Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (50 page)

When we’d finished dinner, however, and he’d taken his black coffee (also with lots of sugar) and the fire was dancing flickeringly, both yellow and blue now, he turned to me with a little, venturesomely friendly smile and a big, wonderingly wide lifting of his eyebrows, and said quietly, “And now you’ll quite rightly be expecting me to tell you, my dear Fischer, all the things about the project that I’ve been hesitant to write, the answers I’ve been reluctant to give to your cogent questions, the revelations I’ve been putting off making until we should meet in person. Really, you have been very patient, and I thank you.”

Then he shook his head thoughtfully, his eyes growing distant, as he slowly and rather sinuously and somehow unwillingly shrugged his shoulders, which paradoxically were both frail and wide, and grimaced slightly, as if tasting something strangely bitter, and said even more quietly, “if only I had more to tell you that’s been
definitely proved
.
Somehow we always stop just short of that. Oh, the artifacts are real enough and certain—the Innsmouth jewelry, the Antarctic soapstones, Blake’s Shining Trapezohedron, though that’s lost in Narragansett Bay, the spiky baluster knob Walter Gilman brought back from his witchy dreamland (or the nontemporal fourth dimension, if you prefer), even the unknown elements, meteoric and otherwise, which defy all analysis, even the new magneto-optic probe which has given us virginium and alabamine. And it’s almost equally certain that all, or almost all, those weird extraterrestrial and extra-cosmic creatures
have
existed—that’s why I wanted you to read the Lovecraft stories, despite their lurid extravagances, so you’d have some picture of the entities that I’d be talking to you about. Except that they and the evidence for them
do
have a maddening way of vanishing upon extinction and from all records—Wilbur Whateley’s mangled remains, his brother’s vast invisible cadaver, the Plutonian old Akeley killed
and couldn’t photograph
, the June 1882 meteor itself which struck Nahum Gardner’s farm and which set old Armitage (young then) studying the
Necronomicon
(the start of everything at Miskatonic) and which Atwood’s father saw with his own eyes and tried to analyze, or what Danforth saw down in Antarctica when he looked back at the horrible higher mountains beyond the Mountains of Madness—he’s got amnesia for that now that he has regained his sanity … all, all gone!

“But whether any of those creatures exist
today
—there, there’s the rub! The overwhelming question we can’t answer, though always on the edge of doing so. The thing is,” he went on with gathering urgency, “that
if they do exist
, they are so unimaginably powerful and resourceful, they might be”—and he looked around sharply—”anywhere at the moment!

“Take
Cthulhu
,” he began.

I couldn’t help starting as I heard that word pronounced for the first time in my life; the harsh, dark, abysmal
monosyllabic
growl it came to was so very like the sound that had originally come to me from my imagination, or my subconscious, or my otherwise unremembered dreams, or.…

He continued, “If Cthulhu exists, then he (or she, or it) can go anywhere he wants through space, or air, or sea, or earth itself. We know from Johansen’s account (it turned his hair white) that Cthulhu can exist as a gas, be torn to atoms, and then recombine. He wouldn’t need tunnels to go through solid rock, he could
seep
through it—‘not in the spaces we know, but between them.’ And yet in his inscrutability he might choose tunnels—there’s that to be reckoned with. Or—still another possibility—perhaps he neither exists nor does not exist but is in some half state—‘waits dreaming,’ as Angell’s old chant has it.
Perhaps his dreams, incarnated as your winged worms, Fischer, dig tunnels.

“It is those monstrous underground cavern-and-tunnel worlds, not all from Cthulhu by any means, that I have been assigned to investigate with the geo-scanner, partly because I was the first to hear of them from old Akeley and also—Merciful Creator!—from the Plutonian who masked as him—‘great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai,’ which was Tsathoggua’s home, and even stranger inner spaces litten by colors from space and from Earth’s nighted core. That’s how I guessed the colors in your childhood dreams or nightmares (or personality exchanges), my dear Fischer. I’ve glimpsed them also in the geo-scanner, where they are, however, most fugitive and difficult to discern.…”

His voice trailed off tiredly, just as my own concern became most feverishly intense with his mention of “personality exchanges.”

He really did look shockingly fatigued. Nevertheless I felt impelled to nerve myself to say, “Perhaps those dreams can be repeated, if I take Dr. Morgan’s drug. Why not tonight?”

“Out of the question,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “In the first place, I wrote too hopefully there. At the last minute Morgan was unable to supply me with the drug. He promised to send it along by mail, but hasn’t yet. In the second place, I’m inclined to think now that it would be much too dangerous an experiment.”

“But at least you’ll be able to check those dream colors
and
the tunnels with your geo-scanner?” I pressed on, somewhat crestfallen.

“If I can repair it …” he said, his head nodding and slumping to one side. The dying flames were all blue now as he whispered mumblingly, “… if I am
permitted
to repair it.…”

I had to help him to bed and then retire to my own, shaken and unsatisfied, my mind a-whirl. Wilmarth’s alternating moods of breezy optimism and a seemingly
frightened
dejection were hard to adjust to. But now I realized that I was very tired myself—after all, I’d been up most of the previous night reading
Innsmouth
—and soon I slumbered.

(The voices stridently groan, “The pit of primal life, the Yellow Sign, Azathoth, the Magnum Innominandum, the shimmering violet and emerald wings, the cerulean and vermilion claws, Great Cthulhu’s wasps …” Night has fallen. I have limpingly paced the house from the low attic with its circular portholes to the basement, where I touched my father’s sledge and eyed “The Gate of Dreams.” The moment draws nigh. I must write rapidly.)

I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling totally refreshed by my customary twelve hours of sleep. I found Wilmarth busily writing at the table that faced the north window of his bedroom. His smiling face
looked positively youthful in the cool light, despite its neatly brushed thatch of white hair—I hardly recognized him. All his accumulated mail except for one item lay open and face downward on the far-left-hand corner of the table, while on the far-right-hand corner was an impressive pile of newly written and addressed postcards, each with its neatly affixed, fresh, one-cent stamp.

“Good morrow, Georg,” he greeted me (properly pronouncing it GAY-org), “if I may so address you. And good news!—the scanner is recharged and behaving perfectly, ready for the day’s downward surveying, while that letter George Goodenough forwarded is from Francis Morgan and contains a supply of the drug against tonight’s inward researches! Two dosages exactly—Georg, I’ll dream with you!” He waved a small paper packet.

“That’s wonderful, Albert,” I told him, meaning it utterly. “By the way, it’s my birthday,” I added.

“Congratulations!” he said joyfully. “We’ll celebrate it tonight with our drafts of Morgan’s drug.”

And our expedition did turn out to be a glorious one, at least until almost its very end. The Hollywood Hills put on their most youthfully winning face; even the underlying crumbling, worm-eaten corruptions seemed fresh. The sun was hot, the sky bright blue, but there was a steady cool breeze from the west and occasional great high white clouds casting enormous shadows. Amazingly, Albert seemed to know the territory almost as well as I did—he’d studied his maps prodigiously and brought them along, including the penciled ones I’d sent him. And he instantly named correctly the manzanita, sumac, scrub oak, and other encroaching vegetation through which we wended our way.

Every so often and especially at my favorite pausing places, he would take readings with the geo-scanner, which he carried handily, while I had two canteens and a small backpack. While his head was under the black hood, I would stand guard, my stick ready. Once I surprised a dark and pinkly pale, fat, large serpent, which went slithering into the underbrush. Before I could tell him, he said correctly, “A king snake, foe of the crotaloids—a good omen.”

And … on every reading, Albert’s black box showed vacuities of some sort—tunnels or caves—immediately below us, at depths varying from a few to a few score meters. Somehow this did not trouble us by bright outdoor day. I think it was what we’d both been expecting. Coming out from under the hood, he’d merely nod and say, “Fifteen meters” (or the like) and note it down in his little book, and we’d tramp on. Once he let me try my luck under the hood, but all I could see through the eyepiece was what seemed like an intensification of the dancing points of colored light one sees in the dark with the eyes
closed. He told me it took considerable training to learn to recognize the significant indications.

High in the Santa Monicas we lunched on beef sandwiches and the tea-flavored lemonade with which I’d filled both canteens. Sun and breeze bathed us. Hills were all around and beyond them to the west the blue Pacific. We talked of Sir Francis Drake and Magellan and of Captain Cook and his great circumpolar voyagings, and of the fabulous lands they’d all heard legends of—and of how the tunnels we were tracing were really no more strange. We spoke of Lovecraft’s stories almost as if they were no more than that. Daytime viewpoints can be strangely unworrying and unconcerned.

Halfway back or so, Albert began looking very haggard once more—frighteningly so. I got him to let me carry the black box. To do that I had to abandon my flat backpack and empty canteens—he didn’t seem to notice.

Almost home, we paused at my father’s memorial. The sun had westered most of this way, and there were dark shadows and also shafts of ruddy light almost parallel to the ground. Albert, very weary now, was fumbling for phrases to praise Rodia’s work, when there swiftly glided out of the undergrowth behind him what I first took to be a large rattlesnake. But as I lunged lurchingly toward it, lashing at it with my stick, and as it slid back into thick cover with preternatural rapidity, and as Albert whirled around, the sinuous, vanishing thing looked for an instant to me as if it were all shimmering violet-green above with beating wings and bluish-scarlet below with claws while its minatory rattle was more a skirling hum.

We raced home, not speaking of it at all, each of us concerned only that his comrade not fall behind. Somewhere mine found the strength.

His postcards had been collected from the box by the road and there were a half dozen new letters for him—and a notification of a registered package for me.

Nothing must do then but Albert must drive me down to Hollywood to pick up the package before the post office closed. His face was fearfully haggard, but he seemed suddenly flooded with a fantastic nervous energy and (when I protested that it could hardly be anything of great importance) a tremendous willpower that would brook no opposition.

He drove like a veritable demon and as though the fate of worlds depended on his speed—Hollywood must have thought it was Wallace Reid come back from the dead for another of his transcontinental racing pictures. The Tin Hind fled like a frightened one indeed, as he worked the gear lever smartly, shifting up and down. The wonders were that we weren’t arrested and didn’t crash. But I got to the proper window just before it closed and I signed for the package—a stoutly
wrapped, tightly sealed, and heavily corded parcel from (it really startled me) Simon Rodia.

Then back again, just as fast despite my protests, the Tin Hind screeching on the corners and curves, my companion’s face an implacable, watchful death’s-mask, up into the crumbling and desiccated hills as the last streaks of the day faded to violet in the west and the first stars came out.

I forced Albert to rest then and drink hot black coffee freighted with sugar while I got dinner—when he’d stepped out of the car into the chilly night he’d almost fainted. I grilled steaks again—if he’d needed restorative food last night, he needed it doubly now after our exhausting hike and our Dance of Death along the dry, twisting roads, I told him roughly. (“Or Grim Reaper’s Tarantella, eh, Georg?” he responded with a feeble but unvanquishable little grin.)

Soon he was prowling around again—he wouldn’t stay still—and peering out the windows and then lugging the geo-scanner down into the basement, “to round out our readings,” he informed me. I had just finished building and lighting a big fire in the fireplace when he came hurrying back up. Its first white flare of flame as the kindling caught showed me his ashen face and white-circled blue eyes. He was shaking all over, literally.

“I’m sorry, Georg, to be such a troublesome and seemingly ungrateful guest,” he said, forcing himself with a great effort to speak coherently and calmly (though most imperatively), “but really you and I must get out of here at once. There’s no place safe for us this side of Arkham—which is not safe either, but there at least we’ll have the counsel and support of salted veterans of the Miskatonic project whose nerves are steadier than mine. Last night I got (and concealed from you—I was sure it had to be wrong) a reading of fifteen down there under the carving—
centimeters
, Georg, not meters. Tonight I have confirmed that reading beyond any question of a doubt, only it’s shrunk to
five
under the carving. The floor there is the merest shell—it rings as hollow as a crypt in New Orleans’s St. Louis One or Two—
they
have been eating at it from below and are feasting still. No, no arguments! You have time to pack one small bag—limit yourself to necessities, but bring that registered parcel from Rodia, I’m curious about it.”

And with that he strode to his bedroom, whence he emerged in a short while with his packed valise and carried it and the black box out to the car.