by Various
Yes, it was as he had guessed from the quality of that torn fragment of silken tunic with which he had wiped his tortured eyes free of the stone-dust. The dead man was an officer of one of the Imperial Legions.
Seating the Lady Ledda upon a block of granite and requesting her to watch, Bothon knelt swiftly beside the dead body and busied himself upon it.
At the end of the two intensive minutes the Netvissa Ledda looked up at his touch upon her shoulder to see her lover appareled from head to foot in the uniform, armor, and accoutrements of an Elton of the Imperial Legion of the Hawk.
Then they hurried southward, side by side, across the great square with its desolation of the shattered buildings, towards one of the few remaining residences of the rich before which four coal-black slaves in the livery of their household were lowering an ornamental litter to the ground.
From the luxurious vehicle, as they arrived beside it, there emerged a stout citizen who stared at them inquiringly, his initial fear disappearing at recognition of the Emperor's niece and the uniform of an Imperial Legion.
"We request the loan of your litter, my lord," said Bothon.
"Most willingly," returned the citizen, bowing.
Bothon expressed thanks, handed his companion into the litter, distributed a handful of silver among the four slaves, and gave the destination to the Negro who stood beside the forward left-hand pole. Then he climbed in himself and drew the red silk curtains together.
The strong litter-poles strained and creaked as the load was hoisted to four brawny shoulders, and then the litter swung away from the residence of its still bowing and smirking owner towards the military enclosure which housed and guarded the flying-vessels of the Aluvian standing army.
"You may have observed how very completely I have entrusted my Imperial person to you," remarked the Netvissa Ledda, smiling. She was very well aware of the reasons for the Imperial request which had sent Bothon back to Ludekta, and for the first armed invasion against the Aluvian metropolis. "I have not so much as inquired as to our destination!"
"It is my intention to seek safety to the northwest," answered Bothon gravely. "I am convinced the prediction of Bal, Lord of Fields, as to the destruction of the Mother Continent, is not a mere classic to be learned, as we learned it in our childhood, as a formal exercise in rhetoric. Here, all about us, in the evidence. More, my four augurs warned me of the continent's danger ere I brought my war-galleys up upon the beaches of Alu. The four great forces, they insisted, were in collusion to that end. Do we not see and hear them at work? Fire raging through the land; earth shaking mightily; winds such as never were encountered hitherto upon the planet, else the old records lie! Water, the commotion of which surpasses all experiences;—is it not so, my beloved? Am I not constrained to speak thus to be heard amidst this hellish tumult?"
The Lady Ledda nodded, grave now in her turn.
"There are many deafened in the palace," she remarked. "Where are we to go for refuge?"
"We depart straight this night, for the great mountains of 'A-Wah-Ii,'" answered Bothon, "If so be the four great forces allow us possession of a war-chariot. And, to that end, your ring, my beloved."
The Lady Ledda nodded again, understandingly, and removed from the middle finger of her right hand the ring of the two suns and the eight-pointed star which, as a member of the Royal Family, she was entitled to wear. Bothon received it, and slipped it upon the little finger of his right hand.
The sentinel on guard before the barracks of the officer commanding the military enclosure of the Aluvian supply- barracks, saluted the commanding-looking Elton of the Legion of the Hawk who stepped down from the ornamented litter. The Elton addressed him in formal military phrases.
"Report at once to the Ka-Kalbo Netro, the arrival of the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, conveying a member of the Imperial household into exile. I am requisitioning one battle-chariot of capacity for two persons, and officer's rations sufficient for fourteen days, together with the medicinal supply for a full kit-va of men. My authority, the Imperial Signet. Behold!"
The sentinel saluted the sun-and-star ring of the Emperor, repeated his orders like an efficient automaton, saluted the Elton of the Hawk Legion, and departed at the double to fetch the commandant, the Ka-Kalbo Netro.
The Ka-Kalbo arrived promptly in answer to this summons. He saluted the Imperial Signet, and, as a Ka-Kalbo outranked an Elton by one full grade, was punctiliously saluted according to military usage by the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, an officer whose personal acquaintance he had not previously made.
Within ten minutes the Netvissa Ledda had been ceremoniously carried to and placed upon her seat in the commandeered battle-chariot, and the Elton Barko had taken his place beside her. Then, the dozen sweating mechanicians who had carried out the commandant's orders in record time, standing in a stiff, saluting row, the battle-chariot started off at a stiff gallop, the driver standing and plying his long thong with loud, snapping reports over the horses' backs, while at the great chariot's rear the spare-horse leader whistled continuously to the four relay animals which galloped behind.
The heights of 'A-Wah-Ii,' to the northwest, gave some promise, in Bothon's opinion, of security from the anciently predicted submersion of the continent. Those towering mountains would, at least, be among the last sections to sink, should the gas belts, hypothecated by the scientists of the mother continent, explode, and remove the underseas support of this great land of the globe's most ancient and noble civilization.
Shortly after daybreak, and accurately, according to the map and careful explanations of the painstaking Ka-Kalbo Netro, the chariot paused in the centre of a great level table-land one quarter of the way to his destination. The country was utterly uninhabited. They were relatively safe here in a region only lightly visited by the earthquakes, and not at all by fire. The roar of the north wind troubled the Netvissa Ledda severely. Bothon barely noticed it. He was now convinced that he was losing his sense of hearing.
They ate and slept and resumed their journey at noon after a readjustment of the provisions and a change of the now rested animals.
Their four days' journey steadily northwest was uneventful. The charioteer drove onward steadily. On the fourth day, as the coppery ball which was the smoking sun reached and touched a flat horizon, they caught their first view of the lofty summits of the 'A-Wah-Ii' region, a goal of a possible immunity.
Dr. Cowlington, an anxious look on his face, was standing beside Meredith's bed when he awakened in midmorning. He had slept twenty hours. However, what the doctor thought of as his patient's mental condition was so entirely normal, and his cheerfulness so pronounced after his protracted sleep, that Dr. Cowlington was reassured, and changed his mind about removing the bottle of sleeping medicine. Plainly it had had an excellent effect on Meredith.
Stretched out in his usual quiet-inducing attitude on the davenport just before lunch, Meredith suddenly ceased reading and put down his magazine. It had occurred to him that he had heard none of the turmoil of Alu during that waking period. He sat up, puzzled. Bothon, he remembered, had been hearing the sounds about him only dimly, a strange, perhaps a significant, coincidence.
He felt the bruise behind his right ear. It was no longer even slightly painful to the touch. He pressed his fingertips firmly against the place. The contusion was now barely perceptible to the sense of touch.
He reported the apparent loss of what the ear-specialist Gatefield had named his "clairaudience" to Dr. Cowlington after lunch.
"Your bruise is going down," said the doctor significantly. He examined the posterior edge of Meredith's right temporal area.
"I thought so," remarked the doctor, nodding. "Your secondary 'hearing' began with that injury to your head. As it goes down, some obscure stimulation of the auditory apparatus, which accounts for your ability to hear those sounds, diminishes accordingly. You could probably hear only some stupendous sound from there now. And in a day or so I predict that you
will be hearing nothing more, and then you can go home!"
And, within an hour came the "stupendous sound" in very truth. It broke in upon Meredith's quiet reading once more as though someone had opened that sound-proof door.
A curious, secondary, mental vision accompanied it. It was as though Meredith, in his own proper person, yet through the strange connection of his personality with the General, Bothon, stood on the heights of Tharan-Yud, overlooking the stricken city of Alu. The utter fury of mountainous waves accompanied the now titanic rumblings of malignant earth, the wholesale crashing of the cyclopean masonry of Alu as the vast city crumbled and melted beneath his horrified eyes. With these hellish horrors went the wild roaring of ravaging flame, and the despairing, hysterical cacophony of Alu's doomed millions.
Then there came, at last, a sound as of the veritable yawning of the nethermost watery gulf of earth, and the high sun itself was blotted out by a monstrous green wall of advancing death. The sea rose up and fell upon accursed Alu, drowning forever the shrieks of utter despair, the piping and chittering of the obscurely gnawing Gyaa-Hua distracted at last from their loathsome banquet—hissing, roaring, shriekings, whinings, tearings, seethings—a cacophony more than human ears might bear, a sight of utter devastation more onerous than man might look upon, and live.
There came to Meredith a merciful stupor, as the waters of Mu-Iadon closed in forever over the mother continent, and as his consciousness failed him, he emerged once more out of that quiet bedroom—away from his overlooking of the world's major catastrophe, and as Bothon, walked beside the Lady Ledda along a wooded ravine in 'A-Wah-Ii,' goal of safety, among laden fruit trees, yet not, it seemed, upon the towering heights of those noble mountains but upon an island about the shores of which rolled and roared a brown and viscid ocean choked with the mud which had been the soil of the mother continent.
"We are safe here, it would appear, my Bothon," said the Netvissa Ledda. "Let us lie down and sleep, for I am very weary."
And after watching for a little space while the Lady Ledda reclined and slept, Bothon lay down beside her and fell at once into the deep and dreamless slumber of utter physical exhaustion.
Meredith awakened on his davenport. The room was dark, and when he had risen, switched on the lights and looked at his watch, he found that it was four o'clock in the morning. He undressed and went to bed and awakened three hours later without having dreamed.
A world and an era had come to its cataclysmic end, and he had been witness of it.
The contusion on his head had disappeared, Dr. Cowlington observed later in the morning.
"I think you can go now, you'll never hear again," said the doctor, in his judicial manner. "But, by the way, Meredith, what, if you can remember, was the name of that 'mother continent' of yours?"
"We called it Mu," said Meredith.
The doctor was silent for a while; then he nodded his head. He had made up his mind.
"I thought so," said he, gravely.
"Why?" Meredith asked.
"Because Smith called it that," replied the doctor.
Something From Out There
by August Derleth (1951)
There is a tendency on the part of the vast majority of people not only to take one another for granted, but to take all the aspects of their existence in the same manner. I sometimes think we are all too prone to accept as immutable law the scientific order of things, and not ready enough to challenge that order. Yet scientific laws are being altered and broken daily; new concepts come to the fore and take the place of the old; and they in turn are replaced by yet newer theories based on seemingly equally irrefutable facts.
But in actuality many only recently discovered facts have their beginnings in time before man's recording, and it was certainly in such a distant past that the so-called "Malvern mystery" had its origin. To some extent it is a mystery still, for no one can satisfactorily explain what was found at Hydestall, nor where it came from, nor how it came to be there in the first place.
My own involvement in the mystery dated only to the night the Lynwold constable, John Slade, roused me from sleep by pounding on the door of my combined office and home and, on my raising a window to call down, told me he had brought Geoffrey Malvern to see Dr. William Currie."Found him out of his head," offered Slade in brief explanation. I dressed, went downstairs, and helped Slade bring the young man into my office, where he managed to sit down without collapsing, though he seemed ever on the verge of falling together; there he huddled, hands covering his face, shuddering and trembling as if from the effects of a profound shock.
I glanced at Slade, who stood fingering the rough stubble on his chin, and my eyes apparently asked the question that was on my tongue, for Slade shook his head helplessly and shrugged; so it was obvious that he had come upon Geoffrey in this condition, and brought him directly to my office. I went over to Geoffrey and put my hand gently but firmly on his shoulder.
He groaned. But in a moment his hands slid away from his face and he looked up. I was unable to keep from betraying my surprise: I could hardly believe that this drawn, chalk-pale, mud-splattered face, with blank, unrecognizing eyes yet lit with a burning, intense, haunted light, could be the face of Lord Malvern's son. Though there was not the slightest sign of recognition, the expression on his face, the intentness of his eyes now that they had become accustomed to the light, were evidence that he looked at someone or something he saw in his mind's eye, for his face began to work, his lips twisting and trembling, and his fingers clenched.
"What happened, Geoffrey?" I asked persuasively.
At the sound of my voice, he doubled up once more, huddling in the chair, burying his distraught face in his hands, and made a kind of whimpering, moaning sound, as of a man in deadly terror --- one of the most unpleasant sounds a medical man can hear.
***
It was then, when he opened his hands wider than before, that the stone dropped from one of them and fell to the floor. Geoffrey did not appear to have noticed his loss; so I stooped and retrieved it. It was a queer, oddly-shaped stone in the form of a five-pointed star, suggesting manufacture; and yet its appearance gave the lie to that suggestion. Nevertheless, it was in part at least the product of human hands; for it bore an inscription, now partly encrusted over, but one I felt confident could be read. Indeed, I could make out three letters of what appeared to be a signature following the inscription: AV. V.... The age of the stone was indeterminable, but the inscription being Latin, its general aspect and its encrustations, which suggested that the stone had been in the sea, indicated that it was at least several centuries old.
But the most curious aspect of the stone and that first contact with it was this: I had no sooner taken it up than I was conscious of a strange sense of power, a kind of benign strength that seemed to flow through me as a medium from some other place; this was a sensation I was destined never to be without as long as the stone was on my person. Moreover, there was in addition as noticeable a sense of urgent direction, as if there was something connected with the stone that most vitally needed to be done. It seems to me now, writing in retrospect, that it was this more than Malvern's condition which impelled me to probe into the mystery and so perhaps save Lynwold and the surrounding countryside from the horror which might have broken loose upon them.
At the moment, however, I was too disturbed to heed these strong impressions. I held the stone before Geoffrey's eyes, raising his head by his tousled dark hair, and forcing him to look at it.
"Where did you get this, Geoffrey?" I asked.
"The stone!" he murmured. For a moment his eyes were clear of the haunting horror that filled them, but he gave no sign of having heard my question. Then he began to sway a little, back and forth, muttering and murmuring brokenly to himself, and groaning as if in physical agony.
Clearly, nothing could be done, save to give him a sedative and get him to bed. This I did, sending Slade to take him in my car to Lord Malvern's gaunt old home up the sea-coa
st. Then I telephoned Lord Malvern to explain that Geoffrey had been found wandering on the streets in a dazed condition, saying that I had given him a sedative and recommending that he be put to bed at once. I promised to be up in the morning and take a look at him. Lord Malvern was unusually abrupt, but this I interpreted as prompted by his suspicion that his son had been up to mischief, for relations were strained between father and son, owing to Geoffrey's not infrequent escapades.
***
It was not until the following day that I learned Geoffrey Malvern's movements in outline. He had set out from home alone the previous morning for a long walk over the lowlands near the seashore. In a meandering way he had made for the ruined priory near his father's estate, which he had reached shortly after noon. At about four in the afternoon, he had stopped off at a tavern near the priory along the coast road and eaten a light lunch; subsequently he had paused briefly at the small cottage where Malvern's former gardener now lived. The young man had seemed quite natural; both the tavern-keeper and the ex-gardener testified that Geoffrey had joked quite heartily before continuing on his way.
He had been seen returning to the priory before five o'clock, and several Lynwold motorists had seen him reading in the shade of a yew grove near the ruins during the course of the hours between five and dusk. At or near dusk, Jeremy Cotton, a schoolmaster, had passed the priory on foot, and, catching sight of Geoffrey, had cut off the coast road and into the priory grounds to talk to him. Geoffrey had been at this time busy poking about the ruins. When Cotton came up, he had evidently just come upon a queer sort of stone which he had shown to the schoolmaster; Cotton's description of it, and his recital of their attempt to decipher its inscription, convinced me that the stone was identical with the one now in my possession. Cotton remembered that Geoffrey had been intensely curious about the star-shaped stone; he had been struck at the time by what he now thoughtfully termed an "undue fascination". Asked about the book Geoffrey had been carrying, Cotton identified it as James's Cathedrals of England, and added that Geoffrey had told him he intended to visit the ruined cathedral of Hydestall, which loomed just over the horizon not far from the priory.