“The Earth-Brain flamed pure crimson instantly, the crimson of leaping hell-fires and raging holocausts, the red of a superhuman, stupendous wrath. Colossal anger emanated from it at the same moment like a wave of destroying force, and as that cosmic wrath swept through me I knew that I had committed blackest sin against the universe in daring to attack the brain of the living earth-body upon which dwelt I and all my tiny race!
“And as the Earth-Brain blazed blinding crimson in rage, all its great tentacles or light-muscles whipped and twisted in a wild convulsion of insensate wrath! Travis was flung against the cavern’s wall and smashed into red pulp by the impact; I was hurled as wildly and struck not the cavern wall but the mouth of the tunnel down which we had come, and all earth seemed shaking with a tremendous grinding roar of shifting rock as the tentacles running down from the Earth-Brain into it convulsed.
“The Earth-Brain had for the moment gone mad with sheer rage and its earth-body was shaking and quaking in that mad spasm. I staggered to my feet. The mountain, the great cavern and the tunnel in whose mouth I was standing, were rocking about me like a leaf in the wind. The Earth-Brain, in its mad excess of rage at having been attacked, had for the moment even forgotten me, who had dared make that attack, and was reacting in an insensate convulsion of fury that was shaking the whole upper part of its earth-body, the whole polar region!
“I stumbled away from that awful spectacle of the Earth-Brain’s crimson-flaming ovoid of light, up into the tunnel. It was mindless terror that made me struggle up the tunnel whose terrific shakings flung me this way and that. I knew that in a moment when the Earth-Brain’s first wild rage subsided it would remember me and its vengeance would crash upon me.
“I cannot tell now for how many minutes I fought my way up that tunnel, thrown from my feet each time I staggered erect by the wild pitchings of the mountain around me; crawling crazily upward on hands and knees with the terrific grinding of rock-masses beneath and around me like the last roar of doom in my ears. I saw ahead the white circle of light that was the tunnel’s opening just as the first awful quakes began to subside, as the Earth-Brain’s first convulsive rage began to calm.
“I knew the Earth-Brain would now remember me and I flung myself forward, out of the dark tunnel into the daylight on the mountain’s side. Below and far away stretched the glittering ice-fields but now they were heaved and rumpled like waves of a mighty sea, piling here and there in mountainous ridges and attesting the violence of the great quake that had just shaken them.
“Down the mountain’s icy side I started by the path Travis and Skeel and I had cut in ascending. There came a roar from above and an avalanche of ice and rock poured down on me from the mountain’s upper side. I flattened myself beneath the angle of the slant in the side and it roared over and past me. The Earth-Brain had indeed remembered, knew where I was upon its body and was seeking to slay me!
“Thrice it tried to destroy me as I struggled down the mountain’s side. Twice other avalanches were shaken loose upon me, each almost annihilating me, and once the whole mountain shook violently as though to dislodge me and send me tumbling to death. God, what a weird progress was that of mine down the mountain, with the Earth-Brain, with earth itself, trying to destroy me!
“I do not know yet by what chance I evaded those tremendous attacks and got to the ice-field at the mountain’s bottom, bruised and terror-dazed. I looked to where our camp had been and there was but Noskat and one sledge and three dogs. Shan and the other sledge and dogs had been caught and annihilated by the shifting ice. Noskat ran toward me.
“He was babbling madly of the vengeance of the Earth-Brain, of the mighty quake that had killed Shan and the dogs and shaken terribly the earth itself. I cut him short, and we fled southward from the mountain over the ice-fields. Before we had travelled two hours a strong quake shook violently the ice over which we were travelling. A crevice opened suddenly ahead of us that we almost fell into.
“Noskat cried to me that we might as well die, that we had offended the Earth-Brain and that wherever we went upon its body, the earth, it would know and would try to kill us. But I pressed on, motivated only by the insane desire to put more and more distance between myself and that towering ice-mountain in whose heart the Earth-Brain poised.
“The next week was like one in a strange inferno, an icy hell of cold in which we pushed south with the Earth-Brain’s vengeance ever following closely. Nine times during that week we were menaced by violent quakes that shook the ice over which we travelled. How we escaped those suddenly opening crevices and marching ice-ridges and terrific shocks, I cannot now dream. Terror, a terror not of the quakes but of the Earth-Brain causing them, drove us on.
“It came to me during that week of hell that Travis and Skeel had been luckier in being slain outright by the Earth-Brain than had I, with this remorseless vengeance of that mighty ovoid of light and intelligence pursuing me. Yet with that mad persistence that still actuated me, I pushed on. Toward the week’s end Noskat’s strength failed. With him in the sledge, dying and babbling of the Earth-Brain, I struggled south and at last reached the ship.
“To the ship’s officers, who talked excitedly of the great cataclysm that had almost destroyed the vessel and that had seemed to centre where Travis and Skeel and I had been, I lied. I said that there had been a terrific quake and that Travis and Skeel and Shan had been killed in it. Noskat died without regaining consciousness and there was none to contradict me. The ship started south.
“I prayed as we sailed southward that the Earth-Brain would pursue me no farther, but I feared—I feared. My fear was justified, for as the ship passed close to the shore of Grinnell Land, a projecting glacier broke and hurled out a huge mass of ice that barely missed the ship. Two days later an undersea disturbance almost swamped us. The ship’s crew talked of unsettled conditions, of earth-faults caused by the great polar quake; but I knew the truth, knew that my prayer was not answered and that still the Earth-Brain’s vengeance followed me.
“We finally reached Halifax, and there I saw that the Earth-Brain would not reck of killing all my race if it could slay me, who had dared attack it. For, two days after we reached Halifax, came a terrible quake that destroyed half the city and killed thousands of its people. I escaped again, by the mere chance of being in an open park when the quake began.
“The newspapers quoted the scientists as saying, like the ship’s men, that the great polar quake I had gone through had somehow caused faults in earths’s interior structure which had resulted in this quake. I knew how far they were from the truth, knew the Earth-Brain had moved its vast earth-body and caused that quake solely to kill me.
“I fled from Halifax, whose dead seemed to point accusingly at me who had brought the Earth-Brain’s death upon them. I took a boat to Norway and the day I arrived there came a quake that did great damage. By then I knew enough to stay out of buildings that might crash upon me, even sleeping in the open air. I went on from Norway to Russia.
“Russia had a series of three devastating quakes, the third one of which almost got me despite my precautions. When I fled on to Egypt it was worse, for my presence in Alexandria brought a quake and tidal wave that killed more innocent thousands. When I headed north again to Italy, the peninsula was racked by unprecedented quakes and landslides during my stay. And when I went on to England the quakes followed me.
“I knew that sooner or later, despite my carefulness to stay out of buildings and away from mountains and hills that might loose avalanches on me, one of these quakes would get me, the Earth-Brain’s vengeance would find me. But I fled on, took a boat home. I arrived in New York today, and you, Morris, saw what happened.
“You saw that when I had not been in New York more than a few hours there came an earth-tremor. To the people here it seemed only a tremor. But to me it was warning and knowledge, knowledge that the Earth-Brain knew of my presence here, that it was still seeking to slay me with the movements of its great earth-body.
That was the story Clark Landon told me in my New York apartment the morning of the tremor. He left the city despite all I could say, a few hours afterward. I parted from him at the station where he took a train to New Orleans. I never saw Landon again but I followed his movements from that time until the end, and will summarise them briefly here.
The train Landon took to New Orleans was derailed by a sudden earth-tremor when a few hundred miles from its destination. Landon escaped, according to the newspaper casualty lists, though a score of people were killed and more injured. There were several earth-shocks of varying violence while Landon was in New Orleans, but they ceased after he took a banana boat to Mexico.
Ten days later I read of a violent quake that had destroyed the town of Tegulcipan, in northern Mexico, and the neighbouring villages of Causo and Santlione. The newspaper dispatches estimated the dead at fifty and mentioned the escape of an American staying in Tegulcipan, Clark Landon.
Landon went southward and a more or less continuous series of earthquakes followed him. At Progreso, in Yucatan, a double quake laid practically every structure in ruins and slew three-fourths of the population. Again I saw Clark Landon mentioned as one who had escaped, and it was said he had started for Guatemala.
At Guatemala came the end. The day after Landon arrived came the first terrifying rumblings of an earthquake of tremendous violence. The radio and cable stories told of the unexpected suddenness with which the earth heaved violently and with which vast crevices began opening in it. They told also of the curious suicide of an American named Clark Landon, which took place as the quake started.
According to these dispatches, Landon, when the quake started, had rushed into the street along which crevices were opening and had shouted madly as though adjuring someone or something to stop the quake. The shocks becoming each moment more violent, Landon had shouted something about surrendering himself and stopping these quakes devastating earth, and had rushed to the nearest crevice and thrown himself into it. According to those who saw, the crevice closed instantly upon him.
With Landon’s death the quake stopped almost at once, the tremors subsiding. Though a few of Guatemala’s buildings were shaken down and much glass shattered, there was no other damage and so Guatemala had cause for rejoicing. It was only after the first sensational stories of the quake and its sudden stop had filled the papers that they carried the minor detail of Landon’s strange suicide.
The quake at Guatemala was the last of the series of earthquakes that for almost two years had wrought destruction over earth’s surface. There have been minor tremors and movements since, of course, but no such succession of cataclysms as that which began with the great polar quake and moved here and there over earth until it ended at Guatemala.
That is all of the story, and I, Morris, intend to attach to it no explanation or attempt at explanation. It must end not with explanations but with questions, questions that may have their answer in known natural causes or that can be answered, perhaps, only by the incredible tale Clark Landon told me that morning.
Was the tale the literal truth? Did Landon and Travis and Skeel actually penetrate that icy mountain at earth’s top to find there the Earth-Brain, the vast mind that has this earth for body? Was it because Landon attacked that Earth-Brain that for two years earth was racked by quakes?
Certain it is that that terrible series of quakes did follow Landon over earth’s surface. Whether that was by coincidence only, or whether those quakes were the deliberate movements of its huge earth-body by which the Earth-Brain was striving to kill Landon, as he believed, there will be different minds.
And what of that last quake at Guatemala, where Landon flung himself into the crevice after madly adjuring the Earth-Brain to stop its destruction? There can be no doubt that Landon saw himself as bringing endless death and destruction on innocent cities and peoples by his mere continued living, and that he felt at last that only by sacrificing himself would the Earth-Brain’s vengeance be satisfied, and the quakes cease.
Here again it is certain that no sooner had Landon flung himself into that crevice in the Guatemala street than the quake there stopped, the whole series of quakes stopped. Was that, too, by chance only? Or was it that Landon’s sacrifice was not in vain, that with his death the Earth-Brain’s revenge was accomplished?
It is with such questions and not with explanations, as I said, that the story must end. We cannot say whether up in its mountain-chamber at earth’s top sits that mighty ovoid of sentient light that Landon called the Earth-Brain, whether we who consider ourselves masters of all are not but a race of microscopic parasites dwelling upon the vast and strangely living body of that Earth-Brain. It may be that we shall never be able to say, and I think that that is best. I think it is infinitely best that we, who know so much so certainly, do not know this thing.
THROUGH THE ALIEN ANGLE
BY ELWIN G. POWERS
“I’M SORRY, BUT THAT’S ALL THE BOOKS THE LIBRARY HAS ON that subject.” I started to protest to the librarian, but knew at once it would do no good. I should have realized the folly of venturing out on a stormy night to try to get some information from this mausoleum of knowledge, and would have done better to go directly to the University. And with the time the girl had spent in vain searching for my material, the University Library had certainly closed. My final paper on the prehistory of man, due in class tomorrow, was in a sadly incomplete state.
I turned away, wondering whether I dared attempt to find a bookstore which might have remained open this late. But it was unlikely that any ordinary bookstore would have the books I needed. As I stood there, I felt a touch on my arm.
I turned, and looked at an old man who stood there. He came barely to my shoulder, and his white hair and beard made me think that he was a teacher from some local school. But his eyes were what arrested my attention. They were deep-set and dark, and seemed to hold in their depths some hint of dark and forbidden knowledge. I was tempted to rebuff him, but he smiled at me disarmingly.
“They are hopelessly materialistic here,” he said, in a quiet voice. “I heard you asking about certain books. I may be able to help you, and my own small collection is at your disposal if you wish.”
I thanked him. Scorn not the gifts that the gods provide, and I remembered that uncompleted class paper.
“I live a little way from here,” he said, as I nodded my assent. “Is it still raining, as it was? Yes? Well, we will take a cab.”
Almost before I could protest, he had hustled me from the library and into a taxi. He muttered something to the driver, and we whirled away into the dark.
I was almost inclined to withdraw from this singular venture, but I was confident of my ability to take care of myself, and so relaxed, and spent the time watching my companion as the cab sped along.
He seemed to have an indefinable air of antiquity about him, and I observed that he wore a cape—this incongruous garment had previously escaped my notice.
I grew more and more uncomfortable as the minutes passed. But suddenly the cab pulled up before a row of old brownstone houses, and the caped man paid the driver and we alighted.
That part of town was unfamiliar to me, and I stared at the residence with misgivings. But I suddenly caught sight of a police prowl car under a distant street light, and, reassured that help was near if I should need it, I mounted the steps behind my companion.
The room into which we stepped made me gasp, for it was luxuriously furnished, in contrast with the plain exterior of the house. In ev
ery corner stood relics, antiques from every corner of the globe. There was a saturnine statuette from Easter Island, a gorgeous Egyptian mummy-case, carved jade figurines, miniature Indian totems, Mayan tablets—and many others.
“Interesting, aren’t they?” the old man said, breaking his silence. I wish I could give his name, but for some reason it never occurred to me to ask it. And I have never been able to find that house again, though I have combed the city several times, looking for it.
The antiquarian in me aroused, I examined several pieces more closely. They were undoubtedly genuine, and worth a small fortune.
“Collected every one myself,” he said. “But come. In the library is what you wish to know.”
He ushered me into another room, and here my astonishment was redoubled. For the walls were lined with books—books of every nature and description. But in spite of my enthusiasm, I could not help feeling that there was something amiss. And after a searching look around, I discovered what it was.
The room was not square. Two walls, the floor, and the ceiling, seemed to come together at an angle—a puzzling angle. And it seemed as if a person could walk into that peculiar conjunction, and walk right on—into, or through, or beyond our normal plane of things. But my attention was diverted from this odd phenomenon by the books about me.
I was standing before a shelf which seemed to hold all the forbidden books about which I had heard strange and disquieting whispers. The De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn, the Nightbook of Jacques Mosquea, several volumes by von Junzt, Perre Ereville, and Dirkas. Others were labeled simply by name, and I saw the Song of Yste, the Book of Eibon, and many others I had never heard of before. And, set a little aside, were two black-bound tomes—one was the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, and the other was stamped simply Cthulhu—but that dread connotation sent chills down my spine.
“I think this will help you,” said my host, as he drew out a volume. “The Stanzas of Dzyan are reliable. Sit down, and I’ll read.”
Acolytes of Cthulhu Page 17