by Brian Lumley
On 5 August in that same year, almost exactly twelve months after he vanished, when I had long since given up hope of ever seeing my uncle again, news came to throw me into transports of hope and wonder. Three days previously, on the afternoon of the 2nd, a naked man had been found in a condition of extreme exposure and ordeal-induced delirium stumbling weakly, mazedly about the countryside near Sarby. His eyes had been closed, apparently against the brilliance of the daylight.
The man, a person in his late forties, had first been taken into a small local hospital, only to be transferred to a private ward in the well-equipped hospital at Radcar when it was seen just how dangerous his condition was. There at Radcar on the morning of the third day, after being asked repeatedly to identify himself, he had finally managed to supply the name of Ewart Masters!
The hospital staff passed this information to the police, and they in turn contacted me. That was how I first came to hear of my uncle’s return, and of course I went straight down to Radcar in the hope that I would be able to provide positive identification. There was no doubt about it—the long-bearded, moustached, white-haired, and incredibly pale man I found between the white sheets of the hospital ward was indeed the professor.
He was asleep when first I saw him, but his nurse told me that it was decidedly better that way (his condition was not a pleasant one when he was awake), for which reason he had been under sedatives since his arrival. Yet even in his drugged sleep he tossed and turned, groaning and mouthing incoherently of strange and incomprehensible things.
Beside his bed an ashtray sported a huge cave-pearl. The nurse saw me eyeing the thing and told me about it: “He had that in his hand from the time they found him until he was brought in here. He was holding on to it very tightly—mumbling about Ulysses and a ... a Cyclops with two eyes! We had quite a struggle getting him to give it up.”
“May I take it? I’ll give it back to him later.”
“Certainly, though if it tends to remind him of whatever he’s been through, it’s probably best if you remove it for good—whatever it is!”
“It’s a cave-pearl,” I told her, tossing the thing thoughtfully in my hand. “Just about the biggest I’ve ever heard of. Now where d’you suppose my uncle might have got it?” Of course, she had no answer.
I do not intend to write of the professor’s... activities when finally he did awaken. Suffice to say I immediately contacted the best psychiatrist I could find. That was how I came to place my uncle’s care in the hands of the Harley Street specialist Dr. Eugene T. Thappon.
Within a week I was back home again in Harden, and it was only then that I gave any thought to the odd “natural” occurrences which had accompanied my uncle’s inexplicable reappearance. I had of course already traced his movements in Bleakstone prior to his disappearance, and almost a year had gone by since I had spoken to a policeman in that village who informed me of the professor’s stated intention the day before he vanished of going down to Dilham to have a look at Devil’s Pool. I would have been blind not to have given the idea considerable thought that perhaps my uncle had attempted the exploration of the pool’s continued course below ground.
In this, apparently, I had been correct. The police, having also spoken to people in Bleakstone and Dilham, had arrived at the same conclusion; nor, I was informed, would the professor be the first person to have vanished into Devil’s Pool. It could only have been by a series of miracles that he had managed to survive down there to emerge alive all these months later.
But what of those strange circumstances surrounding his return? For instance: there had been no sudden or heavy rains in the greater Yorkshire area for many months; yet, on the very day my uncle had been found babbling deliriously near Sarby, it had also been reported that three new resurgences had opened up in that same cliff face whence the figurine in Radcar Museum had originated. Indeed it was quite possible that the professor had been borne from below ground by the force of these mysteriously and suddenly rushing waters. But what had caused the necessarily vast alterations in the substrata of the moors which alone might explain the sudden appearance of so great a quantity of water? Had some seismic shock or other—a subterranean earthquake, perhaps—been responsible for my uncle’s merciful release?
On 18 August I went to Sarby to have a look at the new resurgences myself. Much of the original cliff face had been broken down by the force of the erupting water and lay in great blocks of lime- and grit-stone, and where once a small stream had chuckled from below ground at the foot of the cliffs there now opened four cavernlike mouths from which rushed veritable torrents of chill water. I spoke to a number of geologists and cavers, there to speculate on the phenomenon, only to discover that they were as baffled as the most uninformed man-in-the-street regarding the cause of the sudden flood.
Yet another group of observers—men I noticed keeping very much to themselves and talking in whispers—turned out to be members of the scientific staff of the North-East Coal Board, but understandably I failed to tie this fact in until later.
Fortunately the out-gushing flood merged with the Thyne less than a mile from the cliffs, and only one small road-bearing bridge had been inundated. A new bridge was already planned, but in the meantime a team of Army engineers had put up a temporary Bailey.
While my brief trip had produced no really useful information, I was hardly back at Harden before reading in the Hartlepool Mail of another archaeological “find” in the new tributary of the Thyne at Sarby. An extremely violent jet of water on the 20th of the month had thrust out from the cliffs an eighteen-inch fragment of strangely sculpted stone—part of a reptilian head—from beneath the moors. Equally important were the perfectly preserved bones (presumably prehistoric) of as yet unidentified animals, which the same eruption threw forth in their hundreds. But I was most interested in the sculpture, and I read how the fragment comprised the left side of a face of odd intelligence, lizardlike yet with a high forehead of almost human proportions. An empty socket in the stone face showed where an eye of sorts had once rested. Remembering what the nurse had said of my uncle’s remarks regarding the cave-pearl— of Ulysses and a Cyclops with two eyes—I went straight down to Radcar Museum where the new find had been placed beside that earlier figurine in the “Wonders of Ancient Britain” showcases.
I arrived before the fragment went behind glass and, unobserved, was able to place the cave-pearl in the gaping socket in the great stone face. The pearl fitted perfectly; confirming (so far as I was concerned) beyond all dispute, the fact that my uncle had indeed been trapped underground for a year!
Three weeks later, on 10 September, I received a letter from Dr. Thappon in which he admitted his inability to properly improve my uncle’s lot, and only three days after that, I had the professor back with me in Harden. There were improvements in his condition, I could see that from the first, but he was still in so very bad a way with regard to things I had been warned of by Dr. Thappon that I knew I would be unable to handle him myself. So, to take no chances, I had hired in advance a local male nurse, Harry Williamson, to work nights from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 a.m.—long hours to be sure, but very well paid indeed.
During those first few evenings and nights I gave my wholehearted attention to Thappon’s typescript of my uncle’s tape-recorded “story.” Much of it, up to the time of his sojourn in Bleakstone, I knew already (though I had not known of the attacks he suffered there), but from that time on, well, it was all new and terrible to me. I did pick up one inconsistency, with regard to the professor’s claim of having returned from Devil’s Pool to The George in Bleakstone. Obviously he had not done so. The barman at The George could quite definitely pinpoint the last time my uncle had been seen there, and then of course there was that other proof—the fact that my car had been found in Dilham. This much of his story at least was certainly only the professor’s memory of early hallucinations, and much of the remainder—the great majority of it in fact—could surely only be put down to the same origin.
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As I have told, I was quite certain by then that my uncle had been underground for a year, and I believed it possible that he had found the crumbling remnants of a long-lost civilization. In support of the existence of such a city, there was the proof of the figurines at Radcar and Bleakstone, and the additional and stronger proof of the cave-pearl eye of the lately disgorged stone face-fragment. Perhaps the professor had lived on fish and mushrooms down there in the dark (indeed, considering that he did not show any appreciable physical wastage, such seemed the only likely explanation), but the rest of his narrative—except as hellish dreams or diseased fancies— was quite unacceptable. The greater wonder was that in his state of mind he had survived the terrible ordeal at all...
Like my uncle before me, I, too, found it odd that Inspector Ianson, one-time Inspector of Police at Radcar, had not seen grotesque connections in the Krug case. On 16 September I again went down to Radcar (I had hired the services of Harry Williamson for the whole day) and set about the task of tracing Ianson or whichever relatives he might have left behind when he forsook the country. But here an important find—a negative find—for to all accounts Ianson had had no known relatives; apparently he had been an orphan!
I did trace a retired policeman, a man who allegedly had known Ianson as well as any other, and then at last I received the first of those clues which eventually were to signal in me certain frightening reversals of belief.
I had spoken to this gentleman, a Mr. Simpkins, on the telephone from Radcar’s police headquarters, and later at a public house, The White Horse, I met him as arranged. He was a jovial, healthy-looking old fellow, whose manner and outlook on life gave me complete faith in the reliability of the facts with which he presented me. Over a pint we first chatted of this and that before settling down to the business at hand. Mr. Simpkins was not a man to gossip of anyone without good reason, and I had to explain my case before he would get down to the relevant details. In short, those details were these:
In the two or three years immediately preceding his “going abroad,” Inspector Ianson—a strange, completely hairless man— had suffered increasingly from an obscure form of ichthyosis, a condition he treated himself and of which he would allow no professional medical examination. The disease had not been confined to his skin, for all his bodily movements in the weeks prior to his quitting Radcar and its environs had been stiff and painful. In fact Ianson’s appearance had been not quite human in those last days, and his attendance at the various police stations had suffered accordingly. Simpkins did not believe that the inspector had gone off with a woman—he had given all the circumstances much thought at the time and had arrived at the conclusion that Ianson, knowing he was dying, had simply gone away, without any fuss, to some private place where he might pass on in peace. That was Simpkins’s reckoning. My own . . . ?
From Harden on the morning of the 19th I put through a telephone call to Oakdeene Sanatorium and asked to speak to that institute’s director. He was not available, but perhaps the speaker could help me with my enquiry? On learning that I was interested in the possibility that certain inmates at the sanatorium were “so unnatural in aspect” that they were not allowed to be seen by outsiders, the voice on the telephone turned hard and unfriendly:
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t talk to the Press. There’s quite enough in the papers already...” With that the connection had been broken. Until that time I had been unaware of any untoward happenings at the sanatorium.
A further telephone call to the offices of the Sunderland Echo (a good friend of mine was a reporter there) supplied me with the following information. I copied the words directly over the telephone, which will explain any discrepancies between my text and that which appeared in the Echo at the time:
TWO DANGEROUS LUNATICS ESCAPE FROM ELMHOLME
Two Elmholme lunatics, believed to be twin brothers, escaped last night (the evening of the 17th) after being transferred from Oakdeene Sanatorium near Glasgow. For the past six months the two escapees have been undergoing a special course of psychological therapy at Oakdeene as administered by a German psychiatrist of impeccable references, Dr. Ruben Kruger. It was on the advice of Dr. Kruger—following tremendous improvements in what had hitherto been considered hopeless cases—that the two inmates were moved to the low-security wing at Elmholme, but since their escape the authorities have been unable to contact him. The escaped men are of the following description: bald and with no bodily hair whatever; 70 to 72 inches in height; approx. 130 pounds in weight. They are suffering from severe skin and muscular diseases by which they may be most easily recognized, i.e., the skin of their faces and bodies is thick, rough, and scaly, and the speed of their movements is painfully restricted. At a distance, they might easily be taken for old people as their movements suggest severe rheumatic disorders...
There was more, but in effect that was the gist of the announcement. I have yet to discover what my friend in Sunderland thinks of the way I ended our conversation (I must think up an excuse for having cut him off without even a word of thanks), but the truth is I simply let the receiver fall before he had done speaking.
Later, when I was able to carry out further investigations, I discovered of the two escaped ... men?... a horrible history of madness, peculiar ichthyic diseases, and an obscurity of origin so like the background of Inspector Ianson and the “fiction” of the alleged madman Robert Krug that I found myself ever more apprehensive of my discoveries and eventually actually trembling with an inner horror. It was too mad, too fantastic—yet item upon item, clue after clue, the whole incredible jigsaw was piecing itself together into a picture of the most awe-inspiring and hideous aspect.
It was on 21 September that yet another piece of the puzzle slipped itself into place. The morning newspaper carried second-page news of an enquiry opened by the Minister of National Economics into an alleged “misuse of authority” by the NECB. Even before reading the thing I remembered that Krug’s statement had been supposedly designed to prevent the North-East Coal Board’s extension of its drilling operations on the Yorkshire moors; and more ... I remembered the furtive-seeming crowd of scientists I had seen at the site of the new resurgences at Sarby!
Apparently it had come to the notice of the Ministry of National Economics that the NECB had been carrying out unauthorized experiments on the moors—experiments involving the drilling of deep shafts into the earth, and the sinking and detonation of powerful explosives!
The Minister’s prime allegation was that these experiments had been directly responsible for bringing about the resurgences at Sarby, the inundation and collapse of a previously quite serviceable bridge, and the destruction of fifty yards of metalled road; but he further pointed out that the results might have been disastrous. Had the water forced an outlet at some other spot, whole villages may well have been swamped!
Of course, I was not much interested in these allegations as such—but I was interested in the locations at which those detonations had taken place. Had not my uncle mentioned a tremendous blast towards the end of his narrative—a blast heralding the waters which carried him to freedom? Hurriedly I read on to discover that the site of the last and biggest explosion of the series had been a spot just some four miles out on the moors. The bomb had been set off by remote control at a great depth in the earth at 10:00 a.m. on 2 August only four or five hours before my uncle was found wandering about on the outskirts of Sarby!
The more I learned the more it appeared that the professor’s hallucinations had had at least a foothold in reality, but I found myself praying that was all they had had.
The rest of the thing is easy to relate. It happened so quickly— and, to me at least, its proofs were so positive—that everything remains in my mind with unbelievable clarity. I only wish I could forget all I know of it...
On the evening of 23 September I left my uncle in the capable care of Harry Williamson and went out into the brisk air to walk along the sea cliffs. The shushing of the waves below was soot
hing to me and I realized how badly, how deeply the occurrences of the last month had affected me. The truth was I had needed to think things over, for I was seriously considering—despite any beliefs I might by then have developed—taking Dr. Thappon’s advice regarding the placing of my uncle in a private home. At least an action such as that, harsh though it seemed, would give me time to carry out further investigations. As it happened, I need not have bothered my mind about the professor’s future; even as I turned towards home that night, his “future” was already in the process of being taken entirely out of my hands...
Now, my house stands at the very outskirts of the village, not many miles from the A19, which of course runs south and to the west of the Yorkshire moors on its way to Thirsk, York, and Selby. I mention this fact in order to illustrate the ease with which a traveller through Harden might make his way directly down to the moors, a journey of no more than ninety minutes to two hours at the outside in a motorcar, especially a car as big as mine.
By the time I reached the garden wall I knew something was wrong. I had set out three hours earlier, at about eight in the evening, and the night was quite dark, but I could see that the house was ablaze with lights and that my car was missing from its garage, the doors of which were swinging open. Passing in through the garden gate at a run, I saw that the front door was ajar. As I skidded to a halt on the gravel path the door opened fully and Harry Williamson staggered out. He was holding his head and there was a mixed expression of shock and bewilderment on his face. Pausing only to ensure that Williamson was not urgently in need of attention, I hurried into the house and made a rapid search of all the rooms. Need I add that my uncle was nowhere to be found?