by Brian Lumley
When I “came to,” as it were, I had no idea where I was, other than that I was certainly not in the original pit of my choice. That I was in a pit was irrefutable, but this one had walls which were quite high and steep, and I must have had the devil of a job getting down them in the state in which I had been. Obviously I had suffered a relapse, but I could remember nothing whatsoever of it except that the palaeontological theme of my previous conscious intentions had predominated throughout.
It took me some time to climb out of the pit, and when I had done so I was quite horrified to discover that my unremembered wanderings had carried me a distance of well over a mile from my starting point! Time, too, had flown, for my watch showed me that the day already was well into its afternoon.
That was the end of my rock-hounding for the day. Why, anything might have happened to me! I could easily have broken my neck attempting a climb so venturesome as the steep sides of that gravel pit. Yet, to an extent, I must have known what I was about; there were one or two small, common fossils in my pockets....
Tired and disappointed that my recovery from the car accident was not the complete thing I had thought it, I made my way slowly back to The George. There I telephoned Jason, as promised, but I told him nothing of my setback, for I liked the quiet Yorkshire village and was still convinced that a few more days there would do me good. There seemed little point in worrying my nephew over something which (I fervently prayed) might never occur again.
Later I went into the smoke room where I took an unoccupied corner table. There were one or two customers, regulars, at the bar drinking beer from their own, personal mugs, and a small party of students sat at some nearby tables. Within the half-hour the latter group left the inn and a few moments later I heard their car pull away into the night. Now that the bar was quieter I took my briefcase and removed from it the magazine with the photographs of the figurine. It could do no harm to have another look at the thing.
I had just opened the magazine to the pages carrying those remarkable pictures when the elderly, balding barman, not so busy now, came over to my table to chat. At least, I assumed that such was his intention, but as soon as he saw the open journal his expression changed from one of friendly interest to a frown of puzzlement and surprise. His attention seemed riveted on the photographs. I smiled, folding the page so that he could see the pictures better:
“Rare, isn’t it? A very weird thing to look at...”
“Weird?—yes, I’ll grant you that, Guv’nor—but rare?” He cocked his head on one side enquiringly.
“Oh, yes,” I confirmed. “Quite rare, unique! So far as is known, there’s only one like it. It’s in the museum at Radcar, where these photographs were taken—the only surviving fragment of an unknown, early English civilization ...”
His interest quickened: “You’ve seen the real thing then, have you Guv’? I mean, not just these photographs?”
“Why, yes—” I answered, “I saw it just a few weeks ago, at Radcar. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I don’t like to stick my neck out,” he said, “but if you’ll just take a short walk down the street to the police station—well, you’ll be able to see another! I saw it myself this morning, in the property room, when I went in to pick up a wallet I lost a day or two ago....”
“Another figurine!” I leapt to my feet. “Here in Bleakstone? Are you sure?”
“Positive!” he answered, peering more closely at the photographs. “I mean, a fellow’s not likely to forget the looks of one of those things in a hurry, now is he?”
~ * ~
III
THE SECOND FIGURINE
[From the Notebooks of Professor Ewart Masters]
So there I was back on the trail again!
It would have been pointless to try to go off to bed early as I had planned (I could never have got to sleep with the thought in my head that within a distance of a few hundred yards a second figurine awaited my attention), so instead I returned my briefcase to my room and then left The George to walk down to the police station, bringing myself into the presence of the weighty night-duty constable, PC Edwards.
I got straight to the point and asked the policeman if I might be allowed to see the figurine. I did not need to furnish him with much of a description of the statuette before he nodded his head in recognition of my subject.
“Oh, yes—that thing! Well, I don’t think there’s any reason you shouldn’t see it, sir, but I’m afraid you’re not allowed inside the property room. If you’ll wait here and sit yourself down, I’ll bring it to you.”
He lifted his bulky, blue-clad form from behind his desk and disappeared into an adjoining room closing the door after him. In the space of a few seconds—during which time, short as it was, I fidgeted impatiently—he was back again with the figurine.
I had not really known what to expect. It seemed too much of a coincidence—the odds were stacked far too heavily against it— that a duplicate of the green statuette in the museum at Radcar should exist here at the site I had chosen for my rock-hounding, and that I should so easily stumble across it. Of course, the village was a backwater, one of those places that perpetually hover on the edge of modernity without ever actually becoming involved, and tucked away in the confines of this tiny village police station— why!—almost anything might vanish, unclaimed, into complete obscurity. The constable carefully placed the object of my enquiries on the desk before me, dusting it down with his handkerchief.
Delighted beyond my wildest dreams and equally excited, I reached out and touched the thing. My fingers trembled as they followed the lines of its contours. Oh, yes ... there was no doubt about it. From the smooth baldness of the head, with its piercingly intelligent eyes and tiny, almost circular ears; to the folded arms with their flat hands and blunt, webbed fingers; down the lizardlike body to the powerful legs and webbed feet, the greenstone figurine was indeed the duplicate of the piece in the museum.
Even the short tail was there, curving down and back and giving the whole composition an almost natural balance. “Almost” natural? An understatement, that, for the thing, despite its irrefutable alienage, looked perfectly... well... natural; and once again, as I had with its twin at Radcar, I found myself certain that the figurine had been made in the form of a living model! Yet how could that possibly be?
“Funny story attached to that there,” Constable Edwards informed, breaking into my thoughts, squinting wisely at the thing on his desk. “It’s been here with some other stuff ever since Dilham police station closed down. Handed in by a Mrs. White, it was, after the case proper was closed. P’raps you’d care to see the original report and notes? I shouldn’t let you see any paperwork, really— but seeing as how it’s all long done with, and provided you’d swear never to breathe a word as how you’ve seen it—I’ll let you read it. That is, if you’ve the time to spare? I appreciate a bit of company on late shift.”
If I had the time to spare, indeed! “I’d like very much to see anything you can show me with any bearing at all on this... model,” I told him. “And I promise you that any confidences will be strictly inviolable—you can have complete faith in my discretion ...”
Which was how the following statement, police report, and notes were first brought to my attention.
~ * ~
IV
THE SISTER CITY
[Being the Statement of Robert Krug]
This manuscript attached as
Annex “A” to report number
M-Y-127/52, dated 7 August 1952.
Towards the end of the war, when our London home was bombed and both my parents were killed, I was hospitalized through my own injuries and forced to spend the better part of two years on my back. It was during this period of my youth—I was only seventeen when I left the hospital—that I formed, in the main, the enthusiasm which in later years developed into a craving for travel, adventure, and knowledge of Earth’s elder antiquities. I had always had a wanderer’s nature but was so restricted during
those two, dreary years that when my chance for adventure eventually came I made up for wasted time by letting that nature hold full sway.
Not that those long, painful months were totally devoid of pleasures. Between operations, when my health would allow it, I read avidly in the hospital’s library, primarily to forget my bereavement, eventually to be carried along to those worlds of ancient wonder created by Walter Scott in his enchanting Arabian Nights.
Apart from delighting me tremendously, the book helped to take my mind off the things I had heard said about me in the wards. It had been put about that I was different; allegedly the doctors had found something strange in my physical makeup. There were whispers about the peculiar qualities of my skin and the slightly extending horny cartilage at the base of my spine. There was talk about the fact that my fingers and toes were ever-so-slightly webbed; and being, as I was, so totally devoid of hair, I became the recipient of many queer glances.
These things plus my name, Robert Krug, did nothing to increase my popularity at the hospital. In fact, at a time when Hitler was still occasionally devastating London with his bombs, a surname like Krug, with its implications of Germanic ancestry, was probably more a hindrance to friendship than all my other peculiarities put together.
With the end of the war I found myself rich; the only heir to my father’s wealth, and still not out of my teens. I had left Scott’s Jinns, Ghouls and Efreets far behind me but was returned to the same type of thrill I had known with the Arabian Nights by the popular publication of Lloyd’s Excavations on Sumerian Sites. In the main it was that book which was responsible for the subsequent awe in which I ever held those magical words: “Lost Cities.”
In the months that followed, indeed through all my remaining—formative—years, Lloyd’s work remained a landmark, followed as it was by many more volumes in a like vein. I read avidly of Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon and Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. I dwelled long over such works as Budge’s Rise and Progress of Assyriology and Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.
Nor were the fabled lands of Mesopotamia the only places of interest to me. Fictional Shangri-La and Ephiroth ranked equally beside the reality of Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra, and Thebes. I read excitedly of Atlantis and Chichén-Itzá, never bothering to separate fact from fancy, and dreamed equally longingly of the Palace of Minos in Crete and Unknown Kadath in the Cold Waste.
What I read of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s African expedition in search of Dead G’harne confirmed my belief that certain myths and legends are not far removed from historical fact. If no less a person than that eminent antiquarian and archaeologist had equipped an expedition to search for a jungle city considered by most reputable authorities to be purely mythological... why! His failure meant nothing compared with the fact that he had tried...
While others, before my time, had ridiculed the broken figure of the demented explorer who returned alone from the jungles of the Dark Continent I tended to emulate his deranged fancies—as his theories have been considered—reexamining the evidence for Chyria and G’harne and delving ever deeper into the fragmentary antiquities of legendary cities and lands with such unlikely names as R’lyeh, Ephiroth, Mnar, and Hyperborea.
As the years passed my body healed completely and I grew from a fascinated youth into a dedicated man. Not that I ever guessed what drove me to explore the ill-lit passages of history and fantasy. I only knew that there was something fascinating for me in the rediscovery of those ancient worlds of dream and legend.
Before I began those far-flung travels which were destined to occupy me on and off for four years, I bought a house in Marske at the very edge of the Yorkshire moors. This was the region in which I had spent my childhood, and there had always been about the brooding moors a strong affinity which was hard for me to define. I felt closer to home there somehow—and infinitely closer to the beckoning past. It was with a genuine reluctance that I eventually left my moors, but the inexplicable lure of distant places and foreign names called me away, across the seas.
First I visited those lands that were within easy reach, ignoring the places of dreams and fancies but promising myself that later— later!
Egypt, with all its mystery! Djoser’s step-pyramid at Saqqarah, Imhotep’s masterpiece; the ancient mastabas, tombs of centuries-dead kings; the inscrutably smiling sphinx; the Sneferu pyramid at Meidum and those of Chephren and Cheops at Giza; the mummies, the brooding Gods...
Yet in spite of all its wonder Egypt could not hold me for long. The sand and heat were damaging to my skin which tanned quickly and roughened almost overnight.
Crete, the Nymph of the beautiful Mediterranean ... Theseus and the Minotaur ... the Palace of Minos at Knossos ... all wonderful—but that which I sought was not there.
Salamis and Cyprus, with all their ruins of ancient civilizations, each held me but a month or so. Yet it was in Cyprus that I learned of yet another personal peculiarity: my queer abilities in water ...
I became friendly with a party of divers at Famagusta. Daily they were diving for amphorae and other relics of the past offshore from the ruins at Salenica on the southeast coast. At first the fact that I could remain beneath the water three times as long as the best of them, and swim further without the aid of fins or snorkel, was only a source of amazement to my friends, but after a few days I noticed that they were having less and less to do with me. They did not care for the hairlessness of my body or the webbing, which seemed to have lengthened, between my toes and fingers. They did not like the bump low at the rear of my bathing costume or the way I could converse with them in their own tongue when I had never studied Greek in my life.
It was time to move on. My travels took me all over the world and I became something of an authority on those dead civilizations which were my one joy in life. Then, in Phetri, I heard of the Nameless City.
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his inexplicable couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
My Arab guides thought I, too, was mad when I ignored their warnings and continued in search of that City of Devils. Their fleet-footed camels took them off in more than necessary haste, for they had noticed my skin’s scaly strangeness and certain other unspoken things which made them uneasy in my presence. Also, they had been nonplussed, as I had been myself, at the strange fluency with which I used their tongue.
Of what I saw and did in Kara-Shehr I will not write. It must suffice to say that I learned of things which sent me off again on my travels to seek Sarnath the Doomed in what was once the land of Mnar ...
No man knows the whereabouts of Sarnath, and it is better that this remain so. Of my travels in search of the place and the difficulties which I encountered at every phase of my journey I will therefore recount nothing. Yet my discovery of the slime-sunken city, and of the incredibly aged ruins of nearby lb, were major links forged in the lengthening chain of knowledge which was slowly bridging the awesome gap between this world and my ultimate destination. And I, bewildered, did not even know where or what that destination was.
For three weeks I wandered the slimy shores of the still lake which hides Sarnath, and at the end of that time, driven by a fearful compulsion, I once again used those unnatural aquatic powers of mine and began exploring beneath the surface of that hideous morass.
That night I slept with a small green figurine, rescued from the sunken ruins, pressed to my bosom. In my dreams I saw my mother and father—but dimly, as if through a mist—and they beckoned to me...
The next day I went again to stand in the centuried ruins of lb, and as I was making ready to leave I saw the inscribed stone which gave me my first real clue. The wonder is that I could read what was written on that weathered, aeon-old pillar, for
it was written in a curious cuneiform older even than the inscriptions of Geph’s broken columns, and it had been pitted by the ravages of time.
It told nothing of the beings who once lived in lb, or anything of the long-dead inhabitants of Sarnath. It spoke only of the destruction which the men of Sarnath had brought to the beings of lb—and of the resulting Doom that came to Sarnath. This doom was wrought by the gods of the beings of lb ... but of those “Gods” I could likewise learn not a thing. I only knew that reading that stone and being in lb had stirred long-hidden memories, perhaps even ancestral memories, in my mind. Again that feeling of closeness to home, that feeling I always felt so strongly on the moors in Yorkshire, flooded over me. Then, as I idly moved the rushes at the base of the pillar with my foot, yet more chiselled inscriptions appeared. I cleared away the slime and read on. There were only a few lines... but those lines contained my clue: