The Doom That Came to Dunwich

by Richard A. Lupoff

  Speaking not a word, she gestured to us, summoning us to follow her. We proceeded along a series of corridors and up and down staircases until, I warrant, I lost all sense of direction and of elevation. I could not tell whether we had climbed to a room in one of the battlements of the Anthracite Palace or descended to a dungeon beneath the Llewellyns’ ancestral home. I had placed the object Holmes had entrusted to me inside my garments. I could feel it struggling to escape, but it was bound in place and could not do so.

  “Where is this bishop you promised us?” I asked of Mrs. Llewellyn.

  Our hostess turned toward me. She had replaced her colorful Gypsyish attire with a robe of dark purple. Its color reminded me of the emanations of the warm object concealed now within my own clothing. Her robe was marked with embroidery of a pattern that confused the eye so that I was unable to discern its nature.

  “You misunderstood me, Doctor,” she intoned in her unpleasant accent. “I stated merely that it was my hope that Bishop Romanova would preside at our service. Such is still the case. We shall see in due time.”

  We stood now before a heavy door bound with rough iron bands. Mrs. Llewellyn lifted a key which hung suspended about her neck on a ribbon of crimson hue. She inserted it into the lock and turned it. She then requested Holmes and myself to apply our combined strength to opening the door. As we did so, pressing our shoulders against it, my impression was that the resistance came from some willful reluctance rather than a mere matter of weight or decay.

  No light preceded us into the room, but Mrs. Llewellyn strode through the doorway carrying her kerosene lamp before her. Its rays now reflected off the walls of the chamber. The room was as Lady Fairclough had described the sealed room in her erstwhile home at Pontefract. The configuration and even the number of surfaces that surrounded us seemed unstable. I was unable even to count them. The very angles at which they met defied my every attempt to comprehend.

  An altar of polished anthracite was the sole furnishing of this hideous, irrational chamber.

  Mrs. Llewellyn placed her kerosene lamp upon the altar. She turned then, and indicated with a peculiar gesture of her hand that we were to kneel as if participants in a more conventional religious ceremony.

  I was reluctant to comply with her silent command, but Holmes nodded to me, indicating that he wished me to do so. I lowered myself, noting that Lady Fairclough and Holmes himself emulated my act.

  Before us, and facing the black altar, Mrs. Llewellyn also knelt. She raised her face as if seeking supernatural guidance from above, causing me to remember that the full name of her peculiar sect was the Wisdom Temple of the Dark Heavens. She commenced a weird chanting in a language such as I had never heard, not in all my travels. There was a suggestion of the argot of the dervishes of Afghanistan, something of the Buddhist monks of Tibet, and a hint of the remnant of the ancient Incan language still spoken by the remotest tribes of the high Choco plain of the Chilean Andes, but in fact the language was none of these and the few words that I was able to make out proved both puzzling and suggestive but never specific in their meaning.

  As Mrs. Llewellyn continued her chanting, she slowly raised first one hand then the other above her head. Her fingers were moving in an intricate pattern. I tried to follow their progress but found my consciousness fading into a state of confusion. I could have sworn that her fingers twined and knotted like the tentacles of a jellyfish. Their colors, too, shifted: vermilion, scarlet, obsidian. They seemed, even, to disappear into and return from some concealed realm invisible to my fascinated eyes.

  The object that Holmes had given me throbbed and squirmed against my body, its unpleasantly hot and squamous presence making me wish desperately to rid myself of it. It was only my pledge to Holmes that prevented me from doing so.

  I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, summoning up images from my youth and of my travels, holding my hand clasped over the object as I did so. Suddenly the tension was released. The object was still there, but as if it had a consciousness of its own, it seemed to grow calm. My own jaw relaxed and I opened my eyes to behold a surprising sight.

  Before me there emerged another figure. As Mrs. Llewellyn was stocky and swarthy, of the model of Gypsy women, this person was tall and graceful. Swathed entirely in jet, with hair a seeming midnight blue and complexion as black as the darkest African, she defied my conventional ideas of beauty with a weird and exotic glamour of her own that defies description. Her features were as finely cut as those of the ancient Ethiopians are said to have been, her movements filled with a grace that would shame the pride of Covent Garden or the Bolshoi.

  But whence had this apparition made her way? Still kneeling upon the ebon floor of the sealed room, I shook my head. She seemed to have emerged from the very angle between the walls.

  She floated toward the altar, lifted the chimney from the kerosene lamp, and doused its flame with the palm of her bare hand.

  Instantly the room was plunged into stygian darkness, but gradually a new light, if so I may describe it, replaced the flickering illumination of the kerosene lamp. It was a light of darkness, if you will, a glow of blackness deeper than the blackness which sur-rounded us, and yet by its light I could see my companions and my surroundings.

  The tall woman smiled in benediction upon the four of us assembled, and gestured toward the angle between the walls. With infinite grace and seemingly glacial slowness she drifted toward the opening, through which I now perceived forms of such mad-deningly chaotic configuration that I can only hint at their nature by suggesting the weird paintings that decorate the crypts of the Pharaohs, the carved stele of the mysterious Mayans, the monoliths of Mauna Loa, and the demons of Tibetan sand paintings.

  The black priestess — for so I had come to think of her — led our little procession calmly into her realm of chaos and darkness. She was followed by the Gypsy-like Mrs. Llewellyn, then by Lady Fairclough, whose manner appeared as that of a woman entranced.

  My own knees, I confess, have begun to stiffen with age, and I was slow to rise to my feet. Holmes followed the procession of women, while I lagged behind. As he was about to enter the opening, Holmes turned suddenly, his eyes blazing. They transmitted to me a message as clear as any words.

  This message was reinforced by a single gesture. I had used my hands, pressing against the black floor as I struggled to my feet. They were now at my sides. Fingers as stiff and powerful as a bobby’s club jabbed at my waist. The object which Holmes had given me to hold for him was jolted against my flesh, where it created a weird mark which remains visible to this day.

  In the moment I knew what I must do.

  I wrapped my arms frantically around the black altar, watching with horrified eyes as Holmes and the others slipped from the sealed room into the realm of madness that lay beyond. I stood transfixed, gazing into the Seventh Circle of Dante’s hell, into the very heart of Gehenna.

  Flames crackled, tentacles writhed, claws rasped, and fangs ripped at suffering flesh. I saw the faces of men and women I had known, monsters and criminals whose deeds surpass my poor talent to record but who are known in the lowest realms of the planet’s underworlds, screaming with glee and with agony.

  There was a man whose features so resembled those of Lady Fairclough that I knew he must be her brother. Of her missing husband I know not.

  Then, looming above them all, I saw a being that must be the supreme monarch of all monsters, a creature so alien as to resemble no organic thing that ever bestrode the earth, yet so familiar that I realized it was the very embodiment of the evil that lurks in the hearts of every living man.

  Sherlock Holmes, the noblest human being I have ever encountered, Holmes alone dared to confront this monstrosity. He glowed in a hideous, hellish green flame, as if even great Holmes were possessed of the stains of sin, and they were being seared from within him in the face of this being.

  As the monster reached for Holmes with its hideous mockery of limbs, Holmes turned and signaled to me
.

  I reached within my garment, removed the object that lay against my skin, pulsating with horrid life, drew back my arm, and with a murmured prayer made the strongest and most accurate throw I had made since my days on the cricket pitch of Jammu.

  More quickly than it takes to describe, the object flew through the angle. It struck the monster squarely and clung to its body, extending a hideous network of webbing ’round and ’round and ’round.

  The monster gave a single convulsive heave, striking Holmes and sending him flying through the air. With presence of mind such as only he, of all men I know, could claim. Holmes reached and grasped Lady Fairclough by one arm and her brother by the other. The force of the monstrous impact sent them back through the angle into the sealed room, where they crashed into me, sending us sprawling across the floor.

  With a dreadful sound louder and more unexpected than the most powerful thunderclap, the angle between the walls slammed shut. The sealed room was plunged once again into darkness.

  I drew a packet of lucifers from my pocket and lit one. To my surprise, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his own and drew from it a stick of gelignite with a long fuse. He signaled to me and I handed him another lucifer. He used it to ignite the fuse of the gelignite bomb.

  Striking another lucifer, I relit the kerosene lamp that Mrs. Llewellyn had left on the altar. Holmes nodded his approval, and with the great detective in the lead, the four of us — Lady Fairclough, Mr. Philip Llewellyn, Holmes himself, and I — made haste to find our way from the Anthracite Palace.

  Even as we stumbled across the great hall toward the chief exit of the palace, there was a terrible rumbling that seemed to come simultaneously from the deepest basement of the building if not from the very center of the earth, and from the dark heavens above. We staggered from the palace — Holmes, Lady Fairclough, Philip Llewellyn, and I — through the howling wind and pelting snow of a renewed storm, through frigid drifts that rose higher than our boot tops, and turned about to see the great black edifice of the Anthracite Palace in flames.

  NOTHING PERSONAL

  The flashes on the surface of Yuggoth were so brilliant that they shorted out every bit of electronic equipment on Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen Jing-quo was the sole occupant of the observation satellite at the time, and her own eyes were spared only through a lucky break. She had been showering when the flashes occurred, sealed off from the outer universe.

  Still, she had a devil of time extricating herself from the shower-stall, now that the fractional horsepower motor that rolled the door open and shut as well as the touch-sensitive keypad that controlled the motor were dead.

  Dr. Chen found the manual override control by touch, got the door open, slipped into a jumpsuit and made her way to one of Beijing 11-11’s visual ports. The series of flashes had jolted the ports’ photosensitive intracoating to darken dramatically. Dr. Chen stared at Yuggoth, a pulsing, oblate globe that filled the sky above Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen studied the planet’s surface and the flashes briefly; she intuited that the observatory’s electron telescopes would be useless. Fortunately the station was also fitted with an array of old-style optical telescopes. Dr. Chen made her way to one of these, a 500-millimeter Zeiss-Asahi model, and trained it upon the site of the most recent flashes.

  The flashes continued. Dr. Chen, at first alarmed and confused by the unexpected events, was regaining her calm. She focused the Zeiss-Asahi on the apparent epicenter of the flashes and was rewarded by the sight of another flash. This time she observed a bright dot moving away from the surface of the planet. It flashed away into the black trans-Neptunian space, toward the tiny, distant jewel that she knew was the sun. She followed the brilliant dot as long as she could. When it disappeared from sight she set about repairing the assaulted electronics of Beijing 11-11.

  As soon as she could do so she set up a hyper-light speed link with her superiors on Earth’s moon. Even as she did so she trained one of Beijing 11-11’s powerful electron telescopes on Yuggoth’s surface. She knew the planet’s cities as well as — no, better than — she knew the cities of Earth. She had been born on the mother world but her recollections of the planet were only the vague images of a small child. Colors and sounds and odors. The feeling of her mother’s arms, a flavor that she thought was that of her mother’s milk. But she could not be sure.

  She had been selected as a toddler and transported to the moon for two decades of training. She had emerged at the top of her class, triumphing in the final competitive examinations over a thousand young women and men who competed for positions in the world’s ongoing scientific enterprises.

  She had worked with joyous dedication on Beijing 11-11 for the past decade, observing the enigmatic activities on Yuggoth. That huge planet and its four satellites, Nithan, Zaman, Thog and Thok, rolled eternally in a counterplanar orbit, crossing the plane of the solar ecliptic only once in a thousand years. No wonder it had gone undiscovered for so long, for Earthbound planetary astronomers had long concentrated their studies on the multi-billion-kiometer disk that surrounded Sol, containing the four rocky planets, the four gas giants, the asteroids and plutoids and the countless meteors and comets.

  Barely a century ago Yuggoth and its moons had actually crossed the plane of the ecliptic, and thus it had been detected at last. The discovery of a new major planet had sent shockwaves through the scientific community of Earth. Probes had landed on the major solid bodies of the known solar system, the four rock planets and the solid moons of the four gas giants. The variety of worlds was incredible. There were the ice-covered bodies, the volcanoes, the nitrogen seas, the mountain ranges and deserts and canyon-like beds of ancient rivers, long run dry.

  Above all, there was life and the evidence of past life. Exobiologists on Earth had long given hope of such discoveries. Their mantra: Where life can exist, it does! The flaw in their argument lay in the fact that they had only a single model from which to draw their conclusion. True, life flourished in the most astonishing of environments, in water close to boiling, in fissures deep within the Earth, on ocean floors where pressure reached tonnes per square centimeter and where neither sunlight nor oxygen could be detected. But it was possible — although it was vigorously debated — that life had originated but once upon Earth, and that all organisms, however varied their natures and locales, were descended from a single ancestor.

  It took the exploration of dozens of moons to find jungles and prairies, natural gardens of unimaginable colors and forms, schools of swimming things that were surely not fish, and flocks of flying things that were anything but birds.

  But no people. Not merely no humans like those whose robot explorers first landed on Calisto and Mimas, Miranda and Proteus and Galatea and all the others. The people of Earth both longed for and feared the discovery of alien intelligences, whether they looked like giant grasshoppers or self-conscious cabbages or whales with hands, whether they wrote epic treatises on the meaning of life or built machines to carry them across the dimensional barrier to other universes even stranger than the one from which they had come.

  No people. No intelligent cabbages or whales with hands, no ancient cities to put the monuments of Thebes to shame and to make the mysteries of Rapa Nui and Stonehenge and the riddle of Linear B look like child’s play.

  Until Yuggoth.

  Until the first robotic probe had circled Yuggoth sending back to Earth images of structures that were undoubtedly artificial, yet that resembled no city ever built upon Earth. They stretched for thousands of miles across the ruddy, pulsing surface of Yuggoth. They rose for hundreds miles into the roiling, cloudy atmosphere of the planet. At the poles of the monstrous globe, black, glossy areas that must be ice caps reflected the light of a billion distant stars.

  At this distance from Yuggoth’s sun the amount of heat and light from that star was infinitesimal. Clearly, Yuggoth’s ruddy pulsations emanated from within the planet, whether the product of radioactivity, of tidal or magnetic forces, or of some other sour
ce of unfathomable nature.

  Controllers on Earth — for this was before the construction and orbiting of Chen Jing-kuo’s observation station — tried sending messages to the occupants of those cyclopean cities, relaying them from their own base of operations on Luna to the satellites orbiting the gigantic “new” planet. There was no response.

  Were the Yuggothi extinct? Were their cities like the dead cities of Angkor Wat and Yucatan?

  But the satellites detected movement on the surface of Yuggoth. Great creatures of alien configuration, beings like nothing encountered on Earth or any other world of the solar system, moved between the buildings, between structures that had to be considered buildings, of those cities, which had to be considered cities.

  Chen Jing-quo observed the Yuggothi with both electronic and optical instruments. They had heads and bodies and limbs. To that extent they resembled familiar species found both on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. But where one might have expected to see facial features the Yuggothi showed clusters of waving, polypoidal tentacular growths. Their limbs were tipped with vicious-looking claws, and on their backs were what appeared to be vestigial, bat-like wings.

  They were hairless, their skin of a scaly composition that suggested a onetime marine origin, and indeed Yuggoth was covered in part with dark regions that appeared to be composed of a black, viscid liquid. If these were the seas and oceans of Yuggoth, the winged creatures might have evolved in their depths, using their wings to “fly” through the seas as Earthly manta rays “flew” through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.

  Once Beijing 11-11 was launched from its construction site on Luna, it was piloted to the Oort Cloud by a two-member crew comprising Chen Jing-quo and Kimana Hasani. When Beijing 11-11 settled into orbit around the ruddy pulsing oblate form of Yuggoth, Kimana Hasani informed Chen Jing-quo that he was going to take one of the station’s EEPs for a closer look at the new planet.