“It is written below that tonight is the time when the buried ones wish to come forth, and it is decreed that the servants of E-poh must go beyond Alaozar, beyond the Lake of Dread to the Plateau of Sung, there to await the coming of the Old Ones from below.”
E-poh peered intently at Fo-Lan, his perplexity evident. “Tonight I spoke long with Lloigor; it is strange that he told me nothing of this plan, Fo-Lan.”
Fo-Lan bowed again. “That is because the decision is Zhar’s, and of this Lloigor did not know until now.”
“And it is strange that the Old Ones did not address themselves to me.”
For a moment Fo-Lan hesitated; then he said, “That is because Zhar wishes me to go beyond Alaozar, to address those below Sung, while E-poh and his people must summon the Gods below from the towers and house-tops of Alaozar. When Lloigor and Zhar have come above the Lake of Dread, then Eric Marsh and I must return to Alaozar, to plan for them the way beyond, into the outer world.”
E-poh pondered this statement. In me uneasiness was beginning to grow when at last the Tcho-Tcho leader said, “It will be as you wish, Fo-Lan, but four of my people must go with you and the American.”
Fo-Lan bowed. “It is pleasing to me that four others accompany us. But it is necessary also for us to take with us food and water, for there is no way of telling how many hours it may take the Old Ones to rise from below.”
E-poh acquiesced without question.
Within a half-hour the six of us found ourselves pushing off the Isle of the Stars into the Lake of Dread, heavily shrouded in thick mists which gave off a strange putrescent odor. The barge-like boat in which we rode was strangely suggestive of ancient Roman galleys, yet very different. The Tcho-Tcho people sculled their way across the lake, and in a few moments we had reached the opposite shore and were pushing rapidly across the Plateau of Sung.
We had not gone far, when from behind us came a weird whistling call, then another and another, and finally a ghastly assembly was piping weirdly from the towers of Alaozar. And from below there came suddenly the terrifying sound of movements under the earth.
“They have opened the vast caverns below the city,” murmured Fo-Lan, “and they are calling forth Lloigor and Zhar and those below them.”
Then Fo-Lan looked swiftly around, calculating the distance we had covered. Abruptly he turned to me, whispering, “Give me the gun; they will not hear in the city.”
Silently I handed the doctor the weapon, and following his sign, backed away. Sharply the sound of the first shot cut into the night; immediately after, a second shot rang out. Two of our little companions were dead. But the other two seeing what had happened to their companions, and sensing their own fate, jumped nimbly away, drawing their sharp little two-edged swords. Then, together, they came at Fo-Lan. The revolver spat again, and one of them went down, clawing wildly at the air. But the last of them came on—and the revolver jammed.
Fo-Lan leaped aside at the same instant that I flung myself forward, falling on the Tcho-Tcho man from behind. The force of my attack caused him to drop the weapon he held in his hand, and I thought for a moment that his death was certain. But I had reckoned without his strength. He whirled at once, catching me unaware, and with the greatest ease flung me five feet from him. But this short pause had been sufficient for Fo-Lan; darting forward, he seized the weapon the Tcho-Tcho man had dropped. Then, just as the little man turned, Fo-Lan plunged the weapon into his body. He dropped instantly.
I staggered to my feet, bruised from the shock of being thrown to the ground with such force; I had not imagined that these little men could be so powerful, despite Fo-Lan’s early warning. Fo-Lan was standing quite still, an almost ecstatic smile on his face. I looked at him, and opened my lips to speak—and then a movement far behind him caught my eye. At the same instant Fo-Lan turned.
Far up in the sky a brilliant beam of light was growing—and it did not come from the Earth! Then suddenly, so swiftly the light grew, the surrounding country was as light as day, and in the sky I saw countless hordes of strange, fiery creatures, apparently mounted on creatures of burden. The riders in the sky were oddly like men in construction, save that from their sides grew three pairs of flailing growths similar to arms, yet not arms, and in these growths they carried curious tube-like weapons. And in size these beings were monstrous.
“My God!” I exclaimed, when I could find my voice. “What is it, Fo-Lan?”
Fo-Lan’s eyes were gleaming in triumph. “They are the Star-Warriors sent by the Ancient Ones from Orion. Up there they listened to my plea, for they know that Lloigor and Zhar and their evil spawn are deathless to man; they know that only the ancient weapons of the Elder Gods can punish and destroy.”
I looked once more into the sky. The glowing beings were now much closer, and I saw that the things they rode were limbless—that they were exactly like long tubes, pointed at both ends, travelling evidently only in the power of the ray of light emanating from the stars far above.
“The ululations from beneath the earth have guided them here—and now they will destroy!”
Fo-Lan’s voice was drowned out abruptly by the terrific clamor that rose from Alaozar. For the Star-Warriors had surrounded the city, and now from their tube-like appendages shot forth great beams of annihilation and death! And the age-old masonry of Alaozar was crumbling into ruin. Then suddenly the Star-Warriors descended, entering into the city, and penetrating the vast caverns beneath.
And then two things happened. The entire sky began to glow with a weird purple light, and in the ray that descended from above I saw a file of beings even stranger than the Star-Warriors. They were great, writhing pillars of light, moving like tremendous flames, colored purple and white, dazzling in their intensity. These gigantic beings from outer space descended swiftly, circling the Plateau of Sung, and from them great rays of stabbing light shot out toward the hidden fastnesses below. And at the same time, the earth began to tremble.
Shuddering, I put out my hand to touch Fo-Lan’s arm. He was utterly unmoved, save in triumphant joy at the spectacle of the destruction of Alaozar. “The Ancient Ones themselves have come!” he cried out.
I remember wanting to say something, but I saw suddenly one of those inconceivable pillars of light bending over Fo-Lan and me, and I felt slithering tentacles gently reaching around me; then I knew no more.
There is little more to write. I came to my senses near Bangka, miles from the Plateau of Sung, and at my side was Fo-Lan, unhurt and smiling. We had been transported within the second by the Ancient God who had bent to save us from the destruction of the things beneath the earth.
4
The statement of Eric Marsh ends thus abruptly. However, what surmises might be made from it, this paper will not state. Mr. Marsh had appended to his curious statement several newspaper clippings, all of them dated within ten days of his appearance at Bangka, where he evidently stayed with Doctor Fo-Lan before returning to America. There is room for only a brief summary of the clippings.
The first was from a Tokyo paper announcing the strange reappearance of Doctor Fo-Lan. Another clipping from the same issue of that paper tells of a curious electrical display witnessed from several observatories in the Orient, seemingly centered in its elemental force somewhere in Burma. Still another paragraph concerns an apparition (thus it is called), supposedly seen in the night during which Doctor Fo-Lan and Eric Marsh so mysteriously returned to Bangka; it was that of a gigantic pillar of light, towering far into the sky, and alive with movement; it was seen by forty-seven persons in and around Bangka.
The final clipping was dated ten days later; it was taken from an eminent London paper, and is the verbatim report of an aviator who flew over Burma in the endeavor to trace the source of a fetid odor which was sweeping the country, nauseating India and China for hundreds of miles around. The heart of this report is briefly:
“The odor I traced to the so-called Plateau of Sung, to which I was attracted by accidental sight of hitherto unknown ruins i
n the heart of the plateau. I found, to my amazement, that for some reason the earth of the plateau had been broken and torn up for its entire area save for one spot not far from a deep cavern near the ruins, which bears evidence of once having been a lake. On this spot I managed to effect a landing. I left the machine in order to determine the meaning of the great green-blackmasses of rotting flesh which greeted my eyes at once. But the odor forced a quick retreat. Yet this I know: the remains on the Plateau of Sung are those of what must have been gigantic animals, apparently boneless, and utterly unknown to man. And they must have met death in battle with mortal enemies!”
The Lord of Illusion
E. Hoffmann Price
They tell a tale of a certain Randolph Carter, and of a silver key wherewith he sought to unlock the hierarchy of gates that bar the march of man from this tri-dimensional fantasy we call reality, and into the super-spatial world we name illusion.
It is said that Randolph Carter upon finding that silver key of archaic workmanship, tarnished blue-black from ages of disuse, so that the cryptic runes with which it was engraved were scarcely legible to whatever eye might have read their prodigious syllables, went at once to his ancestral home at Arkham; and there he sought what in the old days was called the snake den, a deep grotto in an ominously shaded spot where few natives of the region cared to go, much less linger. Carter since that day has not been seen; and it has been hinted that he achieved his old dream of marching into the Land of Illusion.
There the chronicle ends, leaving a tale whose exquisite beauty is matched only by its incompleteness. The learned chronicler, who has in all probability peered further into the realms of mystery and the ultra-cosmic abysses than any of his contemporaries, released only what he knew, and withheld all but a hint of that which he suspected. Four years, however, have passed; and sundry startling developments have resulted in a well founded conviction that Randolph Carter has not been irretrievably lost in the gulfs which, after sounding in fancy, he finally plumbed in person. The last of these bits of evidence warrants a statement, which will tend to show that the chronicler’s intuition was amazingly correct, and lacking only in detail.
Randolph Carter, it must be remembered, left in his car, on the day of his disappearance, a carved oaken chest. He took with him that antique silver key which was to unlock the successive doors that barred his free march down the mighty corridors of space and time, to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shadded with his terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half starved darwishes, and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of glimpses of its monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch; but no man has passed, and returned to say that his footprints on the garnet-strewn sands within bear witness to his visit. Carter, therefore, took with him that key for which the sculptured hand is said vainly to grasp; but Carter through ignorance or the absentmindedness of exultation left behind him the palimpsest which was found in that disquietingly carved oaken chest, several days after his disappearance had aroused comment and vain search.
That yellow parchment, whose reed-scribed characters baffled scholars familiar with lost languages, fell into the hands of the chronicler who first sought to account for Carter’s disappearance; but in the light of subsequent events, particularly a chance meeting in New Or-leans in the summer of 1932, it seems that Randolph Carter would have done well to have taken scroll as well as key. Such, at least, was the contention of an old man who, motionless and silent, save for an occasional muttering, and an occasional replenishment of the olibanum whose fumes rose from the oddly wrought iron tripods that flanked the wine-red Bokhara rug on which he sat. But more, in due course, of that scroll, and that old man who muttered.
Randolph Carter, with the silver key in his pocket, picked his way along a familiar, though almost obliterated path, long unused. That afternoon, Carter observed that the cleft in the granite hillside seemed strangely like the crudely shaped bastions on each side of the gates of a certain walled city. But this change, instead of disturbing Carter, served but to assure him that the day was auspicious and the hour also. And, unhappily, his exaltation at possessing the Key conspired with his scholarly forgetfulness to make him quite oblivious of any possible need for the scroll. Although, in view of the fate that overtook one who with Carter, years previous, had ventured to read a similar scroll, it may be that Carter deemed it more prudent not to have that portentous screed with him in the strange domain he proposed invading, and thus intentionally abandoned it.
As Carter strode into the dimness and took from his pocket the silver key, and a flashlight with which to illuminate that grotto which he knew was beyond the narrow fissure at the back of the anteroom, for such he considered the cave in which he stood, he was for a moment amazed to find that there was ample illumination. Whereupon he abandoned his flashlight, and, key in hand, as he now realized should be his procedure, he advanced into what he expected would be the high-ceiled grotto that he had once, as a boy, explored.
His expectation, however, was exceeded. And for several bemused moments, he was unaware of the old man who had civilly greeted him as he stepped into the vault. For, strangely enough, it was into a vast chamber rather than into a grotto that Carter had entered. A hemispherical ceiling curved over him with a mighty sweep that dwarfed all comparison that he made as he stood seeking to reconcile the immensity of the dome with the outer bulk of the hill which contained it. He wondered how a part could exceed the whole; and then he realized that this prodigious vault might not, and need not, be a part of the hill in whose center it presumably curved.
The cyclopean pillars which supported the vault caused him still to ignore the civil old man who had approached Carter. There was a rugged enormity that disturbed Carter, and left him with the impression that neither nature nor the chisel of any mason had worked the stone into its solemn and majestic simplicity. He sought for a moment to name to himself the curve of the dome, which he now perceived was not truly hemispherical as he had at first thought, but of a curvature that transcended not only spheres, but the ellipsoids of revolution, and the paraboloids with which he was familiar.
Then, with a start, Carter realized that he had not returned the old man’s civil greeting, and, somewhat disconcerted, he wished to make amends for his lack of courtesy. But he was at a loss to think of a suitable remark or salutation. Since he had never seen him, or anyone remotely resembling that erect figure with its proudly poised head and solemn, sphinx-like features, he was obviously not to make any banal remarks equivalent to “Just fancy meeting you here.” For it seemed, after an instant’s reflection, that it was of all things in the world the most appropriate that he should meet this person whose majestic bearing was relieved by a twinkle in a pair of eyes more ancient-seeming than the very vault itself. Moreover, Carter doubted that he knew, or could even name a language in which to address him. And finally, Carter, as he stared, abashed, and forgetful of the Key, doubted that this could be a man. He felt that he was before a Presence.
“We have been awaiting you,” said the bearded sage, in a language that Carter understood. “Welcome, even though delayed. You have the key, and the doors await your trial....”
He paused for an instant, then continued, tactfully sensing that Carter could have no appropriate reply, “If you have the courage.”
His last words were devoid of menace, yet Carter trembled at the implication of the speech. The soul of Randolph Carter, and the inheritance of all those visionary Carters before him felt rather than understood the meaning; and trembled at the risk of passing the threshold whereof the Presence spoke.
“I am ’Umr at-Tawil, your guide,” said the old man. “Or at least, so you may call me, for I have many names.”
Then he smiled as he noted Carter’s now perceptible consternation at the mention of that name which he had read in the archaic Kufic script of the forbidden
Necronomicon, whose unholy pages he had once, and once only, dared scan.
This Presence, then, was ’Umr at-Tawil, that Terrible Ancient One of whom the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred wrote vaguely, and said disturbingly, “And while there are those who have had the temerity to seek glimpses of beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as a guide, they would be more prudent to avoid commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of but one glimpse; and none who pass may return, for they will be firmly bound by those who lurk in the vastnesses that transcend our world. The terrors of the night, and the evils of creation, and those who stand watch at the secret exit that it is known each grave has, and thrive on that which grows out of the tenants thereof; these are lesser powers than he who guards the Gateway, and offers to guide the unwary into the realm beyond this world and all its unnamed and unnameable Devourers. For HE is ’UMR AT-TAWIL, which signifieth, THE MOST ANCIENT ONE, which the scribe hath rendered as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.”
“I am indeed that Most Ancient One,” said ’Umr at-Tawil, “and if you fear, Randolph Carter, you may now leave, safe and harmless. But, if you elect to advance——”
The pause was ominous, but the smile of the Ancient One was benign. Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad Arab’s terrific, blasphemous hints, and excerpts from the lost Book of Thoth, might not have arisen out of envy, and frustration of a desire to essay that which Carter was about to accomplish.
“I will advance,” declared Carter. “And I accept you as my guide, ’Umr at-Tawil!”
Carter’s voice sounded strangely resonant in his own ears as he spoke. Then he realized that he had replied in that sonorous language which all save three obscure scholars deem dead: Guezz, which is to Amharic as Latin is to English.
’Umr at-Tawil made a gesture of acceptance. And then he made with his left hand another sign; but now Carter was beyond being perturbed, despite his having recognized that curious motion, and the unusual position of the fingers. Randolph Carter knew now that he was approaching the gateway, and that despite the cost, he could sail his galleys “up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and march with his elephant caravans through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.” Therefore he elected to forget the peril.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 19