by Brian Lumley
That cinched it!
No, I did not believe that Julian was writing a story at all. That was only an excuse he had created to put me off the track. But what track? What did he think he was doing? Oh! It was obvious: he was on the verge of another breakdown, and the sooner I got in touch with Dr. Stewart the better. All these tumultuous thoughts kept me awake until a late hour, and if my brother was noisy again that night I did not hear him. I was so mentally fatigued that when I eventually nodded off I slept the sleep of the dead.
~ * ~
Is it not strange how the light of day has the power to drive away the worst terrors of night? With the morning my fears were much abated and I decided to wait a few more days before contacting Dr. Stewart. Julian spent all morning and afternoon locked in the cellar, and finally—again becoming alarmed as night drew near—I determined to reason with him, if possible, over supper. During the meal I spoke to him, pointing out how strangely he seemed to be acting and lightly mentioning my fears of a relapse. I was somewhat taken aback by his answers. He argued it was my own fault he had had to resort to the cellar in which to work, stating that the cellar appeared to be the only place where he could be sure of any privacy. He laughed at my mention of a relapse, saying he had never felt better in his life! When he again mentioned “privacy” I knew he must be referring to the unfortunate incident of the missing diary and was shamed into silence. I mentally cursed Professor Walmsley and his whole museum.
Yet, in direct opposition to all my brother’s glib explanations, that night was the worst, for Julian gibbered and moaned in his sleep, making it impossible for me to get any rest at all, so that when I arose, haggard and withdrawn, late on the morning of the 13th, I knew I would soon have to take some definite action.
I saw Julian only fleetingly that morning, on his way from his room to the cellar, and his face seemed pale and cadaverous. I guessed that his dreams were having as bad an effect on him as they were on me, yet rather than appearing tired or hag-ridden he seemed to be in the grip of some feverish excitement.
Now I became more worried than ever and even scribbled two letters to Dr. Stewart, only later to ball them up and throw them away. If Julian was genuine in whatever he was doing, I did not want to spoil his faith in me—what little of it was left—and if he was not genuine? I was becoming morbidly curious to learn the outcome of his weird activities. Nonetheless, twice that day, at noon and later in the evening, when as usual my fears got the better of me, I hammered at the cellar door demanding to know what was going on in there. My brother completely ignored these efforts of mine at communication, but I was determined to speak to him. When he finally came out of the cellar, much later that night, I was waiting for him at the door. He turned the key in the lock behind him, carefully shielding the cellar’s contents from my view, and regarded me curiously from behind those horrid dark glasses before offering me the merest parody of a smile.
“Phillip, you’ve been very patient with me,” he said, taking my elbow and leading me up the cellar steps, “and I know I must have seemed to be acting quite strangely and inexplicably. It’s all very simple really, but for the moment I can’t explain just what I’m about. You’ll just have to keep faith with me and wait. If you’re worried that I’m heading for another bout of, well, trouble, you can forget it. I’m perfectly all right. I just need a little more time to finish off what I’m doing, and then, the day after tomorrow, I’ll take you in there”—he nodded over his shoulder—”into the cellar, and show you what I’ve got. All I ask is that you’re patient for just one more day. Believe me, Phillip, you’ve got a revelation coming which will shake you to your very roots, and afterward—you’ll understand everything. Don’t ask me to explain it all now; you wouldn’t believe it! But seeing is believing, and when I take you in there you’ll be able to see for yourself.”
He seemed so reasonable, so sensible—if a trifle feverish—and so excited, almost like a child about to show off some new toy. Wanting to believe him, I allowed myself to be easily talked around and we went off together to eat a late meal.
~ * ~
Julian spent the morning of the 14th transferring all his notes—great sheaves of them which I had never suspected existed—together with odds and ends in small cardboard boxes, from his room to the cellar. After a meagre lunch he was off to the library to “do some final checking” and to return a number of books lately borrowed. While he was out I went down to the cellar—only to discover that he had locked the door and taken the key with him. He returned and spent the entire afternoon locked in down there, to emerge later at night looking strangely elated. Still later, after I had retired to my room, he came and knocked on my door.
“The night is exceptionally clear, Phillip, and I thought I’d have a look at the sky... the stars have always fascinated me, you know? But the window in my room doesn’t really show them off too well; I’d appreciate it if you’d allow me to sit in here and look out for a while?”
“By all means do, old fellow, come on in,” I answered, agreeably surprised. I left my easy chair and went to stand beside him after he crossed the room to lean on the windowsill. He peered through those strange, dark lenses up and out into the night. He was, I could see, intently studying the constellations, and as I glanced from the sky to his face I mused aloud: “Looking up there, one is almost given to believe that the stars have some purpose other than merely making the night look pretty.”
Abruptly my brother’s manner changed. “What d’you mean by that?” He snapped, staring at me in an obviously suspicious fashion. I was taken aback. My remark had been completely innocuous.
“I mean that perhaps those old astrologers had something after all,” I answered.
“Astrology is an ancient and exact science, Phillip—you shouldn’t talk of it so lightly.” He spoke slowly, as though restraining himself from some outburst. Something warned me to keep quiet, so I said no more. Five minutes later he left. Pondering my brother’s odd manner, I sat there a while longer, and, as I looked up at the stars winking through the window across the room, I could not help but recall a few of those words he had mumbled in the darkness of my bedroom so long ago at the onset of his breakdown. He had said: “That in time, when the stars are right, they may perform the Great Rising ...”
There was no sleep at all for me that night; the noises and mutterings, the mouthings and gibberings which came, loud and clear, from Julian’s room would not permit it. In his sleep he talked of such eldritch and inexplicable things as the Deep Green Waste, the Scarlet Feaster, the Chained Shoggoth, the Lurker at the Threshold, Yibb-Tstll, Tsathoggua, the Cosmic Screams, the Lips of Bugg-Shash, and the Inhabitants of the Frozen Chasm. Toward morning, out of sheer exhaustion, I eventually nodded off into evil dreams which claimed my troubled subconscious until I awoke shortly before noon on the 15th.
Julian was already in the cellar, and as soon as I had washed and dressed, remembering his promise to “show me” what he had got, I started off down there. But at the top of the cellar steps my feet were suddenly arrested by the metallic clack of the letter-box flap in the front door of the house.
The diary!
Unreasonably fearing that Julian might also have heard the noise, I raced back along the passage to the door, snatched up the small stamped and addressed brown-paper parcel which lay on the inside doormat, and fled with the thing to my room. I locked myself in and ripped open the parcel. I had tried Julian’s door earlier and knew it to be unlocked. Now I planned to go in and drop the diary down behind the headboard of his bed while he was still in the cellar. In this way he might be led to believe he had merely misplaced the book. But, after laying aside the diary to pick up and read the stapled sheets which had fallen loose and fluttered to the floor, I forgot all about my planned deception in the dawning knowledge of my brother’s obvious impending insanity. Walmsley had done as he had promised. I cast his brief, eagerly enquiring letter aside and quickly, in growing horror, read his translation of Julian’s cr
yptical notes. It was all there, all the proof I needed, in neat partially annotated paragraphs, but I did not need to read it all. Certain words and phrases, lines and sentences, seemed to leap upon the paper, attracting my frantically searching eyes:
“This shape/form? sickens me. Thanks be there is not long to wait. There is difficulty in the fact that this form/body/shape? would not obey me at first, and I fear it may have alerted—(?—?) to some degree. Also, I have to hide/protect/conceal? that of me which also came through with the transfer/journey/ passage?
“I know the mind of (?—?) fares badly in the Deeps ... and of course his eyes were ruined/destroyed? completely...
“Curse the water that quiets/subdues? Great (?)’s power. In these few times/periods? I have looked upon/seen/observed? much and studied what I have seen and read—but I have had to gain such knowledge secretly. The mind-sendings/mental messages (telepathy?) from my kin/brothers? at (?—?) near that place which men call Devil—(?) were of little use to me, for the progress these beings/creatures? have made is fantastic in the deep times/moments/periods? since their (?) attack on those at Devil—(?).
“I have seen much and I know the time is not yet ripe for the great rising/coming? They have developed weapons of (?) power. We would risk/chance? defeat—and that must never be.
“But if (?????? they ???) turn their devices against themselves (??? bring ?) nation against nation (?? then ??) destructive/cataclysmic? war rivalling (name—possibly Azathoth, as in Pnakotic Mss).
“The mind of (?—?) has broken under the strain of the deeps ... It will now be necessary to contact my rightful shape in order to rebecome one/re-enter? it.
“Cthulhu? (?) triumph (???) I am eager to return to my own shape/form/body? I do not like the way this brother— (the word brother implying falseness?) has looked at me... but he suspects nothing ...”
There was more, much more, but I skipped over the vast majority of the translation’s remaining contents and finished by reading the last paragraph which, presumably, had been written in the diary shortly before Julian took himself off to London:
“(Date?) ... six more (short periods of time?) to wait... Then the stars should be right/in order/positioned? and if all goes well the transfer can be performed/accomplished?”
That was all, but it was more than enough! That reference about my not “suspecting” anything, in connection with those same horrors which had been responsible for his first breakdown, was sufficient finally to convince me that my brother was seriously ill!
Taking the diary with me, I ran out of my room with one thought in my mind. Whatever Julian thought he was doing I had to stop him. Already his delvings constituted a terrible threat to his health, and who could say but that the next time a cure might not be possible? If he suffered a second attack, there was the monstrous possibility that he would remain permanently insane.
Immediately I started my frantic hammering, he opened the cellar door and I literally fell inside. I say I fell; indeed, I did—I fell from a sane world into a lunatic, alien, nightmare dimension totally outside any previous experience. As long as I live I shall never forget what I saw. The floor in the centre of the cellar had been cleared, and upon it, chalked in bold red strokes, was a huge and unmistakable evil symbol. I had seen it before in those books which were now destroyed ... and now I recoiled at what I had later read of it! Beyond the sign, in one corner, a pile of ashes was all that remained of Julian’s many notes. An old iron grating had been fixed horizontally over bricks, and the makings of a fire were already upon it. A cryptographic script, which I recognized as being the blasphemous Nyhargo Code, was scrawled in green and blue chalk across the walls, and the smell of incense hung heavily in the air. The whole scene was ghastly, unreal, a living picture from Eliphas Levi—nothing less than the lair of a sorcerer! Horrified, I turned to Julian—in time to see him lift a heavy iron poker and start the stunning swing downward toward my head. Nor did I lift a finger to stop him. I could not—for he had taken off those spectacles, and the sight of his terrible face had frozen me rigid as polar ice.
~ * ~
Regaining consciousness was like swimming up out of a dead, dark sea. I surfaced through shoals of night-black swimmers to an outer world where the ripples of the ocean were dimly lit by the glow from a dying orange sun. As the throbbing in my head subsided, those ripples resolved themselves into the pattern of my pinstriped jacket, but the orange glow remained! My immediate hopes that it had all been a nightmare were shattered at once, for as I carefully raised my head from its position on my chest the whole room slowly came under my unbelieving scrutiny. Thank God Julian had his back to me and I could not see his face. Had I but glimpsed again, in those first moments of recovery, those hellish eyes I am certain the sight would have returned me to instant oblivion.
I could see now that the orange glow was reflected from the now blazing fire on the horizontal grill, and I saw that the poker which had been used to strike me down was buried in the heart of the flames with red-heat creeping visibly up the metal toward the wooden handle. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I had been unconscious for many hours—it was fast approaching the midnight hour. That one glance was also sufficient to tell me that I was tied to the old wicker chair in which I had been seated, for I saw the ropes. I flexed my muscles against my bonds and noticed, not without a measure of satisfaction, that there was a certain degree of slackness in them. I had managed to keep my mind from dwelling on Julian’s facial differences, but, as he turned toward me, I steeled myself to the coming shock.
His face was an impassive white mask in which shone, cold and malevolent and indescribably alien, those eyes! As I live and breathe, I swear they were twice the size they ought to have been—and they bulged, uniformly scarlet, outward from their sockets in chill yet aloof hostility.
“Ah! You’ve returned to us, dear brother. But why d’you stare so? Is it that you find this face so awful? Let me assure you, you don’t find it half so hideous as I!”
Monstrous truth, or what I thought was the truth, began to dawn in my mazed and bewildered brain. “The dark spectacles!” I gasped. “No wonder you had to wear them, even at night. You couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing those diseased eyes!”
“Diseased? No, your reasoning is only partly correct. I had to wear the glasses, yes; it was that or give myself away—which wouldn’t have pleased those who sent me in the slightest, believe me. For Cthulhu, beneath the waves on the far side of the world, has already made it known to Othuum, my master, of his displeasure. They have spoken in dreams, and Cthulhu is angry!” He shrugged, “Also, I needed the spectacles; these eyes of mine are accustomed to piercing the deepest depths of the ocean! Your surface world was an agony to me at first, but now I am used to it. In any case, I don’t plan to stay here long, and when I go I will take this body with me,” he plucked at himself in contempt, “for my pleasure.”
I knew that what he was saying was not, could not, be possible, and I cried out to him, begging him to recognize his own madness. I babbled that modern medical science could probably correct whatever was wrong with his eyes. My words were drowned out by his cold laughter. “Julian!” I cried.
“Julian?” he answered. “Julian Haughtree?” He lowered his awful face until it was only inches from mine. “Are you blind, man? I am Pesh-Tlen, Wizard of deep Gell-Ho to the North!” He turned away from me, leaving my tottering mind to total up a nerve-blasting sum of horrific integers. The Cthulhu Mythos—those passages from the Cthaat Aquadingen and the Life of St. Brendan— Julian’s dreams: “They can now control dreams as of old.” The Mind Transfer—”They will rise”—”through his eyes in my body”— giant gods waiting in the ocean deeps—”He shall walk the Earth in my guise”—a submarine disturbance off the coast of Greenland! Deep Gell-Ho to the North ...
God in heaven! Could such things be? Was this all, in the end, not just some fantastic delusion of Julian’s but an incredible fact? This thing before me! Did he—it—re
ally see through the eyes of a monster from the bottom of the sea? And if so, was it governed by that monster’s mind?
After that, it was not madness that gripped me—not then— rather was it the refusal of my whole being to accept that which was unacceptable. I do not know how long I remained in that state, but the spell was abruptly broken by the first, distant chime of the midnight hour.
At that distant clamour my mind became crystal clear and the eyes of the being called Pesh-Tlen blazed even more unnaturally as he smiled—if that word describes what he did with his face—in final triumph. Seeing that smile, I knew that something hideous was soon to come and I struggled against my bonds. I was gratified to feel them slacken a little more about my body. The—creature—had meanwhile turned away from me and had taken the poker from the fire. As the chimes of the hour continued to ring out faintly from afar it raised its arms, weaving strange designs in the air with the tip of the redly glowing poker, and commenced a chant or invocation of such a loathsome association of discordant tones and pipings that my soul seemed to shrink inside me at the hearing. It was fantastic that what was grunted, snarled, whistled, and hissed with such incredible fluency could ever have issued from the throat of something I had called brother, regardless what force motivated his vocal cords, but, fantastic or not, I heard it. Heard it? Indeed, as that mad cacophony died away, tapering off to a high-pitched, screeching end—I saw its result!