by Brian Lumley
Then, with an additional thrill of horror, I saw that the thing was on the move, drifting across the surface of the pool, its flaccid tentacles reaching avidly in the direction of the house. The lights downstairs were out, which meant that Carl must be asleep…
Carl!
The thing was across the drive now, entering the porch, the house itself. I forced cramped limbs to agonized activity, lurched across the room, out onto the dark landing and stumbled blindly down the stairs. I slipped, fell, found my feet again—and my voice, too.
“Carl!” I cried, arriving at the door of his studio. “Carl, for God’s sake!”
The thing straddled him where he lay upon his bed. It glowed with an unearthly, a rotten luminescence which outlined his pale body in a sort of foxfire. Its tentacles writhed over his naked form and his limbs were filled with fitful motion. Then the dweller’s mushroom head settled over his face, which disappeared in folds of the thing’s gilled mantle.
“Carl!” I screamed yet again, and as I lurched forward in numb horror so my hand found the light switch on the wall. In another moment the room was bathed in sane and wholesome electric light. The thing bulged upward from Carl—rising like some monstrous amoeba, some sentient, poisonous jellyfish from an alien ocean—and turned toward me.
I saw a face, a face I knew across twenty years of time fled, my uncle’s face! Carved in horror, those well remembered features besought, pleaded with me, that an end be put to this horror and peace restored to this lonely valley; that the souls of countless victims be freed to pass on from this world to their rightful destinations.
The thing left Carl’s suddenly still form and moved forward, flowed toward me; and as it came so the face it wore melted and changed. Other faces were there, hidden in the thing, many with McGilchrist features and many without, dozens of them that came and went ceaselessly. There were children there, too, mere babies; but the last face of all, the one I shall remember above all others—that was the face of Carl Earlman himself! And it, too, wore that pleading, that imploring look—the look of a soul in hell, which prays only for its release.
Then the light won its unseen, unsung battle. Almost upon me, suddenly the dweller seemed to wilt. It shrank from the light, turned and flowed out of the room, through the porch, back toward the pool. Weak with reaction I watched it go, saw it move out across the now still water, saw the slab tilt down upon its descending shape and heard the music fade into silence. Then I turned to Carl…
• • •
I do not think I need mention the look on Carl’s lifeless face, or indeed say anything more about him. Except perhaps that it is my fervent prayer that he now rests in peace with the rest of the dweller’s many victims, taken down the centuries. That is my prayer, but…
As for the rest of it:
I dragged Carl from the house to the Range Rover, drove him to the crest of the rise, left him there and returned to the house. I took my uncle’s prepared charges from his study and set them in the base of the shale cliff where the house backed onto it. Then I lit the fuses, scrambled back into the Range Rover and drove to where Carl’s body lay in the cool of night. I tried not to look at his face.
In a little while the fuses were detonated, going off almost simultaneously, and the night was shot with fire and smoke and a rising cloud of dust. When the air cleared the whole scene was changed forever. The cliff had come down on the house, sending it crashing into the pool. The pool itself had disappeared, swallowed up in shale and debris; and it was as if the House of the Temple, the temple itself and the demon-cursed pool had never existed.
All was silence and desolation, where only the moonlight played on jagged stumps of centuried columns, projecting still from the scree- and rubble-filled depression which had been the pool. And now the moon silvered the bed of the old stream, running with water from the ruined pool—
And at last I was able to drive on.
10. The Unending Nightmare
That should have been the end of it, but such has not been the case. Perhaps I alone am to blame. The police in Penicuik listened to my story, locked me in a cell overnight and finally conveyed me to this place, where I have been now for more than a week. In a way I supposed that the actions of the police were understandable; for my wild appearance that night—not to mention the ghastly, naked corpse in the Range Rover and the incredible story I incoherently told—could hardly be expected to solicit their faith or understanding. But I do not understand the position of the alienists here at Oakdeene.
Surely they, too, can hear the damnable music?—that music which grows louder hour by hour, more definite and decisive every night—the music which in olden days summoned the pool-thing to its ritual sacrifice. Or is it simply that they disagree with my theory? I have mentioned it to them time and time again and repeat it now: that there are other pools in the Pentlands, watery havens to which the thing might have fled from the destruction of its weedy retreat beside the now fallen seat of the McGilchrists. Oh, yes, and I firmly believe that it did so flee. And the days are long and hot and a great drought is on the land…
And perhaps, too, over the years, a very real curse has loomed up large and monstrous over the McGilchrists. Do souls have a flavour, I wonder, a distinctive texture of their own? Is it possible that the pool-thing has developed an appetite, a taste for the souls of McGilchrists? If so, then it will surely seek me out; and yet here I am detained in this institute for the insane.
Or could it be that I am now in all truth mad? Perhaps the things I have experienced and know to be true have driven me mad, and the music I hear exists only in my mind. That is what the nurses tell me and dear God, I pray that it is so! But if not—if not…
For there is that other thing, which I have not mentioned until now. When I carried Carl from his studio after the pool-thing left him, I saw his finished painting. Not the whole painting but merely a part of it, for when it met my eyes they saw only one thing: the finished face which Carl had painted on the dweller.
This is the nightmare which haunts me worse than any other, the question I ask myself over and over in the dead of night, when the moonlight falls upon my high, barred window and the music floods into my padded cell:
If they should bring me my breakfast one morning and find me dead—will my face really look like that?
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Horror at Oakdeene
Born of the Winds
The Fairground Horror
The Taint
Rising with Surtsey
Lord of the Worms
The House of the Temple
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Horror at Oakdeene
Born of the Winds
The Fairground Horror
The Taint
Rising with Surtsey
Lord of the Worms
The House of the Temple
