The Feaster From The Stars (Blackwood and Harrington)

by Alan K Baker

  ‘The Wanderer?’ said Castaigne. ‘In all my researches I’ve never heard of it. What is it?’

  ‘I am uncertain, as are the Hyades. They speculated that it is perhaps an entity of some kind, or perhaps the product of an ancient technology, created by a distant and unknown civilisation somewhere in the depths of the Æther, with the purpose of defending our universe against threats from Outside… perhaps a super-civilisation’s equivalent of your Bureau of Clandestine Affairs, Thomas,’ he added.

  ‘In any event, the King in Yellow is afraid of it, and has been moving from planet to planet for countless aeons, feeding and hiding… feeding and hiding… for he has placed Anti-Prisms upon worlds without number throughout this universe, forming a transit network for himself.’

  ‘And that is the fate which awaits the Earth, if the fiend is allowed to come here?’ said de Chardin.

  Oberon nodded. ‘Once he has established himself on Earth, the King in Yellow will begin to feed upon its inhabitants, both human and animal – indeed, all forms of life will be sustenance to him. And humanity will suffer the same fate as the inhabitants of Carcosa.’

  ‘How, precisely, will the thing feed?’ asked de Chardin.

  ‘The King in Yellow comes from beyond the edge of ordered space and time,’ Oberon answered, ‘from a place where the laws of physics are vastly different to those operating in this universe. He is capable of warping the fabric of reality: just as we can dip our hands into a pool of water and create currents within the liquid, so can he create currents within reality itself, pointing them in whichever direction he chooses. In this way, he can open avenues of attraction between himself and anything else on the planet – including the minds and bodies of its inhabitants.

  ‘The Planetary Angels of Carcosa watched this happening, and great was their anguish as they described how the King in Yellow drank the minds of the people, and then the life force animating their bodies. The result was insanity and physical feebleness, swiftly followed by death, and when death came, the victims’ bodies dissolved like ice in a hot room, until nothing was left of them.

  ‘This is what will happen if the King in Yellow is allowed to come to Earth. He will choose a place to make his fortress; he will make it impregnable, and there he will dwell, periodically reaching out to feed on all the life which covers the surface of this world.’

  ‘Good God! Then Blackwood is right: we must find this Anti-Prism gadget and destroy it without delay!’

  ‘We must do more than that,’ said Oberon.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Sophia.

  ‘The King’s intention is to come to Earth and feed upon its population while hiding from the Wanderer. Eventually, our Sun will begin to sing its own song of distress, but by the time the Wanderer arrives, untold deaths will have occurred, and the Earth will have been irreparably damaged. The King in Yellow will move on to the next world, and then the next. We must make our stand on behalf of all the intelligent beings which are yet to fall victim to the monster’s attentions, on worlds as yet unknown to us, in millennia yet to come.’

  ‘And how are we to do that, when so many must have tried and failed in the past?’ asked Blackwood.

  ‘The gateway between Carcosa and Earth is actually a tunnel extending through a higher form of space,’ Oberon replied. ‘The Planetary Angels told me that the King in Yellow has kept a hoard of Carcosan souls with which he will power the Anti-Prism in his castle in the Lake of Hali…’

  ‘While Charles Exeter uses the spirits which have been consumed by the Servitor to power the Anti-Prism here on Earth,’ said Blackwood.

  Oberon nodded. ‘Precisely. When the two devices have been activated, they will resonate with each other through the higher space, and the tunnel between worlds will be opened. But if they are both destroyed while the King in Yellow is in transit within the tunnel, it will be severed from the universe, and he will be trapped within it. Our universe will be free of him forever.’

  The humans glanced at each other in silence.

  ‘Oberon,’ said Blackwood after a moment. ‘You say that both Anti-Prisms must be destroyed.’

  ‘At precisely the same moment, yes,’ the Faerie King replied.

  ‘And that would involve our travelling to Carcosa… physically rather than mentally.’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘How are we to do that? You said yourself that Carcosa is too far away to be reached by our Æther zeppelins.’

  ‘Allow me to worry about that,’ Oberon replied with a smile. ‘In the meantime, I suggest that you equip yourselves with all that is necessary to survive in an alien environment.’

  ‘I’m sure the chaps at Station X will be able to help out on that score,’ said Blackwood.

  ‘Good. Go and speak to them. Titania will go with you and will advise your scientists on the exact nature of the equipment required. I will make the preparations for your voyage. We will require two groups: one to make the journey to Carcosa and the other to descend into the Void Chamber here in London. Each will have but one task: to destroy the Anti-Prism and banish the King in Yellow from this universe forever!’

  PART FOUR

  The Tunnel Between Worlds

  CHAPTER ONE:

  The Wanderer

  It had roamed for aeons amongst the drifting stars of the island universe known by humans as the Milky Way. Unseen and unsuspected by the beings inhabiting the planets rolling eternally through the galactic night, it wandered and watched and searched… and listened.

  It had been created by a great race which had perished in ages long past, on the far side of the vast, glittering disc whose myriad stars sang to each other through the black firmament. It did not know its name, nor even if it had been given a name by those who had created it. It knew only that they were gone forever from the universe, that they had been a noble people, and that their world had been among the first to be visited by the thing that drank minds and sucked the life force from all that lived and breathed.

  When the blight first became apparent, their scientists had struggled to find ways to combat it, and perhaps send it back to the ultra-dimensional hell from which it had emerged. But it was impervious to every weapon brought to bear against it. It settled parasitically into the depths of their defenceless world, and then it began to feed.

  And the trees withered and died, and animal carcasses littered the land in their millions, and the seas grew thick with noisome darkness and then dried up altogether, and the people… the people went insane as their minds were consumed, and they screamed things that made their friends and loved ones cover their ears and turn away in anguish, and then they too withered away, and when they died, their bodies melted into the cracked earth and disappeared.

  In their madness, the people raved about a symbol which burned brightly in their minds: a geometrical form which they could not describe, but which some of them drew, sometimes on paper, but more often on the walls of their homes in their own blood:

  And while they drew this sign, the people spoke of a thing made of yellow rags which seethed within them, and which they could see in the waking dreams that haunted their collapsing minds.

  While their world was being consumed, those scientists who remained alive and sane continued their struggle to comprehend the calamity which had befallen them. The last of their most brilliant minds strove ceaselessly to understand the blasphemous nature of the interloper from beyond space, and to search for a possible weakness.

  They studied the weirdly contorted figure, which came to be known as the Yellow Sign; they sent volunteers into the planet’s depths to gather whatever information they could, while theoreticians pondered the nature of this and other universes, and the possible forms which intelligence might take in those infinitely distant realms.

  But the volunteers never returned, and the theoreticians despaired of ever finding a means to rid their world of the thing which the people had come to call ‘the yellow feaster from the stars’.

  And th
en a breakthrough occurred. Through the application of newly-discovered scientific principles combined with Magickal incantations designed to reverse the reality-warping mathematics embodied in the hideous geometry of the Yellow Sign, the theoreticians created an entity of their own.

  It was partly organic, partly thinking machine, partly of planetary matter and partly of the Luminiferous Æther. They gave it the power to invert the mathematical blasphemy of the Yellow Sign and thus to undermine the existence of the yellow feaster from the stars.

  But it was too late for their world: too much damage had been done; too many people had been lost. All that remained of a once thriving civilisation was a few thousand survivors clinging to the barren, lifeless surface of a withered, sterile globe. The survivors knew what awaited them: extinction through starvation.

  When they brought their creation to life, its first act was to communicate to them the fact that the yellow feaster from the stars had departed from their world. The agent of their doom had fled through a doorway in space and time to an unknown destination.

  And so the last survivors of that great race gave their creation the means to travel between the stars; they equipped it with vast, membranous wings which would catch the starlight and propel it out into the universe. The instructions they gave it were simple: find the horror and destroy it; prevent it from doing to any other world what it had done to theirs.

  They bid it farewell, sent it out into the eternal night, and turned away from the stars for the last time, to await their final destiny.

  For millions of years, the entity roamed through the island universe of the Milky Way, searching for the obscene ripples in space and time that would signal the presence of the horror. There were times when it came close, but never close enough, for the yellow feaster possessed a means of instantaneous travel from world to world, a way to open doorways through space. And so the entity had no choice but to continue its search, while the stars watched its passing and sang songs to each other, calling it the Wanderer, for it had no other name.

  As the aeons passed, the quest of the Wanderer came to be known by millions of stars, and when the blight appeared on a world, its parent star would begin to sing a song of distress and torment, and the song would be taken up by other stars in its vicinity, and passed on until it was detected by the Wanderer.

  And then the Wanderer would come…

  But always too late.

  And so the Wanderer would turn away from the doomed world, spread its great wings to catch the light from a mourning star, and set off once again, into the endless night, on its eternal quest.

  Thus had it been for millennium upon millennium… until a song reached the Wanderer from a lonely star which it was passing. The star had no planetary family of its own, but throughout its long life it had listened to the stories told by others of the Wanderer’s quest.

  The star sang to the Wanderer of a great calamity which had befallen a distant world and begged the entity to make haste towards that region of the infinite sky.

  That world was called by its inhabitants… Carcosa.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The Aurelius

  Blackwood, Sophia and Castaigne stood on the landing field at Biggin Hill Cosmodrome beneath a heavily overcast sky, like three tourists waiting for transportation to an exotic destination. Beside each of them stood a stout and sturdy suitcase of steel-reinforced leather, courtesy of the people at Station X.

  Away in the distance, work was nearing completion on the reconstruction of the cosmodrome’s reception centre and support buildings, which had been destroyed three weeks earlier by Indrid Cold, the Venusian agent provocateur who had tried to ignite a war between Earth and Mars. Soon the cosmodrome would open again, allowing the arrival and departure of the Martian interplanetary cylinders, but for now the vast concrete launch platform was empty and deserted, its surface still blackened in places from the wreckage of the cylinder which Cold had destroyed.

  ‘I wonder why Oberon asked us to wait for him here,’ said Castaigne.

  ‘I wonder how the blazes he’s going to get us across trillions of miles of space to Carcosa,’ Blackwood rejoined.

  ‘I have a feeling we’re about to find out,’ Sophia said, pointing into the sky towards the west, where the clouds had begun to billow and churn strangely, like thick cigar smoke disturbed by the slow waving of some vast, unseen fan.

  Presently, the clouds parted to reveal a sight which left the three companions speechless and open-mouthed in astonishment. From out of the grey swirl, a ship had appeared: a gigantic galleon, far larger than any that had ever sailed the oceans of Earth. Blackwood estimated it to be more than a mile in length, and he searched in vain for the tops of its masts, which were lost in the clouds above. The main topsail could easily have enveloped the entire Palace of Westminster, and was emblazoned with a vast and intricate design which Blackwood and Sophia instantly recognised as the colossal tree known as the Fortress of Apples, where Oberon and Titania had their home. The great sweeping flanks of the vessel, oak-hued and polished to a lustrous sheen, were decorated with fantastic curlicues of filigreed gold and silver which would have made Beardsley weep with envy, and which were studded with cabochons of luminous gemstones, the smallest of which would have been impossible for a man to lift.

  Its vast size was not the only surprising thing about the vessel, however; for at its stern, behind the captain’s cabin and officers’ quarters common to galleons of Earth, there was a gigantic paddle-wheel similar to those which powered the great riverboats of the Mississippi. To Blackwood’s eye, this bizarre concatenation of designs was even more arresting than the ship’s colossal scale.

  ‘A floating ship,’ said Castaigne, his voice a whisper of awe. ‘Gods, what a marvel!’

  ‘Our transportation to Carcosa?’ said Blackwood, peering up at the apparition. He shook his head. ‘I fail to see how such a vessel – however magnificent – will get us across all those countless leagues of space…’

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ Castaigne chuckled.

  The great ship loomed above them as it slowly settled upon the landing field. As its vast keel – more than a hundred feet in height – gently touched the grass, the blades barely stirred, as if nothing more substantial than a feather had fallen upon them. The three humans gazed up at the elegantly curved lapstraking of the mountainous hull, like minnows contemplating a whale, and Sophia shook her head and sighed, ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!’

  ‘Nor I, your Ladyship,’ rejoined Castaigne.

  ‘I wonder how we’re going to get onboard,’ said Blackwood.

  As if in answer to his comment, a large panel in the upper reaches of the hull slid aside and a wide platform emerged, connected to the vessel by means of a complex arrangement of beams and pulleys. The platform quickly descended to the ground, suspended by copper-coloured chains, and alighted upon the grass a few yards from them.

  Castaigne picked up his suitcase. ‘Our means of boarding, I should say.’

  Blackwood picked up both his and Sophia’s cases, and together they stepped onto the platform, which immediately began to rise again into the air. The ground fell away rapidly, and in moments they had a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside, an irregular patchwork of fields and villages stretching to the horizon.

  As Sophia gazed across the landscape of southern England, she felt her heart tremble with excitement and trepidation: soon, they would be leaving all this beauty and tranquillity far behind, heading into the depths of space towards a world which might once have looked a little like this, but which was now a blighted sphere, drifting lonely amongst mourning stars, its life almost completely drained by the trans-dimensional monstrosity that dwelled there.

  A monstrosity which she had already encountered, and which she would soon encounter again.

  Her breath caught in her throat at the thought. Blackwood glanced at her, intuited her apprehension, and placed a comforting arm around her shoulders.

/>   The platform came to a halt, and they turned to see Oberon standing in the hatchway. He was dressed in a tunic of shimmering emerald, black breeches and high boots, much in the manner of a sea captain of centuries past. His great dragonfly wings spread out behind him, and his eyes blazed with the light of Faerie as he smiled at them.

  ‘Sophia, Thomas, Dr Castaigne,’ he said, ‘welcome aboard my Æther galleon, the Aurelius.’

  ‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ replied Castaigne. ‘It’s quite magnificent… very, er, big.’

  The Faerie King’s smile grew broader as he beckoned to them. ‘Come. You may wish to observe our departure from the main deck, and then I will show you to your quarters.’ As he said this, three of the vessel’s crew stepped onto the platform and took the suitcases. Oberon indicated them. ‘Your equipment?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Blackwood. ‘Queen Titania gave very detailed instructions to the chaps at Station X on what to provide.’

  They stepped through the hatchway into what was evidently a large reception chamber. The room was furnished with ornate tables and chairs, which gave the impression of having been fashioned from living wood. Large cabinets lined the walls, and on their shelves were arranged numerous objects which might have been ornaments, or perhaps instruments of some kind: it was difficult to tell, so strange were their forms. There was a curious scent on the air, rather pleasing but difficult to identify. Blackwood detected a briny tinge, but in fact it was like no sea-scent he had ever encountered.

  Oberon noticed his frown. ‘Is something wrong, Thomas?’

  ‘No, not at all – it’s just… that smell…’

  ‘Does it displease you?’

  ‘No, it’s quite pleasant – I just can’t identify it.’