, as far as I could see, it made little difference where we were.

  “Silence!” snapped our escort.

  The commander of the party led the way. The two who had faced us in the car fell in behind us. Their pistols were still drawn and ready.

  We heard the car starting. The Master, it seemed, had other errands requiring attention.

  * * * *

  We descended from the parapet into the area, and thence to the entrance that opened into a casemate. Our footsteps rang hollowly in the vaulted passageway. Through the embrasures of the casemate I caught glimpses of the surrounding moat. As we advanced, I saw that we were on the side nearest the Chef.

  Sentries at intervals challenged us. Our escort muttered a password, and continued the march. Finally we halted at the end of the casemate.

  The leader advanced and tapped. What had seemed in the light of his flash-lamp to be a blank wall of seasoned brick swung silently out, revealing a wall of concrete and a door of steel plates.

  He beat a tattoo on that barrier. We heard the whine of an electric motor picking up speed, and a muffled humming of gears. The massive, armored door slid slowly aside. Our captors thrust us forward into a passageway pervaded with a diffused, rosy glow.

  From a guard room at the left of the entrance a dignitary in yellow robes and a tall miter emerged to take charge of us. He addressed d’ Artois in a language unfamiliar to me. Pierre answered in the same tongue, and without hesitation. Then he turned to me.

  “I hope to see you and Father Martin later,” he said. “The Master wishes to confer with me. Acolytes, it seems, are not entitled to interview him. In case I do not see you again—” Instead of completing his speech, he bowed gravely.

  Two others in yellow robes escorted Pierre into the guard room. The leader of our captors, carrying the rug in his arms, followed. We were for the moment left alone in the pulsing rosy glow of the passage.

  The massive sliding door was firmly sealed behind us.

  As I looked about and saw that we were surrounded by walls and a ceiling of reinforced concrete, I began to realize the resourcefulness of the enemy. Most, if not all, of the rendezvous must be underground; and in this marshy country caissons would have to be sunk before excavations could be made. With what infinite patience they must have worked, setting the first course of a caisson, then digging, and moving the excavated earth by night through the casemate embrasures and into fishermen’s skiffs, thence to be dumped far out into the lake, lest mounds of earth about the fort betray their presence.

  And what of the
laborers? Why had not some one of them mentioned the mysterious excavations?

  The solution had a dreadful simplicity.

  Drifters had been engaged, brought out by night, imprisoned until the job was completed, and then—the waters of the Chef were deep, and the current was swift. There would be none to betray the Master’s digging.

  All surmise: yet how else could this system of passages have been sunk so secretly?

  “Father Martin,” I finally said, “do you think that the Master seeks us as allies? Or is this just to give us a secret graveyard?”

  “God alone can say,” replied the priest, “although it seems that Pierre is known to them, by reputation at least. He seems to have commanded their respect to such a degree that they believe he can be of service. Much of his past is a riddle to me. I know only that he is a very learned and profound student of things which the Church has forbidden.”

  He paused a moment, then hastened to add, “Understand, I do not personally criticize. His attempt to thwart this menace is indeed worthy. Only—” I understood his uncompromisingly orthodox view. Mathematical research as such was one thing; the actual dabbling in forbidden mysteries was another.

  As we speculated on the outcome of Pierre’s conference with the Master, I heard the faint, high-pitched whine of a dynamo picking up its load. Then I heard the humming of transformers being energized.

  “We’ll soon know,” I remarked to Father Martin. “Something is about to happen.”

  * * * *

  My opinion was soon justified. Scarcely half an hour elapsed when a squad of our captors, arrayed in saffron-colored robes and tall cylindrical miters, approached from the guard room.

  The leader, a Mongol like his men, addressed us.

  “Be pleased to accompany us,” he ordered in the impersonal tone of a soldier.

  They formed in a hollow square in whose center we were to be escorted. We marched to the end of the long passageway. Its floor sloped at a steeper pitch than we had realized from glancing down its length.

  The detachment halted at the end of the long passageway. The steel door that barred further progress slid open in response to the leader’s command.

  “Let them enter,” said a voice.

  The Master was speaking. We, Pierre’s supposed acolytes, were about to enter the Presence.

  The front rank of the square side stepped to the left. The rear rank advanced, so that Father Martin and I were thrust ahead of them and into the blackness beyond the doorway. Then the massive door slipped silently into place, leaving us in a darkness so dense that my first thought was that no natural exclusion of light could possibly result in such an absence of even the faintest suggestion of visibility.

  “You are now in the presence of the Last Conqueror,” announced that same voice, speaking with the majesty of inexorable doom. “You will witness the opening of the Gateway and see the Lord of the Outer Marches. Then you will serve Him whole-heartedly or else be destroyed in a way inconceivable to your human minds.”

  Silence. Then from a great distance I could distinguish a scarcely perceptible pin-point of light. It began to expand into a glowing disk of phosphorescence that pulsed like a living thing.

  “You have opposed us out of incomplete understanding,” resumed the voice. “Therefore see, hear, learn.”

  The disk of light became nebulous, then coalesced to form the head and shoulders of a man whose Mongol features were the very majesty of fate itself : a sage whose contemplation of the vastnesses of space had sublimated every trace of humanity. We saw clearly outlined the awful Presence we had seen limned in weaving mists and spectral grayness. The Master had revealed the august splendor of his presence so that there could remain no lingering doubt that it had indeed been he who had projected his self to thwart our meddling with his monstrous plans.

  The slightly slanted eyes were profound and inscrutable as those brooding colossi that hold eternal watch over the wastes of Egypt: without pity, without passion, and without prejudice.

  And d’Artois, the only man who could contend with this master of doom, was a prisoner somewhere in this vortex of madness, to elect either service with the enemy, or destruction.

  Blackness blotted out the Presence.

  Then I noted that the darkness was rolling away like a wind-driven mist. Light advanced pace by pace until it occupied the entire vast, vaulted chamber into which we were looking. We were standing in an entrance passageway from which to witness the ritual that would prepare for the apparition of the Lord of the Fourth Axis.

  The hemispherical dome of the chamber was supported on walls buttressed with severely straight columns, and recessed with arched niches—entrances, presumably, like the one in which we stood.

  Along the wall sat the enemy’s dignitaries, each on a throne shaded by a gilded parasol. The thrones of those adepts were arranged according to height, the tallest ones being nearest the lofty dais of the Master, whose position was exactly opposite our niche.

  I saw now that some of the arched niches in the wall contained intricate networks of cables, helices, and bulbous glass tubes; a part of the ray and vibration generating devices that Pierre’s explanation had led me to expect.

  We tiptoed forward, halting in the archway of our niche.

  “I wonder where Pierre is,” I finally ventured to whisper to Father Martin. He did not answer. A human voice was outlawed in the presence of those impassive faces along the wall. They were devoid of emotion. They were passionless brazen sphinxes crouching in wait, the masters and not the slaves of time. They sat like old gods brooding over the destinies of worlds not yet created. Hatred, fanaticism, thirst for blood; anything would have been a relief from this terrific emotional vacuum.

  The first sound other than our whispered remarks was a single note of exquisite sweetness. As its vibrant richness died, the Master on the central throne made a gesture with his left hand. From one of the arched entrances emerged three figures, gray-robed and wearing cylindrical miters. Each held before him, by the fringe, a rug: Satan’s Prayer Rug, and its two companion pieces.

  As they stalked statuesquely toward the center of the hall, I noted for the first time their obvious objective: three panels so placed that they joined, leaving a triangular space in the center. Each panel was shaped like the rugs: a rectangle with clipped corners. They were advancing as if in cadence to a rhythm; then, halting, each before his appointed panel, they spread their rugs with ceremonious gestures and genuflections. This done, each stood erect at his post behind his rug.

  There was a moment of silence as heavy as that which broods in the lost gulfs between the uttermost stars, and the farthest frontiers of space; and then the resonant, majestic note of a brazen gong rang through the hall, mighty as the greeting to a god stepping from world to world across the vastnesses of unlimited space. It rolled and thundered, and died to a whisper like the rustling of silk, and the hissing of serpents, then swelled full-throated and triumphant in a peal of colossal splendor, its surge and sweep shaking that cyclopean vault and reaching the unplumbed depths of creation.

  Then the ultimate note of that tremendous brazen roar blended into a piping, wailing harmony that sighed and moaned and whispered against a background of muttering drums purring in a rhythm that started chills dancing up and down my spine. It was the complex, maddening cadence of elemental spirits chanting sinister invocations as they plucked stars one by one from the face of heaven and mirthfully discarded them.

  “That music is a greater blasphemy than the tongue of any man could utter!” exclaimed Father Martin, speaking into my ear. “Resist it, or you will join them!”

  He was right. And I clenched my fists, and set my teeth, seeking to fight the compelling wizardry of that diabolical music.

  In the niches along the wall I caught the flare and sputter and glow of the bulbous glass tubes. Beams of many-colored lights swept the v
ault. Some interlaced in dizzying networks; others were deflected into swirling vortices at the center. Tiny tongues and flashes of bluish flame played and leaped along the thrones of the adepts, and hovered in halos about their miters, and glorified their solemn features. The vault was a concentration of vibrant energy, visible and invisible forces that wove, and writhed, and twisted in accord with the harmonies of a law beyond our conception.

  Thus far, ours had been the only human voices since the blackness had rolled out of the hall. But as the sweeping bands of light interwove, the transfigured adepts on their thrones began a chanting that rose and fell, sinking to a whisper, and rising full-throated and sonorous in an infinitely rich, obscure tongue. It was with such resonant syllables that Lucifer sang to the morning star, and Shaddad enticed the gardens of Irem to rise from the sands of Arabia.

  Above the rolling thunder of the chanting, and the whine and sob of those soul-searing pipes, and the savage clang of mighty gongs, I could hear the three at their posts by the rugs, each in his turn pronouncing a sentence, each syllable as crystal-dear and clean-cut as it was utterly foreign. They were enunciating the inscriptions on the borders of their rugs; reading the poisonous runes woven into those oriflammes of darkness that lay shimmering in sinister beauty before them.

  The Master on his dais was nodding, now, and with a tiny baton beating the cadence of his intricate symphony of sound and, color and invisible radiations. And sound and color were blending into one! I could now see the color of that terrific brazen roar of the gong, and I could hear the vibration of those surging waves of light. Every conception of matter and force was running amuck, maddened by the concentration of force directed toward the central point where those solemn hierophants in regular order read their archaic runes, and shook the foundations of all creation with their portentous utterances.

  In that weird weaving of heretofore incompatible elements into a harmonious pattern, every belief and certainty was melting away and blending with madness. If those inscrutable squatting figures beneath their parasols had shown only a trace of human emotion! Some shadow of lingering humanity, some vestige of kinship with flesh-and-blood men! But they sat there, holding in reserve some power as yet unsuggested and unhinted, some awful force yet to be unleashed. And the fear that there could and would be a further rending asunder of all logic and reason froze and terrified me.