“In nervous haste I scooped away with my hands the sand blocking the lower part of the panel, and, using the cudgel I always carry for protection, forced open the protesting door. By now I had forgotten about my companions, so intense were my emotions, and was never aware for some time of his presence or absence.
“The mausoleum was a shadowy, brooding place, completely bare, except for a stone sarcophagus in the center of the floor and directly under the domed roof through whose windows penetrated the ghostly light of the Milky Way. It was surprising there were no treasures, no Russian golden samovars, no rich Manchu tapestry, no hand-carved Persian chessmen, no colorful Azerbaijan icon, nothing; not even any of the Khan’s banners and battle-standards about which the old chronicles related unbelievable inhuman sacrifices.
“I strained and pushed the sarcophagus lid halfway off to see a tenebrous space, within which lay a grinning skeleton amid a litter of sand—around its neck an amulet, in its bony fingers a scimitar.
“As I reached for the trinket, I froze. In life the Khan had been not just a cruel man but an evil man as well. Around many a nomad campfire in Central Asia there still were whispers: of a dark pilgrimage he had made to a forbidden plateau in mountainous Tibet, of his aberrant behavior during the time of a full moon, and of his dabbling in astrology’s darker side.
“Angry at my superstitious lapse, I roughly jerked the golden chain of the amulet, rattling the spinal column and skull of the Khan, then retrieved the jeweled scimitar.
“To my ears there came a renewed stirring in remote sandy streets, as of a multitude of wiggling, slithering forms. In panic Sing Lee lapsed into a Chinese dialect mostly unknown to me, so that all I could understand was that our noisy blunderings had irritated some inhabitants in the ruins which I thought he characterized as a vast snake den; and he suggested more by pantomime than words that we should climb to the safety of the roofs, where I suppose we would wait for the false dawn which would send the sand vipers scurrying back to their lairs ahead of the fiery sun. So up we went.
“Against the yellowish orb of the just-rising full moon was the silhouette of minarets and domes, mosques and pagodas, the mingled architecture of Islam and China—the cultural plunder of the Khan’s ‘Golden Horde.’ A moving blob of darkness marred the sky-line, a distortion as if caused by temperature inversion. But there came another and another until the city’s silhouette became insubstantial from this flux of movement.
“Straining my eyes I was aghast to see crawling and creeping and fumbling over the majolica-tiled roofs towards us a horde of gaunt, shriveled, wasted figures, attired in a variety of rotting fur garments and cotton togs—whose styles implied the wearers once were Turkis, Tartars, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Mongols.
“They came without the howling or gibbering a predatory horde, whether man or animal, always makes hunting the hunted; they came in utter silence. But it was their expressionless, obscenely yellowish Mongolian features and dull, jaundiced yellow eyes that caused me to shiver; for their ghastly pigmentation proclaimed them to be the grisly ‘Golden Horde’ that inhabits the caves and ruins of nocturnal Gobi, the necrophagus blight of the great stony desert whom I thought a myth. What I had taken for the stirrings of sand vipers had been the obscene gathering of these loathsome things for a ‘feast.’
“’Muckahi!’ cursed the Chinaman, pointing.
“Over the cornice of our roof came first one hand, then the other, preparatory to hoisting their owner up. It was the long, curved, yellow fingernails that sent a chill down my spine.
“I hacked off one with the Khan’s scimitar, but no blood or ichor flowed; in revulsion, I dropped the blade and fled. Once in our frenzied dash across those time-rotted roofs, I slipped and lost my balance on the polished tiles and would have fallen into the street below, but the Chinaman grabbed me at great risk of falling with me—which should have made me wonder, then.
“In fact, he exercised the greatest solicitude for my welfare, even to the point of aiding me to mount, though his own life was equally in danger, and selflessly rode behind me to act as a rear guard. Why one was needed where those sluggish horrors in the rear were concerned, I don’t know, for our horses covered many miles before he shouted to me to slow down.
“We rode at a trot, Sing Lee immersed in enigmatical silence and I nodding exhaustedly from the strain. I must have fallen asleep with my eyes open, because the borderline between drowsy consciousness and strange grandiose dreams merged into one another imperceptibly. In my dreams I was frightened by an abnormal hyperacuity of all my senses and terrified that it presaged some neural affliction. Following it came a tremendous increase of my powers of thought and logic and concentration, as if my brain capacity had expanded a thousand-fold; questions that once vexed me were now effortless knowledge; encyclopedic vistas crossed my mental eye.
“I remember how during this mental peak my thought wandered to, among other things, the historical controversy of why Genghis Khan was so invincible. And in a flash I had the answer, simplicity itself: tactical mobility—the mounted Mongol bowman versus the unmounted European bowman. I suspected the amulet then, instinctively suspected it had something to do with Genghis Khan’s military genius, and that it would also influence any possessor to heights of mental brilliance.
“Something, either another dream or extrasensory perception, occurred now and I was in the Chinaman’s mind and saw him watching me furtively and knew he was not a dilettante of the grotesque so much as he was a grim sort of collector! I awoke in a nightmare sweat.
“And under that waning moon there came other phenomenal ideas but now in my conscious mind. I toyed with trivia like why the Chinese sometimes call the desert Han-hai (the ‘dry sea’), speculating alternately because of a race memory of a Paleozoic inland sea and sometimes ascribing it to the wave-like furrows in the dunes made by the wind. And I caught myself gazing at the rippled sand patterns with the same kind of vacant fascination that an opium eater finds in staring narcoticized at ordinary objects. Then for a while I sank into a dreamless sleep.
“I was aroused by a painful sensation as of cold fire, an icy consuming flame in my flesh where the moonlight bathed it; the skin tissue looked deteriorated. That fantastic insight I seemed cursed with seized from memory lines written by the poet Drummond of Hawthornden:
‘…all beneath the moon decays…’
And I shuddered, for I saw my body literally wasting away in magical sympathy with the wasting moon. There was a roaring of blood in my ears and this time I plunged into a final oblivion, watched by the sphinx-like Sing Lee.
“When I returned to my senses it was in the dark of the moon. A sympathetic Moslem was bathing my head with a wet cloth. At my feet Sing Lee lay dead. The Moslem had found us locked in a death struggle, one of my hands around the Chinaman’s throat, the other gripping the one clutching the meat cleaver. To the Moslem it looked like a case of robber and victim. I never told him what I thought.”
Haldane’s story seemed to me to be compounded of fantasy and paranoia. I simply blurted it out: “You certainly don’t believe moonlight has a supernatural effect on you?”
“I do not. I am a materialist. What others call supernatural, to me is mechanistic. When the moon is full, there are some who go mad from its rays—have not electrophysiologists measured a coincidence: the heightened brain waves of asylum inmates with the moon’s increase? It is often said the line between genius and madness is hair-thin. If the moon brings lunacy, might it not also bring genius? Yet whichever the moon brings, I fear it.”
He sat meditating on his own words for some minutes. Then with quiet finality, he said as he got up, “I must destroy that amulet—throw it into the Ganges.”
And he had picked up the amulet before I could reach it. I tried to bar his way but with the strength of madness he brushed me aside and stumbled fully into the moon’s greenish beams as he lunged against the balcony door. He vis
ibly aged decades in seconds; the bony hand that had pushed me aside was now a skeletal claw; his face the color of algae slime; the skin around the teeth shrunk to a grin of death; and what was left of the desiccated horror collapsed under a wrinkled garment. Beyond the skeletal fingers lay the amulet, reflecting the moonlight. And echoing nightmarishly in my mind was the poetic fragment from Drummond, like some hideous epitaph:
“…all beneath the moon decays…”
NIGHT ON FORT CARROLL
Originally published in Weirdbook 7 (1973).
Being marooned on lonely Fort Carroll, possibly overnight, upset Reily; but whether it was due to the inconvenience of missing a hot supper and a comfortable bed, or the vague yarns that the fort was “haunted,” he was not sure. Luckily, he had brought ashore his coffee thermos and sandwiches but he still would have to sleep on the hard ground. As to the supernatural, the place had been shunned for over-night camping after several parties complained vaguely of experiencing uneasy dreams.
Despite its unpopularity with campers, fishermen—Reily included—sought it out in the daylight hours. He had moored his rented boat at the quay outside the sally port hours ago and had fished in leisurely fashion from atop various spots on the ramparts. Now tiring of his sport, Reily had returned to the quay to find his boat gone, obviously having slipped its line in the rough wake of large cargo ships going to dry dock at Locust Point and oil tankers anchoring in Canton Hollow, and then having drifted out of sight with the tide ebbing from Baltimore harbor.
As ship traffic passed within several feet of the western face of the fort, Reily hoped he could signal his plight to one of them, and consequently he passed inward through the sally port on the eastern side. Walking across the grassy parade ground, he stopped, struck with the hushed solitude. The only sound was a faint stirring of breeze. There were no sounds of ships’ engines or steam whistles—anything that normally carries across water. The circumventing fort walls must act as a baffle, smothering and hushing all outside noises, so that he stood in the center of silence, like the abnormal quiet in the eye of a hurricane.
Too, the horizon-girding walls blocked all view of the outside waters, completing the illusion of a locality out in the countryside.
As he ascended the stairs towards the fort’s western top, he heard the faint strains of music. Rushing to the southern extremity of the parapet, he saw leaving his vicinity the Bay Belle, going down the Chesapeake Bay for a “moonlight excursion,” and he waved frantically at the boat. A few passengers cheerfully waved back.
In irritation he sat with his legs dangling over the rampart face, waiting for the next vessel. The waters of the Bay sparkled. The sky was cloudless, while near its rim was the indistinct white haze that invariably hangs over large watery wastes and induces in the viewer dreams of far off sea adventures.
A nearby bell buoy, tossed by the excursion boat’s wake, tolled like some country church bell. Atop the buoy rested a sea gull; and he realized he had seen no gulls roosting about the old fort, the absence of bird guano on the walls proving they totally avoided the place.
The wind shifted, blowing now from Curtis Bay, bringing with it the disagreeable fumes of its gashouse district mixed with the reek of the rotting ship hulks anchored there.
An oil tanker slowly entered the river from the Bay and made way towards his prison. Impatiently, he paced the parapet; and, remembering the misunderstanding of the excursion boat’s passengers, took off his shirt to use as a distress signal. Finally the leviathan drifted by, an undecipherable alien name on her bow and an equally unknown flag fluttering from a mast head. In the stern several crewmen lounged and smoked. To Reily’s shouts and frantic waving of his shirt, they merely stared with dull, indifferent expressions. His angry curses also evoked no reaction on their emotionless faces.
He could only escape now if a chance fisherman approached the fort but that possibility was slowly vanishing with the setting of the sun.
The owner from whom he had rented the boat would soon raise an alarm with Reily’s non-appearance. The empty, drifting boat, if not already observed, would be on the morrow, and tell its own story. But it would definitely be the coming morning before they would search for him.
Reluctantly, he began to explore the murky subterranean regions of the fort, seeking a comfortable spot to spend the night. By the dim light coming through the gun ports, he saw the arched stone ceilings encrusted with nitre; the mouldy odour and dirt in the gun rooms began to persuade him to sleep elsewhere. In the gloom of one such earth void he heard waves splashing; and found the fort’s scuppers by the blur of light coming through them, where blue channel crabs could scurry in if any wanted to. The absence of crabs made him realize there was also a total absence of rats usually infesting such harbor situated structures.
The general atmosphere of the darkening gun rooms, rather than any particular thing, decided him against spending the night there; the outside stone ramparts and grassy parade ground, though chilled and gathering a night damp, seemed the better choice because they were at least in fresh air.
Carrying his lunch box to the eastern ramparts of the fort facing Sparrows Point, he sat there for his spartan meal. As he ate, he watched in fascination the incandescent lights and the clouds of different colored gases belching from out the chimneys of the steel mills. Despite the deepening twilight elsewhere in the fort, there was a reassuring glow from the Point upon the stones where he sat.
Finishing his meal, Reily’s mind eventually wandered back to his predicament and then to the fort itself. Its more than century-old abandonment as a coastal defense fort, while but partially constructed, had never been satisfactorily explained; mystery surrounded the reason. Originally it was but a tidal shoal called Sollers Flats; but incoming foreign ships dumped their ballast there to raise it above sea level. And Robert E. Lee, who was then a Brevet Major in the Core of Army Engineers, started construction of the hexagonal shaped fort in 1858. As Reily mused, a fiery meteorite arced briefly, seeming to fall almost within the reservoir of blackness that had been the parade ground.
He was feeling drowsy now. A chill breeze decided him against sleeping atop the ramparts and he descended to the parade ground, lay down in the grass under the stars, and was soon slumbering.
From the mindless oblivion of slumber the dream began to form. He was walking down a tree-lined avenue that terminated in a weedy garden and ruins just beyond. He knew it was somewheres in Brittany. The end of the avenue seemed an endless distance away; and when he reached it finally, he pondered if something other than a curious elongation of his time sense (as in drug fantasies) were responsible. Looking back the way he had just traveled, he had a disorienting impression that the entrance-way was very close, perhaps a minute of walking time instead of the interminable length it had appeared. Then he noticed a curious thing: the trees on either side were not planted an equal, parallel distance apart, but instead gradually converged together, distorting the perspective to create the visual illusion he had experienced.
Following the stone walk, now nearly obliterated by grass growing between its cracks, he entered the weedy desolation of a former flower garden. In it struggled the remains of a Linneaus Floral Clock, some flowers of which were decayed, leaving unheralded certain hours of the day. If space were altered by the driveway’s perspective, he mused, here time might be symbolically distorted by the decaying floral clock.
Rearing skyward in the near brush was the ruins of an aged cromlech, a stone circle, one pillar completely covered by a thicket of honeysuckle vines, the other stones veneered with greenish moss. But no, it was (he looked harder) the ruins of a house: two fragmentary walls standing, a heavy, fieldstone lintel across several empty windows, a third wall and a crumbling chimney overgrown with honeysuckle, all creating the cromlech illusion.
Yet the idea persisted that it was a cromlech. And what had he heard a cromlech was used for…a prehistoric graveya
rd?
The thought made him unaccountably uneasy.
As he backed out, something clutched or caught at his ankle and he fell. He scrambled up in panic and tore through resisting foliage, which suddenly evaporated into emptiness. He was back in nighted Fort Carroll. Could some lingering psychic residue in ground once ship’s ballast from a far shore have induced the dream?
Wondering if this had been the sort of nightmare complained of by overnight campers, Reily now wandered aimlessly about the fort, fighting the fatigue of sleep. Perhaps if he stayed on his feet, he would resist slumber and the strange dreams it might bring.
The transition to dream was subtle. This time he stood on a stone wharf of a familiar city of canals and gondolas, of Mediterranean Baroque architecture. Behind him reared a high wall spiderwebbed with withered vines and topped with two crumbling ornamental flower urns.
He clutched a stick, waiting for something in the muddy waters which were crimsoned by a red glow from the city. (How like the river Phlegethon of boiling blood in the Dantean Hell, he thought.) Then there bobbed into view a whitish blur, its sockets empty and black, the face of a drowned person. With his stick he pulled it up to him to find he had recovered a masquerade false face.
And with this realization, he found himself on the lowest wall of the fort, a place where its masonry had fallen away into the water. There was a blood red glow from the furnaces of Sparrows Point reflected hideously on the water below and on the false face impaled on his fishing rod. Some errant impulse had made him sleepwalk dangerously close to the water’s edge while at the same time his mind hovered between dream and reality.
Standing erect or walking was no defense against sleep. His recent adventure proved that. Resignedly, he lay down on the dampish grass and drowsily picked out the different summer constellations. How could the ancients visualize full bodied figures of animals and anthropomorphic gods amongst those Zodiacal stars? To him they were instead curious line figures—much like a child would draw—whose articulated joints were but stars. Like the outlandish Hercules thing with its faceless, square head and oblong body and rectilinear limbs. Was there not some story whispered of in an obscure and forbidden book how certain astrologers once called out of the sky such phosphorescent linear horrors that ran amok one night?
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 9