The Mask of Circe

by Henry Kuttner

  The Mask of Circe

  Henry Kuttner

  & C.L. Moore

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1948 by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition August 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-403-5

  More from Henry Kuttner

  The Time Trap

  Book of Iod

  Elak of Atlantis

  Prince Raynor

  Murder of Eleanor Pope

  Murder of a Mistress

  Murder of a Wife

  Murder of Ann Avery

  The Best of Henry Kuttner

  Robots Have No Tails

  Ahead of Time

  Earth’s Last Citadel

  Mask of Circe

  Man Drowning

  Chapter I

  Enchanted Seas

  Talbot drew on his pipe and squinted across the campfire at the face of the man who was speaking softly, slowly, the words coming one upon another in the patterns of the strangest tale Talbot had ever heard.

  Jay Seward’s face was bronze in the flickering firelight. It might have been a mask hammered out of metal, with the tall Canadian pines a background and the moonlight silvering it with strange highlights. They were far away from civilized places, these two, and the tale Jay Seward told might have sounded wildly improbable in more prosaic surroundings. But here and now, it did not seem strange at all…

  Jay Seward had been restless all that day. Talbot, who had known him only a week, was more and more aware as time went by that his companion was somehow a haunted man. He seemed to be waiting for something—watching for something. He kept his head turned a little, whatever else he did, so that the sounds of the sea down at the foot of the pine slope were always clear in his ears, as though he expected some other sound than the splashing of the waves.

  But it was not until an hour ago, after sunset, sitting by the campfire, that at last he began to talk.

  This isn’t real,” Seward declared suddenly, glancing around the moon-drenched clearing. “I feel as if I’d stepped back in time a year. I was up here just a year ago, you know. I was a pretty sick man. Then something happened, and—” He did not finish, but you could see his thoughts move off along a familiar trail of remembering.

  Talbot said, “It’s a good country to get well in.” He spoke cautiously, hoping not to break the spell of Seward’s thinking. He was very curious about this man; he wanted to hear the tale he felt sure was coming.

  Seward laughed. “My mind was sick. And I couldn’t stay away from the ocean.” He turned his head a little and his nostrils flared as if he tried to draw into his lungs the deepest savor of the salt, wind that moved through the pines. A faint thunder of breakers came with it, and Seward stirred restlessly.

  “I was drowning,” he said simply. “Drowning in an unknown ocean that touched—strange shores. Do you mind if I talk? I think it’ll bring everything back clearer—and I want to bring it back. Tonight—I don’t understand it—tonight something’s going to happen. Don’t ask me what. If I told you you wouldn’t believe me. And I won’t make apologies for—for what I know happened. I’m not out of my head—I never have been. I know—” He paused and laughed, faintly apologetic.

  “Go on,” Talbot said, drawing on his pipe. “I’d like to hear it, whatever it is.”

  “If you don’t mind a long story, I will. Maybe it’ll help.” He glanced at the mist wreathing among the pines. “It was like that on Aeaea,” he said. “Always—misty. Veiled.”

  “Aeaea?”

  “The Isle of the Enchantress.” He shrugged impatiently. “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  Seward shifted a little so that his back was against a fallen log and his face to the darkness that hid the ocean. In a slow voice he began to talk.

  “Three years ago I was in the States, working with a man named Ostrend on a new type of psychiatric research. That’s my line—psychiatry. Ostrend was a wonderful man in his field—blast him!

  “It was the sodium pentathol narcosynthesis that started us off—and we went too far. Ostrend was a genius. Before we finished we’d crossed the boundaries of known psychological research and—” Seward broke off, hesitated, and began again.

  “Narcosynthesis is a new method of exploring the brain. You know the principle? Under a hypnotic the patient is forced to look back on his own crises, things buried in his unconscious mind—the unpleasant things he doesn’t want to remember consciously. The catharsis usually brings about a cure.

  “Ostrend and I went farther than that. I won’t tell you the methods we used. But we were, alternately, our own guinea pigs, and the day we succeeded, I was the specimen on the slide…

  “Crises buried in the past—how far back? What I remembered—Ostrend made a transcript of it as he questioned me. I didn’t know what was happening till I woke. But after that the memories came back. Even if I hadn’t read Ostrend’s record, I’d have remembered. A crisis buried far in the past, dredged up out of my subconscious.

  “It should have stayed there, buried! Narcosynthesis is a fine and useful psychiatric treatment, but we reached beyond the normal limits. Ancestral memories, transmitted through the genes and chromosomes from my ancestors down through my lineage until I inherited them.

  “Latent memories of one of my ancestors—a man who has become a myth. Who may never have existed.

  “Yet I know he existed. He lived, in a time and world so long ago that nothing but legends remain now. And he went through a crisis there that was ineradicably impressed on his mind—and buried in his unconscious.

  “A memory he passed down to his sons, and his sons’ sons.

  “A memory of a voyage—in a ship manned by heroes, with Orpheus at the prow. Orpheus, whose lyre could raise the dead—

  “Orpheus—who is a myth today. Like other heroes who went on that great, fabulous voyage—

  “My memories went back and back to time’s dawn.

  “I was Jason!

  “Jason—who sailed in the Argo to Colchis and stole the Golden Fleece from the sacred serpent-temple, where scaled Python guarded that shining treasure of the god Apollo…

  “The memories did not pass. They stayed with me. I seemed to have two minds. Things I could never have heard or noticed as Jay Seward I heard and saw after that narcosynthetic treatment. The sea called me. I—I heard a voice sometimes. It wasn’t calling Jay Seward. It was calling Jason, Jason of Iolcus, Jason of the Argo. And I was Jason. At least, I had his memories.

  “Some of them. Shadowy, confused—but I remembered many things from the life of that ancestor of mine. And some of those things, I knew, could never have existed on this old Earth of ours. Not even in the enchanted seas of the Argonauts.

  “The conch shell of Triton seemed to summon me. Where? Back to that forgotten past? I didn’t know…

  “I tried to get away. I tried to break the spell. It was impossible to continue my work, of course. And Ostrend couldn’t help me. No one could. I came up here as a last resort over a year ago. In the train, out of Seattle, I thought for a while that
I’d got away.

  “But I hadn’t. Up here, a year ago, I heard that soundless call from the sea—and thought of ghosts and ghostly ships. I was afraid. Terribly afraid. I slept under the pines, and the wind brought to me the crack of sails in the wind, the creak of oarlocks.

  “And it brought the sound of a sweet, inhuman voice that called, ‘Jason! Jason of Thessaly! Come to me!’

  “That night I answered the call…”

  I stood on a rocky ledge jutting out above the swirl of waters. My memory was cloudy and confused. I could remember tossing uneasily in my sleeping-bag. I could remember hearing the wind, faint humming of tuned strings and a strange murmur that was not a voice—yet I knew what spoke. It was not the call that summoned Jason by name.

  No, this was very different.

  I was standing above the water. The fog had come down, smothering and silent. The moon must still have been high, for a silver radiance filtered through the mist, and beneath me washed the sea, dark and filigreed white with foam.

  Very dimly I heard the sighing of strings and that alien murmuring from the fog. I knew the murmur. It was—the Argo’s keel, speaking in a voice none but a seer could understand.

  Something moved out there on the water, hidden by fog. I heard oarlocks creak. Slowly, slowly a shape swam into view. First I saw the great square of the sail, hanging limp against the high mast, and then, shadowy in that unearthly light, I saw the prow sweep toward me.

  Out of the fog the ship loomed—driving toward the jut of rock where I stood. One instant it rushed past beneath me, the decks not eight feet away, the mast towering above me as it dipped landward. I saw the oars go up in unison to avoid snapping off against the rock.

  There were figures on the benches—on the deck. Unreal figures. One held a lyre. The music swept out from that in rhythmic echoes.

  But more urgent still was the wordless voice that bubbled from the Argo’s keel as the ship plunged on beneath me.

  The memories of Jason surged up in my mind. Coldness and the shuddering sweat that always accompanied that wave of recollection swept chillingly over me. Jason—Jason—I was Jason!

  As the ship rushed past I sprang out, with all my strength, toward those ghostly decks sliding away below. They were solid planks I struck. My knees buckled. I fell and rolled, and then sprang up instantly, staring about me.

  The shore had already vanished. Only the silver mists surrounded the ship, luminous with moonlight.

  Jason? No, I was not Jason. I was Jay Seward—I—

  Realization, volition, came back to me terrifyingly.

  I knew what it was I had done—or had seemed to do—and I knew this was either a dream, or madness.

  Chapter II

  Mystic Ship

  Beneath my feet the deck felt real. The salt spray tasted of brine; the wind that flung it in my face was a real wind. And yet I knew there was about this incredible ship something wildly unreal.

  For I could see the rowers below me, and through them I could see the long pale swelling of the waves. Every muscle of those bending backs was clear as they leaned to the oar-pull, but clear in the way a dream might be in the instant of awakening. The oarsmen did not see me. Their faces were set with the strain of the work they bent to, skillfully driving toward—what goal?

  I stood there dazed for a moment, peering about me into the mist, balancing to the roll of the ship with a deftness not my own, as if my body had slipped smoothly into even the physical and muscular memories of another body, as my brain had meshed memories with another brain.

  Except for the noises of the ship herself there was no sound around me. I heard the slap of waves against the prow, the creak of timber, the rhythmic song of oars against their locks. I could hear clearly the music of that lyre on the arm of the shadowy figure in the prow. But the men were voiceless.

  I remember how the hair lifted on my head when I first saw a translucent warrior throw back his bearded chin and bellow out a song that swept from rower to rower along the benches until the double ranks swayed to a single rhythm and the hand of the lyrist swept his strings to lead them—in silence.

  The music I could hear; the men were ghosts.

  The sound of my own voice startled me. All my bewilderment and the deep, stirring terrors that had been moving at the back of my brain seemed to crystallize suddenly in the shout I gave.

  “Who are you?” I roared at the voicelessly singing oarsmen. “Answer me! Who are you?”

  My own voice rolled back to me out of the mist as if from a ghostly sounding-board. “Who are you—are you—are you?” And I knew I could no more reply than the oarsmen could. Who was I, indeed? Jay Seward, Doctor of Medicine? Or Jason, son of Aeson, King of Iolcus? Or a ghost on a ghostly ship, manned by—what? I shouted again, an angry, word-less cry, and leaped down to the nearest galley bench, reaching to seize the shoulder of the oarsman nearest me.

  My hand shot helplessly through empty air. The oarsman sang on.

  I didn’t know how long it was I raged up and down the galley benches, shouting to the heedless singers, dashing my fists through their unreal bodies, trying in vain to wrench the oars from those misty hands that would not yield an inch to all my tugging.

  I gave it up at last and climbed back onto the raised central deck, panting and bewildered. The shadowy man at the prow still swept the lyre-strings in a strangely ringing melody, oblivious to me as his companions were. The same breeze lifted my hair and tossed the pale curling beard of the lyrist, but I might have been the ghost and he the reality for all the heed he paid me. I reached for his wrist to halt the music, and his wrist passed through my fingers like the breeze.

  I touched the harp. Like the relentlessly plying oars, the harp was real. I could touch it, but I could not move it. Even the strings were rigid to my hand, though they vibrated with wild, strange music to the lyrist’s touch.

  I said, “Orpheus—Orpheus?” in an uncertain voice, remembering who it was who had stood at the prow of Argo, and yet unsure of myself when I spoke his name. For Orpheus, if he ever lived at all, must have been dead for more than three thousand years.

  He did not hear me. He played on; the rowers toiled, the ship slid forward through the mist. She at least was real, alive with that strange life all ships share, breathing with the motion of plank on plank as the seas lifted her. Out of my memories of the past I knew Jason’s old love for his ship—Jason’s only love, I thought, despite his many lighter loves for womankind. Jason was a strange man while he lived, blind in so many ways, ruthless, ready to betray all who trusted him in his grim pursuit of his goal. But to Argo herself he was faithful all his life—and in the end it was Argo who slew him.

  Her bubbling voice, not for my ears, spoke mysteriously between the waves and the decks. She was more than ship as she drove on toward—toward whatever end my fate and Jason’s had decreed. And then as if the mist itself were answering my wonder, the silvery blindness parted before me and I saw—

  Sunlight struck down upon the water and turned it to a dark and dazzling blue. A long row of blinding white breakers dashed themselves high against the marble walls of—an island? A castled island, fortified down to the very brink of the sea, and lifting white towers against a sky as blue as the water. All white and deep dark blue was that scene unveiled before me.

  “This isn’t out of our time,” I thought, staring. “It can’t be. This is something seen through the lens of legend—wine-dark waters and encastled shores like something Euripides might have written millennia ago.”

  The mists drew farther back, and it was not an island but a long peninsula, walled to the water’s edge and separated from the mainland by a mighty wall that reared its bulk like a tower into the blue air. For a moment the scene lay motionless before me, without life, a city of legend.

  Then I heard trumpets and there was a sudden stirring along the walls. Voices echoed across the water. The Argo swept forward parallel with the shore. I tho
ught the rhythm of the lyre had quickened a little. There was uneasiness in it now, and the oarsmen bent to their work with a swifter stroke.

  The trumpets roared louder. I caught the distinct clashing, as of weapons against shields, and suddenly out from beyond the seaward tip of the promontory a blinding vessel swept. She was all gold. The eye could not look upon her directly in that blaze of sunlight. But in my first glimpse before I had to screen my gaze I saw the double rows of oars flashing along her sides as she swept toward us, water foaming away from her dazzling prow.

  The music of Orpheus’ lyre was a wild alarm now. Rhythm beat fast upon rhythm until the oars of the Argo were pumping like the beats of a quickened heart. Swifter and swifter we flew over the water, that tower-walled promontory sweeping away past us and behind us, shouts from the golden ship echoing over the distance between.

  She was a bireme, with twice the power of ours, but she was heavier in proportion and the Argo’s hull slipped over the water with a lightness that touched my heart somewhere at a point where it was Jason’s heart answering to the beauty and the swiftness of his beloved ship.

  The city fell astern. We were running through mist again, but the outlines of wooded shores and low hills loomed up alongside now and fell behind again as the Argo answered the beat of her ghostly rowers. And ever behind us the bellow of horns rolled out upon the fog and the golden ship at our stem blazed even through the mists between us.

  It was a close race, and a very long one. Not until nearly at the end of it did I know what our goal was. Then out of the fog the cypress island loomed, low-shored, edged with white beaches, and the dark trees brooding down to the edge of the pale sand. Jason knew the island.

  “Aeaea,” his memory murmured in my brain. And subtle fears stirred with it. “Aeaea, Island of the Enchantress.”