As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were
disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe
Mazurewicz who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long,
rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged,
nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only
his silver crucifix - given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St.
Stanislaus' Church - could bring him relief. Now he was praying because
the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when
hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered
for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad lime in Arkham,
even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall
Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings,
and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things,
for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother.
It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months
Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's
room, nor anywhere else - and it meant no good when they held off like
that. They must be up to something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth
of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high
as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him
to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted
the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed
his activities before, would have made him take a rest - an impossible
thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was
certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension,
and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at
the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of
immininence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day?
The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving.
And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly
persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about
the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was
that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle
through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and
full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless
perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes
he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking
or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In
the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness,
and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her
bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless
brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face
was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could
recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the
Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre
of ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth
in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings
had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and
the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly
was the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the Necronomicon,
and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the
corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize
at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she
was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin,
too was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs
glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill
loathsome tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and he could
remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and
"Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct,
and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the
fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly
irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from
our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own
dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less
irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately
spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours
and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him and
follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan
prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all
the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if
approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred.
Gilman was half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with
the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed
the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring
prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing
tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light.
He was barefooted and in his nightclothes. and when he tried to walk discovered
that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything
but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought
of the sounds, that might surge out of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward
him - the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to
her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown
Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw
which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not
originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by
the angle of the old woman's arms and the direction of the small monstrosity's
paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight
abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and
interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of
the eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away
from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a
seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain
vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing
eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare
at vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for lunch and as he threaded
the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast.
Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the
meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all
- perhaps there was a connection with his somnambulism - but meanwhile
he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he
could still manage to walk away from the pull, so with great resolution
he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison
Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was
in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed
upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing
stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible
living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it
was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself
so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too,
as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the
old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge
and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant
though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could
flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous
resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety
stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually
westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers
of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat
and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly
southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him
in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring stars
shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap
mystically into space, and suddenly he realized just where the source of
the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had
a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere
between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward
it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been
underfoot, and now it was roughly south but stealing toward the west. What
was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it
last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself
back to the sinister old house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed
both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It
was about the witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before
- and it was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts - and had come home after midnight.
Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman's
window was dark, but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He
wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew
it was Keziah's witch-light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost
of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he
must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar
were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord
Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed
loft above the young gentleman's room, but they had all agreed not to talk
about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another
room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch
at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came
home the night before; yet the mention of a violet light in the garret
window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which
always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter,
sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the
thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was
utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd
notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his
sleep? No, Joe said, he had not - but he must check up on this. Perhaps
Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
Fever - wild dreams - somnambulism - illusions of sounds
- a pull toward a point in the sky - and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking!
He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand.
When he climbed to the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw
that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret
room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southward,
but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed
loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through
an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon
him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing,
getting closer than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish
gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses,
though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic
little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast
converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below
him - a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown,
alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably
blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded
terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced
planes, domes, minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless
forms of still greater wildness - some of stone and some of metal - which
glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a poly-chromatic
sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks of flame, each of a different
hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon
of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as
far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision,
and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a
veined polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were
cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck himm as less asymmetrical than
based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The
balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along
the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design
and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be
made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in
the chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature utterly defied conjecture.
They represented some ridged barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal
arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring and with vertical knobs or
bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs
was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms
arranged around it like the arms of a starfish - nearly horizontal, but
curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob
was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that
several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were
about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them
a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet.
He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and
look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet
below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical
pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath,
and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned
him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had
he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand
fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him
slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work,
and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half dazed, he
continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth
railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind
him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly
though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were
the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three
were what sent him unconscious; for they were living entities about eight
feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and
propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of
starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration
and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to
the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary
for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know
where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice
his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and
Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place.
Now he felt that he must go north - infinitely north. He dreaded to cross
the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so
went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes
and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control,
and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak
emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth
- that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously
unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted
it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost
balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some
coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and
browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends
who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of
his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile
that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed
the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and
over again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into
the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and
Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if
Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that
the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did
not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its
side - for it could not stand up alone - was the exotic spiky figure which
in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail
was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin radiating arms,
the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms
spreading from those knobs - all were there. In the electric light the
colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and Gilman
could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended
in a jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment to the
dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him
from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to
bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs
to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious
loom-fixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did
not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No,
he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But
his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she
fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her,
and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young
gentleman's bed - on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to
her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his
room - books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly
knew nothing about it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced
that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible
extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got
this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum
in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as
he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the
balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries
- and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism.
As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some
flour which he had borrowed - with a frank admission as to its purpose
- from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had
found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on
the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without
pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slating ceiling he thought
he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized even
to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong
again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and
the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than
on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt
the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and
into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw
the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But
that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless
little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his
head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that
floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration,
and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place.
Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the
cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart
of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor
fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after
a second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry
thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond
the table stood a figure he had never seen before - a tall, lean man of
dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features:
wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment
a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable
because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there
was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and
bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed
to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame
thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over everything was
a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the
furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then down
his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff.
As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
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