When I thought of that fissure and of those hills, a feeling of disquietude filled me, and I had to excuse myself and sip at a glass of water — that same damnable Severn water, I realized too late to stop myself — while I regained my composure. Why I should find thoughts of that fissure and of those hills so distressing, I could not recall.
This time MacIvar grudgingly yielded to my request, insisting that nothing would be found, but willing in his burly, overbearing way to humor this troublesome American. I reported this potential break to Alexander Myshkin by Transatlantic telephone, and spent the remainder of the day more or less productively employed.
Again that night I feigned migraine and excused myself from my cousin’s company. She expressed concern for my well-being and offered to summon a doctor to examine me, but I ran from her company and locked myself in my room. I stared into the fiery orb of the sun as it fell beneath the Severn Hills, then willed myself across the miles to the turret.
As I approached it tonight I realized that it had changed its form again, assuming the features of a style of architecture unknown and unfamiliar to me, but clearly of the most advanced and elaborate nature imaginable.
I flashed through the window, sped past the machines and their attendants, and hovered above the gray plain. I had reached a decision. Tonight I would pursue my investigation of the plain to its end! I swooped low over the plain, passed rapidly over the Victorian village — for such is the way I now labeled this assemblage of souls — over the Roman encampment, over the rough the Pictish gathering, and on. What would I find, I wondered — Neanderthals?
Instead, to my astonishment, I recognized the ectoplasmic manifestation of an Egyptian pyramid. I dropped toward it, entered an opening near its base, and found myself in a hall of carven obsidian, lined with living statues of the Egyptian hybrid gods — the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the ibis-god Thoth, the crocodile god Sobk — and I knew, somehow, that these, too, were not physical representations created by some ancient sculptors, but the very souls of the creatures the Egyptians worshipped!
I did not stay long, although I could see that ceremony was taking place in which worshippers prostrated themselves, making offerings and chanting in honor of their strange deities. I sped from the pyramid and continued along the plain, wondering what next I would encounter.
In Silicon Valley, Alexander Myshkin and I had spent many hours, after our day’s work was completed, arguing and pondering over the many mysteries of the world, including the great mystery of Atlantis. Was it a mere legend, a Platonic metaphor for some moral paradigm, a fable concocted to amuse the childish and deceive the credulous? Myshkin was inclined to believe in the literal reality of Atlantis, while I was utterly skeptical.
Alexander Myshkin was right.
The Atlantean settlement was suffused with a blue light all its own. Yes, the Atlanteans were the precursors and the inspiration of the Egyptians. Their gods were similar but were mightier and more elegant than the Egyptians’; their temples were more beautiful, their pyramids more titanic, their costumes more fantastic.
And the Atlanteans themselves — I wondered if they were truly human. They were shaped like men and women, but they were formed with such perfection as to make the statues of Praxiteles look like the fumblings of a nursery child pounding soft clay into a rough approximation of the human form.
These Atlanteans had aircraft of amazing grace and beauty, and cities that would make the fancies of Wonderland or of Oz pale by comparison.
And yet they had been captured and imprisoned on this terrible gray plain!
I sped beyond the Atlantean settlement, wondering if yet more ancient civilizations might be represented. And they were, they were. People of shapes and colors I could only have imagined, cities that soared to the heavens (or seemed to, in that strange psychic world), wonders beyond the powers of my puny mind to comprehend.
How many ancient civilizations had there been on this puny planet we call Earth? Archaeologists have found records and ruins dating back perhaps 10,000 years, 15,000 at the uttermost. Yet anthropologists tell us that humankind, homo sap. or something closely resembling him, has been on this planet for anywhere from two to five million years. Taking even the most conservative number, are we to believe that for 1,985,000 years our ancestors were simple fisher-folk, hunters and gatherers, living in crude villages, organized into petty tribes? And that suddenly, virtually in the wink of the cosmic eye, there sprang up the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, of ancient China and India, Japan and Southeast Asia and chill Tibet, the Maya and the Aztecs and the Toltecs and the great Incas, the empires of Gambia and of Ghana, the mysterious rock-painters of Australia and the carvers of the stone faces of Easter Island?
This makes little sense. No, there must have been other civilizations, hundreds of them, thousands, over the millions of years of humankind’s tenancy of the planet Earth.
But even then, what is a mere 2,000,000 years, even 5,000,000 years, in the history of a planet six billion years of age? What mighty species might have evolved in the seas or on the continents of this world, might have learned to think and to speak, to build towering cities and construct great engines, to compose eloquent poems and paint magnificent images…and then have disappeared, leaving behind no evidence that ever they had walked this Earth… or at least, no evidence of which we are aware?
Such races did live on this planet. They had souls, yes, and so much, say I, for human arrogance. This I know because I saw their souls.
How many such races? Hundreds, I tell you. Thousands. Millions. I despaired of ever reaching the end of the gray plain, but I had vowed to fly to its end however long it took. This time, if daylight found me still in the tower, so must it be. My cousin might discover my body, seemingly deep in a normal and restorative slumber, propped up in my easy chair. But she would be unable to awaken me.
Yes. I determined that I would see this thing to its conclusion, and from this objective I would not be swayed. I saw the souls of the great segmented fire-worms who built their massive cities in the very molten mantle of the Earth; I saw submarine creatures who would make the reptilian plesiosaurs look like minnows by comparison, sporting and dancing and telling their own tales of their own watery gods; I saw the intelligent ferns and vines whose single organic network at one time covered nearly one third of the primordial continent of Gondwanaland; I saw the gossamer, feathery beings who made their nests in Earth’s clouds and built their playgrounds in Luna’s craters.
We humans in our conceit like to tell ourselves that we are evolution’s darlings, that millennia of natural selection have led Nature to her crowning creation, homo sap. Let me tell you that the opposite is the case. The story of life on Earth is not the story of evolution, but of de-volution. The noblest, the most elevated and most admirable of races were the first, not the last.
But still I pursued my flight, past wonder on wonder, terror on terror, until at last I saw the gray plain, the gray plane curve upward, rising into the brilliant haze that I recognized as the primordial chaos from which our Solar System emerged. And the souls that were captured by the turret — what was their fate? For what purpose were they caught up in every era of being, and drawn backward, backward toward that primordial haze?
A great mass of soul-force formed before my ectoplasmic eyes. A great seething ball of sheer soul-energy that accreted there in the dawn of time, now burst its bonds and rolled down that great gray plain, sweeping all before it, destroying cities as a boulder would crush an ants’ nest, shaking continents to their foundations, causing the globe itself to tremble and to wobble in its orbit around the Sun.
But even this was only the beginning of the havoc wrought by this great ball of soul-energy. From the remote past to the present — our present, yours and mine — it roared, and then on into the future, sweeping planets and suns in its path.
And when the roiling concentration of soul-force reached that unimaginably distant future, when all was dim a
nd silent in the cosmos and infinitesimal granules of existence itself floated aimlessly in the endless void, it reversed it course and swept backward, roiling and rolling from future to past, crushing and rending and growing, always growing, growing.
It reached its beginning point and reversed itself still again, larger and more terrible this time than it had been the first, and as it oscillated between creation and destruction, between future and past, between the beginning of the universe and its end, the very fabric of time-space began to grow weak.
What epochs of history, human and pre-human and, yes, post-human, were twisted and reformed into new and astonishing shapes. Battles were fought and unfought and then fought again with different outcomes; lovers chose one another, then made new and different choices; empires that spanned continents were wiped out as if they had never existed, then recreated in the images of bizarre deities; religions disappeared and returned, transmogrified beyond recognition; species were cut off from the stream of evolution to be replaced by others more peculiar than you can imagine.
A baby might be born, then disappear back into its mother’s womb only to be born again a monstrosity unspeakable. A maddened killer might commit a crime, only to see his deed undone and himself wiped out of existence, only to reappear a saintly and benevolent friend to his onetime victim.
And what then, you might wonder, what then? I’ll not deny that my own curiosity was roused. Would humankind persist forever? What supreme arrogance to think this would be the case! Mightier species than we, and nobler, had come and gone before homo sap. was so much as a gleam in Mother Nature’s eye.
In iteration after iteration of the titanic story, humankind disappeared. Destroyed itself with monstrous weapons. Was wiped away by an invisible virus. Gave birth to its own successor race and lost its niche in the scheme of things. Was obliterated by a wandering asteroid, conquered and exterminated by marauding space aliens —
Oh, space aliens. Alexander Myshkin and I had debated that conundrum many a time. Myshkin believed that the universe positively teemed with intelligence. Creatures of every possible description, human, human-like, insectoid, batrachian, avian, vegetable, electronic, you name it. Myshkin’s version of the cosmos looked like a science fiction illustrator’s sample book.
My universe was a lonely place. Only Earth held life, and only human life on Earth was sentient. It was a pessimistic view, I’ll admit, but as the mother of the ill-favored baby was wont to say, “It’s ugly but it’s mine.”
Well, Myshkin was right. There were aliens galore. At various times and in various versions of the future — and of the past, as a matter of fact — they visited Earth or we visited their worlds or space travelers of different species met in unlikely cosmic traffic accidents or contact was made by radio or by handwritten notes tossed away in empty olive jars.
One version of post-human Earth was dominated by a single greenish fungus that covered the entire planet, oceans and all, leaving only tiny specks of white ice at the North and South Poles. Another was sterilized, and thank you, weapons industry, for developing a bomb that could kill everything — everything! — on an entire planet. But spores arrived from somewhere later on, and a whole new family of living things found their home on Earth.
I saw all of this and more, and I saw the very fabric of space-time becoming feeble and unsure of itself. I saw it tremble and quake beneath the mighty assault of that accumulated and ever-growing soul-force, and I realized what was happening. The cosmos itself was threatened by whatever screaming demons of chaos cavorted beyond its limits.
At length a rent appeared, and I was able to peer into it, but the black, screeching chaos that lay beyond it I will not describe to you. No, I will not do that. But I peered into that swirling orifice of madness and menace and I mouthed a prayer to the God I had abandoned so long ago, and I swore to that God that if one man, if one soul could counter the malignities who populated the fifth dimension, or the fiftieth, or the five millionth, it would be I.
Did I say that the soul is the immaterial and immortal part of a living, sentient being? And did I say that I had realized, in despite of my lifelong skepticism, that God was a living reality? Perhaps I should have said that gods were living realities. I do not know how many universes there are, each one created by its own god, each god behaving like a mischievous child.
And that chaotic void beyond the cosmos — was that in fact part of a higher realm of reality, in which all the universes drifted like the eggs of some aquatic life-form, within the nourishing fluid of the sea? If my soul should leave our cosmos and enter that chaos, to face the demons — demons that I now realized were the gods of other universes — would it then forfeit its claim to immortality?
Could those demons be stopped? Could I, one man, stand against this infinite army of insanity? There was a single way to learn the answer to that question. I decided that I would take that way.
I —
THE PELTONVILLE HORROR
The Hudson-Terraplane roadster’s electric headlights cut twin channels of brilliance through the swirling fog of the Peltonville Turnpike. The hour was late and traffic was almost nonexistent, save for the sporty little car’s sleek, bright blue form.
The shrieking voice that had come from the automobile’s custom-fitted Stromberg-Carlson radio gave way to the less disturbing and more polished tones of a staff announcer. “Tune in again next week for another Witch’s Tale,” he urged listeners. “But for now, sit back and relax, put your feet up and enjoy the melodic musical stylings of the Stan Sawyer Orchestra.”
“What a relief!” Delia Davis managed a quiet little laugh, tinged with a suggestion of nervousness. “I never did like those spooky programs, Paul darling. If I didn’t love you so much I don’t think I could ever put up with them.”
“But, Delia,” Paul Carter reached across the seat to pat his sweetheart’s hand, “it’s all just make-believe. You don’t think there’s really an old witch named Nancy who’s more than a hundred years old, and lives with a wise black cat named Satan, do you?”
“No.” Delia hesitated. Then she repeated, “No. I guess not.” Paul released her hand and she tightened the scarf over her head. Her hair was jet black; by candlelight Paul Carter said that it showed bits of midnight blue that matched the color of her eyes. Delia had let her hair grow longer now that the boyish look and the bobbed hair of the previous decade had been abandoned for a more feminine look. “I do so love the feel of the wind and the smell of the fresh air out here in the country. But it’s getting awfully cold now that the sun is down. Feels more like winter than spring.”
Paul laughed. “Changing the subject, are you?”
“I guess so. When we crossed that bridge over the Beeton River a while ago, I could just imagine we were flying through the stratosphere.” Delia reached for the tuning knob on the dashboard. The signal had drifted and she brought it back so the sound of saxophones and trumpets filled the convertible’s tonneau. “I guess I just don’t enjoy being scared. Well, maybe just a little, like at those frightening movies. But then I know you’ll put your arm around me and I feel all safe. I wish we were married, Paul. Then you could put your arm around me all the time and I’d never be frightened again. Oh, Paul, will we ever be married? Can’t we even set a date?”
“As soon as this depression is over and the economy picks up again,” Paul replied. “You know, I’m lucky to still have a job at all, but since they’ve been cutting salaries every few months, I can barely pay the rent on a furnished room. There’s no way I could afford an apartment and support a wife.”
Delia lowered her eyes to the engagement ring on her left hand. “We could sell my ring.” She toyed with the narrow band and its tiny, glittering stone. “And we don’t really need a car. As much fun as it is, Paul, you could take the streetcar to work at the plant.”
Paul shook his head. “I bought the car before the crash. Some timing, wasn’t it? I couldn’t get a quarter of what it’s worth, now. And you’ll
never sell your ring, Delia, not as long as I can draw breath and do a day’s work. Listen — ”
Delia interrupted him with a gasp. “Paul — what was that?”
“What, Delia? I didn’t see anything.”
“Right over there, Paul. I thought I saw something moving in the woods, and then — then there was a flash. I don’t know what it was. Something bright, a point of light, two points of light. No, there were more. They kept blinking on and off. I think there were eight of them. I — they were some color I’ve never seen before. Something like red, I think, but so deep, so powerful — so frightening, oh, Paul, what could it be?”
Paul eased up on the roadster’s accelerator and the little car slowed. “I don’t see anything, Delia. Through this fog, I don’t know how you did. But maybe there was a momentary break. It might have been an electric power line or a radio tower. Or maybe you just caught sight of a couple of stars.”
“No, Paul. It was nothing like that. It was — oh, never mind. It’s gone now, whatever it was. Let’s go on.”
A distant flash lit the night sky above the woods to the west. Paul pushed the car to a higher speed. As he did so a low, distant rumble followed the lightning. “Uh-oh. I hope we’re not going to get rained on.”
“Maybe we should stop and put the top up.” Delia looked around them. The fog had largely lifted but the night had actually grown darker than ever. A bright moon struggled to send its light through thick storm clouds, but only an occasional break in the clouds permitted a brief moment of illumination.
The Doom That Came to Dunwich Page 10
