New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (27 page)

I returned to New York, caught a chill, and finished out the winter in a hospital bed, visited rather less often than I might have wished by my niece and her boy. Of course, the drive in from Brooklyn is nothing to scoff at.

One recovers far more slowly when one has reached my age; it's a painful truth we all learn if we live long enough. Howard's life was short, but in the end I think he understood. At thirty-five he could deride as madness a friend's 'hankering after youth,' yet ten years later he'd learned to mourn the loss of his own. 'The years tell on one!' he'd written. 'You young fellows don't know how lucky you are!'

Age is indeed the great mystery. How else could Terry have emblazoned his grandmother's sundial with that saccharine nonsense?

Grow old along with me; The best is yet to be.

True, the motto is traditional to sundials - but that young fool hadn't even kept to the rhyme. With diabolical imprecision he had written, 'The best is yet to come' - a line to make me gnash my teeth, if I had any left to gnash.

! spent most of the spring indoors cooking myself wretched little meals and working ineffectually on a literary project that had occupied my thoughts. It was discouraging to find that I wrote so slowly now, and changed so much. My sister only reinforced the mood when, sending me a rather salacious story she'd found in the Enquirer - about the 'thing like a vacuum cleaner' 'that snaked through a Swedish sailor's porthole and 'made his face all purple' - she wrote at the top, 'See? Right out of Lovecraft.'

It was not long after this that I received, to my surprise, a letter from Mrs Zimmerman, bearing profuse apologies for having misplaced my enquiry until it turned up again during 'spring cleaning.'

(It is hard to imagine any sort of cleaning at the Barkleigh Hotella, spring or otherwise, but even this late reply was welcome.) 'I am sorry that the minister who disappeared was a friend of yours,'

she wrote. 'I'm sure he must have been a fine gentleman.

'You asked me for "the particulars," but from your note you seem to know the whole story. There is really nothing I can tell you that I did not tell the police, though I do not think they ever released all of it to the papers. Our records show that our guest Mr Djaktu arrived here nearly a year ago, at the end of June, and ]eft the last week of August owing me a week's rent plus various damages which I no longer have much hope of recovering, though I have written the Malaysian Embassy about it.

'In other respects he was a proper boarder, paid regularly, and in fact hardly ever left his room except to walk in the back yard from time to time, or stop at the grocer's. (We have found it impossible to discourage eating in rooms.) My only complaint is that in the middle of the summer he may have had a small coloured child living with him without our knowledge, until one of the maids heard him singing to it as she passed his room. She did not recognize the language, but said she thought it might be Hebrew. (The poor woman, now sadly taken from us, was barely able to read.) When she next made up the room, she told me that Dr Djaktu claimed the child was '~is," and that she left because she caught a glimpse of it watching her from the bathroom. She said it was naked. I did not speak of this at the time, as I do not feel it is my place to pass judgement on the morals of my guests. Anyway, we never saw the child again, and we made sure the room was completely sanitary for our next guests. Believe me, we have received nothing but good comments on our facilities. We think they are excellent and hope you agree, and I also hope you will be our guest again the next time you come to Florida.'

Unfortunately, the next time I came to Florida was for my sister's funeral late that winter. I know now, as I did not know then, that she had been in ill health for most of the previous year, but I cannot help thinking that the so-called 'incidents' - the senseless acts of vandalism directed against lone women in the South Florida area, culminating in several reported attacks by an unidentified prowler - may have hastened her death.

When I arrived here with Ellen to take care of my sister's affairs and arrange for the funeral, I intended to remain a week or two at most, seeing to the transfer of the property. Yet somehow I lingered, long after Ellen had gone. Perhaps it was the thought of that New York winter, grown harsher with each passing year; I just couldn't find the strength to go back. Nor, in the end, could I bring myself to sell this house; if I am trapped here, it's a trap I'm resigned to. Besides, moving has never much agreed with me; when I grow tired of this little room - and I do - I can think of nowhere else to go. I've seen all the world I want to see. This simple place is now my home - and I feel certain it will be my last. The calender on the wall tells me it's been almost three months since I moved in. I know that somewhere in its remaining pages you will find the date of my death.

The past week has seen a new outbreak of the 'incidents.' Last night's was the most dramatic by far. I can recite it almost word for word from the morning news. Shortly before midnight Mrs Florence Cavanaugh, a housewife living at 24 Alyssum Terrace, South Princeten, was about to close the curtains in her front room when she saw, peering through the window at her, what she described as 'a large Negro man wearing a gas mask or scuba outfit.' Mrs Cavanaugh, who was dressed only in her nightgown, fell back from the window and screamed for her husband, asleep in the next room, but by the time he arrived the Negro had made good his escape.

Local police favour the 'scuba' theory, since near the window they've discovered footprints that may have been made by a heavy man in swim fins. But they haven't been able to explain why anyone would wear underwater gear so many miles from water.

The report usually concludes with the news that 'Mr and Mrs Cavanaugh could not be reached for comment.'

The reason I have taken such an interest in the case - sufficient, anyway, to memorize the above details is that I know the Cavanaughs rather well. They are my next-door neighbours.

Call it an ageing writer's ego, if you like, but somehow I can't help thinking that last evening's visit was meant for me. These little green bungalows all look alike in the dark.

Well, there's still a little night left outside - time enough to rectify the error. I'm not going anywhere.

I think, in fact, it will be a rather appropriate end for a man of my pursuits - to be absorbed into the denouement of another man's tale.

Grow old along with me; The best is yet to come.

Tell me, Howard: how long before it's my turn to see the black face pressed to my window?

The Black Tome of Alsophocus by H.P LOVECRAFT AND MARTIN

S WARNES

My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the parts where ! wish to be heard.

My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock - perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience.

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it in a dimly lighted place near the black oily river where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I did not learn its title at the time, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open towards the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.

There was a formula - a sort of list of things to say and do - which I recognized as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in future paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key - a guide - to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing press, but the hand of some halfcrazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.

I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterwards did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow winding mist-cloaked waterfront streets, I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity - as if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid plaster and timber - with eyelike diamond-paned windows that leered -

could hardly desist from advancing and crushing me ... yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.

I remember how I read the book at last - whitefaced, and locked in the attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I had not gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family then - though the details are very uncertain - and I know there were many servants. Just what the year was, I cannot say; for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of candles that I read - I recall the relentless dripping of the wax - and there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness, as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.

Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.

Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every oncefamiliar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognize the things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me, none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which never left my side. But still I read more - in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my new vision led me - and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and lifepatterns towards the core of the unknown cosmos.

I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needlelike pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars forming strange alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read of or dreamed of. As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space, and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a blankness was again in my attic room sprawled fiat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor. In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before. Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return.

Nevertheless, wary as I was, still my grasp on familiar scenes faded into infiniteness as my new unholy vision asserted itself and made my every glimpse of reality seem unreal and geometrically disturbing. My hearing also became affected. The chimes that came from the distant belfries sounded more ominous, terrifyingly ethereal, as if the sound was carried by disembodied wraiths from nether regions, where tormented souls eternally cry out in anguish and pain. With every passing day I drew farther away from temporal surroundings, aeons removed from earthly perspectives, and dwelt among the unnameable. Time became extrinsic, and my memory of events and people I had known before ever I acquired the book drifted away on dim mists of unreality no matter how desperately I attempted to cling to them.

I remember the first time I heard the voices; weird unhuman sibilant voices, issuing forth from the outer reaches of blackest space, where amorphous beings cavort and caper before a great black fetor-belching idol worn by the passing of uncountable centuries. With the commencement of these voices came visions of horrifying intensity, dread chimeras of dual black and green suns, shining on towering monoliths and citadels of evil, which rose, tier upon tier, as if seeking to escape their earthly attachments. But these dreams and illusions were as nothing compared to the dread colossus that was later to encroach upon my consciousness; even now I cannot recall the horror in its entirety, but when ! think on it I have an impression of vastness, of size beyond measure, and groping tentacles, pulsating, as if with an intelligence of their own, alive with malignant depravity.