Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  “That’s wonderful, Albert,” I told him, meaning it utterly. “By the way, it’s my birthday,” I added.

  “Congratulations!” he said joyfully. “We’ll celebrate it tonight with our drafts of Morgan’s drug.”

  And our expedition did turn out to be a glorious one, at least until almost its very end. The Hollywood Hills put on their most youthfully winning face; even the underlying crumbling, worm-eaten corruptions seemed fresh. The sun was hot, the sky bright blue, but there was a steady cool breeze from the west and occasional great high white clouds casting enormous shadows. Amazingly, Albert seemed to know the territory almost as well as I did—he’d studied his maps prodigiously and brought them along, including the penciled ones I’d sent him. And he instantly named correctly the manzanita, sumac, scrub oak, and other encroaching vegetation through which we wended our way.

  Every so often and especially at my favorite pausing places, he would take readings with the geo-scanner, which he carried handily, while I had two canteens and a small backpack. While his head was under the black hood, I would stand guard, my stick ready. Once I surprised a dark and pinkly pale, fat, large serpent, which went slithering into the underbrush. Before I could tell him, he said correctly, “A king snake, foe of the crotaloids—a good omen.”

  And … on every reading, Albert’s black box showed vacuities of some sort—tunnels or caves—immediately below us, at depths varying from a few to a few score meters. Somehow this did not trouble us by bright outdoor day. I think it was what we’d both been expecting. Coming out from under the hood, he’d merely nod and say, “Fifteen meters” (or the like) and note it down in his little book, and we’d tramp on. Once he let me try my luck under the hood, but all I could see through the eyepiece was what seemed like an intensification of the dancing points of colored light one sees in the dark with the eyes closed. He told me it took considerable training to learn to recognize the significant indications.

  High in the Santa Monicas we lunched on beef sandwiches and the tea-flavored lemonade with which I’d filled both canteens. Sun and breeze bathed us. Hills were all around and beyond them to the west the blue Pacific. We talked of Sir Francis Drake and Magellan and of Captain Cook and his great circumpolar voyagings, and of the fabulous lands they’d all heard legends of—and of how the tunnels we were tracing were really no more strange. We spoke of Lovecraft’s stories almost as if they were no more than that. Daytime viewpoints can be strangely unworrying and unconcerned.

  Halfway back or so, Albert began looking very haggard once more—frighteningly so. I got him to let me carry the black box. To do that I had to abandon my flat backpack and empty canteens—he didn’t seem to notice.

  Almost home, we paused at my father’s memorial. The sun had westered most of this way, and there were dark shadows and also shafts of ruddy light almost parallel to the ground. Albert, very weary now, was fumbling for phrases to praise Rodia’s work, when there swiftly glided out of the undergrowth behind him what I first took to be a large rattlesnake. But as I lunged lurchingly toward it, lashing at it with my stick, and as it slid back into thick cover with preternatural rapidity, and as Albert whirled around, the sinuous, vanishing thing looked for an instant to me as if it were all shimmering violet-green above with beating wings and bluish-scarlet below with claws while its minatory rattle was more a skirling hum.

  We raced home, not speaking of it at all, each of us concerned only that his comrade not fall behind. Somewhere mine found the strength.

  His postcards had been collected from the box by the road and there were a half dozen new letters for him—and a notification of a registered package for me.

  Nothing must do then but Albert must drive me down to Hollywood to pick up the package before the post office closed. His face was fearfully haggard, but he seemed suddenly flooded with a fantastic nervous energy and (when I protested that it could hardly be anything of great importance) a tremendous willpower that would brook no opposition.

  He drove like a veritable demon and as though the fate of worlds depended on his speed—Hollywood must have thought it was Wallace Reid come back from the dead for another of his transcontinental racing pictures. The Tin Hind fled like a frightened one indeed, as he worked the gear lever smartly, shifting up and down. The wonders were that we weren’t arrested and didn’t crash. But I got to the proper window just before it closed and I signed for the package—a stoutly wrapped, tightly sealed, and heavily corded parcel from (it really startled me) Simon Rodia.

  Then back again, just as fast despite my protests, the Tin Hind screeching on the corners and curves, my companion’s face an implacable, watchful death’s-mask, up into the crumbling and desiccated hills as the last streaks of the day faded to violet in the west and the first stars came out.

  I forced Albert to rest then and drink hot black coffee freighted with sugar while I got dinner—when he’d stepped out of the car into the chilly night he’d almost fainted. I grilled steaks again—if he’d needed restorative food last night, he needed it doubly now after our exhausting hike and our Dance of Death along the dry, twisting roads, I told him roughly. (“Or Grim Reaper’s Tarantella, eh, Georg?” he responded with a feeble but unvanquishable little grin.)

  Soon he was prowling around again—he wouldn’t stay still—and peering out the windows and then lugging the geo-scanner down into the basement, “to round out our readings,” he informed me. I had just finished building and lighting a big fire in the fireplace when he came hurrying back up. Its first white flare of flame as the kindling caught showed me his ashen face and white-circled blue eyes. He was shaking all over, literally.

  “I’m sorry, Georg, to be such a troublesome and seemingly ungrateful guest,” he said, forcing himself with a great effort to speak coherently and calmly (though most imperatively), “but really you and I must get out of here at once. There’s no place safe for us this side of Arkham—which is not safe either, but there at least we’ll have the counsel and support of salted veterans of the Miskatonic project whose nerves are steadier than mine. Last night I got (and concealed from you—I was sure it had to be wrong) a reading of fifteen down there under the carving—centimeters, Georg, not meters. Tonight I have confirmed that reading beyond any question of a doubt, only it’s shrunk to five under the carving. The floor there is the merest shell—it rings as hollow as a crypt in New Orleans’s St. Louis One or Two—they have been eating at it from below and are feasting still. No, no arguments! You have time to pack one small bag—limit yourself to necessities, but bring that registered parcel from Rodia, I’m curious about it.”

  And with that he strode to his bedroom, whence he emerged in a short while with his packed valise and carried it and the black box out to the car.

  Meanwhile I’d nerved myself to go down in the basement. The floor did ring much more hollowly than it had last night—it made me hesitate to tread upon it—but otherwise nothing appeared changed. Nevertheless it gave me a curious feeling of unreality, as if there were no real objects left in the world, only flimsy scenery, a few stage properties including a balsa sledgehammer, a registered parcel with nothing in it, and a cyclorama of nighted hills, and two actors.

  I hurried back upstairs, took the steaks off the grill and set them on the table in front of the softly roaring fire (for they were done), and headed after Albert.

  But he anticipated me, stepping back inside the door, looking at me sharply—his eyes were still wide and staring—and demanding, “Why aren’t you packed?”

  I said to him steadily, “Now look here, Albert, I thought last night the cellar floor sounded hollow, so that is not entirely a surprise. And any way you look at it, we can’t drive to Arkham on nervous energy. In fact, we can’t get even decently started driving east without some food inside us. You say yourself it’s dangerous everywhere, even at Miskatonic, and from what we (or at least I) saw at my father’s grave there may be at least one of the things loose already. So let’s eat dinner—I have a hunch t
error hasn’t taken away your appetite entirely—and have a look inside Rodia’s package, and then leave if we must.”

  There was a rather long pause. Then his expression relaxed into a somewhat wan smile and he said, “Very well, Georg, that does make sense. I’m frightened all right, make no mistake of that, in fact I’ve walked in terror for the past ten years. But in this case, to speak as honestly as I’m able, I have been even more concerned for you—it suddenly seemed such a pity, such a disservice, that I should have dragged you into this dreadful business. But as you say, one must bow to necessity, bodily and otherwise … and try to show a little style about it,” he added with a rather doleful chuckle.

  So we sat down before the dancing, golden fire and ate our steaks and fixings (I had some burgundy, he stayed with his sweet black coffee) and talked of this and that—chiefly of Hollywood, as it turned out. He’d glimpsed a bookstore on our headlong drive, and now he asked about it and that led to other things.

  Our dinner done, I refilled his cup and my glass, then cleared a space and opened Rodia’s parcel, using the carving knife to cut its cords and slit its seals. It contained, carefully packed in excelsior, the casket of embossed copper and German silver which sits before me now. I recognized my father’s handiwork at once, which reproduced quite closely in beaten metal his stone carving in the basement, though without the “Gate of Dreams” inscription. Albert’s finger indicated the Cutlu eyes, though he did not speak the name. I opened the casket. It contained several sheets of heavy bond paper. This time it was my father’s handwriting I recognized. Standing side by side, Albert and I read the document, which I append here:

  15 Mar 1925

  My dear Son:

  Today you are 13 but I write to you and wish you well when you are 25. Why I do so you will learn as you read this. The box is yours—Leb’ wohl! I leave it with a friend to send to you if I should go in the 12 years between—Nature has given me signs that that may be: jagged flashes of rare earth colors in my eyes from time to time. Now read with care, for I am telling secrets.

  When I was a boy in Louisville I had dreams by day and could not remember them. They were black times in my mind that were minutes long, the longest half an hour. Sometimes I came to in another place and doing something different, but never harmful. I thought my black daydreams were a weakness or a judgement, but Nature was wise. I was not strong and did not know enough to bear them yet. Under my father’s rule I learned my craft and made my body strong and always studied when and as I could.

  When I was 25 I was deep in love—this was before your mother—with a beautiful girl who died of consumption. Pining upon her grave I had a daydream, but this time by the strength of my desire I kept my mind white. I swam down through the loam and I was joined with her in full bodily union. She said this coupling must be our last, but that I now would have the power to move at will under and through the earth from time to time. We kissed farewell forever, Lorchen and I, and I swam down and on, her knight of dreams, exulting in my strength like some old kobold breasting the rock. It is not black down there, my son, as one would think. There are glorious colors. Water is blue, metals bright red and yellow, rocks green and brown, undsoweiter. After a time I swam back and up into my body, standing on the new-made grave. I was no longer pining, but profoundly grateful.

  So I learned how to divine, my son, to be a fish of earth when there is need and Nature wills, to dive into the Hell of the Mountain King dancing with light. Always the finest colors and the strangest hues lay west. Rare earths they are named by scientists, who are wise, though blind. That’s why I brought us here. Under the greatest of oceans, earth is a rainbow web and Nature is a spider spinning and walking it.

  And now you have shown you have my power, mein Sohn, but in a greater form. You have black nightdreams, I know, for I have sat by you as you slept and heard you talk and seen your terror, which would soon destroy you if you could recall it, as one night showed. But Nature in her wisdom blindfolds you until you have the needed strength and learning. As you know by now, I have provided for your education at a good Eastern school praised by Harley Warren, the finest employer that I ever had, who knew a lot about the nether realms.

  And now you’re strong enough, mein Sohn, to act—and wise, I hope, as Nature’s acolyte. You’ve studied deep and made your body strong. You have the power and the hour has come. The triton blows his horn. Rise up, mein lieber Georg, and follow me. Now is the time. Build upon what I’ve built, but build more greatly. Yours is the wider and the greater realm. Make your mind white. With or without some lovely woman’s help, now burst the gate of dreams!

  Your loving Father

  At any other time that document would have moved and shaken me profoundly. Truth to tell, it did so move and shake me, but I had been already so moved and shaken by today’s climactic events that my first thought was of how the letter applied to them.

  I echoed from the letter, “Now burst the gate of dreams,” and then added, suppressing another interpretation, “That means I should take Morgan’s drug tonight. Let’s do it, Albert, as you proposed this morning.”

  “Your father’s last command,” he said heavily, clearly much impressed by that aspect of the letter. Then, “Georg, this is a most fantastic, shattering missive! That sign he got—sounds like migraine. And his references to the rare-earth elements—that could be crucial. And colors in the earth perceived perhaps by extrasensory perception! The Miskatonic project should have started investigating dowsing years ago. We’ve been blind—” He broke off. “You’re right, Georg, and I am strongly tempted. But the danger! How to choose? On the one hand a supreme parental injunction and our raging curiosities—for mine’s a-boil. On the other hand Great Cthulhu and his minions. Oh, for an indication of how to decide!”

  There was a sharp knocking at the door. We both started. After a moment’s pause I moved rapidly, Albert following. With my hand on the latch I paused again. I had not heard a car stop outside. Through the stout oak came the cry, “Telegram!” I opened it.

  There was revealed a skinny, somewhat jaunty-looking youth of pale complexion scattered with big freckles and with carrot red hair under his visored cap. His trousers were wrapped tightly around his legs by bicycle clips.

  “Either of you Albert N. Wilmarth?” he inquired coolly.

  “I am he,” Albert said, stepping forward.

  “Then sign for this, please.”

  Albert did so and tipped him, substituting a dime for a nickel at the last instant.

  The youth grinned widely, said, “G’night,” and sauntered off. I closed the door and turned quickly back.

  Albert had torn open the flimsy envelope and drawn out and spread the missive. He was pale already, but as his eyes flashed across it, he grew paler still. It was as if he were two-thirds of a ghost already and its message had made him a full one. He held the yellow sheet out to me wordlessly:

  LOVECRAFT IS DEAD STOP THE WHIPPOORWILLS DID NOT SING STOP TAKE COURAGE STOP DANFORTH

  I looked up. Albert’s face was still as ghostly white, but its expression had changed from uncertainty and dread to decision and challenge.

  “That tips the balance,” he said. “What have I more to lose? By George, Georg, we’ll have a look down into the abyss on whose edge we totter. Are you game?”

  “I proposed it,” I said. “Shall I fetch your valise from the car?”

  “No need,” he said, whipping from his inside breast pocket the small paper packet from Dr. Morgan he’d shown me that morning. “I had the hunch that we were going to use it, until that apparition at your father’s tomb shattered my nerves.”

  I fetched small glasses. He split evenly between them the small supply of white powder, which dissolved readily in the water I added under his direction. Then he looked at me quizzically, holding his glass as if for a toast.

  “No question of to whom we drink this,” I said, indicating the telegram he was still holding in his other hand.

  He winced s
lightly. “No, don’t speak his name. Let’s rather drink to all our brave comrades who have perished or suffered greatly in the Miskatonic project.”

  That “our” really warmed me. We touched glasses and drained them. The draft was faintly bitter.

  “Morgan writes that the effects are quite rapid,” he said. “First drowsiness, then sleep, and then hopefully dreams. He’s tried it twice himself with Rice and doughty old Armitage, who laid the Dunwich Horror with him. The first time they visited in dream Gilman’s Walpurgis hyperspace; the second, the inner city at the two magnetic poles—an area topologically unique.”

  Meanwhile I’d hurriedly poured a little more wine and lukewarm coffee and we’d settled ourselves comfortably in our easy chairs before the fire, the dancing flames of which became both a little blurred and a little dazzling as the drug began to take effect.

  “Really, that was a most amazing missive from your father,” he chatted on rapidly. “Spinning a rainbow web under the Pacific, the lines those weirdly litten tunnels—truly most vivid. Would Cthulhu be the spider? No, by Gad, I’d liefer your father’s goddess Nature any day. She’s kindlier at least.”

  “Albert,” I said somewhat drowsily, thinking of personality exchanges, “could those creatures possibly be benign, or at least less malevolent than we infer?—as my father’s subterranean visionings might indicate. My winged worms, even?”

  “Most of our comrades did not find them so,” he replied judiciously, “though of course there’s our Innsmouth hero. What has he really found in Y’ha-nthlei? Wonder and glory? Who knows? Who can say he knows? Or old Akeley out in the stars—is his brain suffering the tortures of the damned in its shining metal cylinder? Or is it perpetually exalted by ever-changing true visions of infinity? And what did poor shoggoth-stampeded Danforth really think he saw beyond the two horrific mountain chains down there before he got amnesia? And is that last a blessing or a curse? Gad, he and I are suited to each other … the mind-smitten helping the nerve-shattered … fit nurses for felines.…”