Eldritch Tales

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Clarendon’s spasmodic start shewed that something had been struck home.

  ‘Do her harm?’ he cried. ’don’t be absurd! You know Georgina must be in the best of health – the very best, I say – in order to serve science as a Clarendon should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that she is my sister. She deems no sacrifice too great in my service. She is a priestess of truth and discovery, as I am a priest.’

  He paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath. Dalton could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted.

  ‘But let me see what this cursed quack has to say,’ he continued. ‘If he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is even simpler than I thought!’

  Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood there clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were. MacNeil had assured him that the author was a pathologist of the highest standing, and that whatever errors the article might have, the mind behind it was powerful, erudite, and absolutely honourable and sincere.

  Watching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face grow pale. The great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in the tenser grip of the long, lean fingers. A perspiration broke out on the high, ivory-white forehead where the hair was already thinning, and the reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor had vacated as he kept on with his devouring of the text. Then came a wild scream as from a haunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his outflung arms sweeping books and paper before them as consciousness went dark like a wind-quenched candle-flame.

  Dalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the slim form and tilted it back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the lounge, he dashed some water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by seeing the large eyes slowly open. They were sane eyes now – deep and sad and unmistakably sane – and Dalton felt awed in the presence of a tragedy whose ultimate depth he could never hope or dare to plumb.

  The golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as Clarendon drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and studied the glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he spoke – slowly, and with the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute despair.

  ‘Thanks, Jimmy, I’m quite all right. But there’s much to be done. You asked me a while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any harm. I’m in a position now to tell you that it won’t.’

  He turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston, at the same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own neck. Dalton cried out in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand injected the contents of the cylinder into the ridge of distended flesh.

  ‘Good Lord, Al, what have you done?’

  Clarendon smiled gently – a smile almost of peace and resignation, different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.

  ‘You ought to know, Jimmy, if you’ve still the judgement that made you a governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise that there’s nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at Columbia I guess you couldn’t have missed much. All I can say is that it’s true.

  ‘James, I don’t like to pass blame along, but it’s only right to tell you that Surama got me into this. I can’t tell you who or what he is, for I don’t fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane person ought to know; but I will say that I don’t consider him a human being in the fullest sense, and that I’m not sure whether or not he’s alive as we know life.

  ‘You think I’m talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed – and I wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I’d failed. Don’t let my old talk of science deceive you, James – I found no antitoxin and was never even half on the track of one!

  ‘Don’t look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some queer places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well, tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old backwaters are dangerous – things are handed down there that don’t do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I couldn’t achieve in lawful ways.

  ‘I shan’t tell you just what I mean, for if I did I’d be as bad as the old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what I’ve learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it’s been through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the geologic eras connected with it. It’s an awful thought – whole forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases – all lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas geology tells us about.

  ‘I said gone, but I didn’t quite mean that. It would have been better that way, but it wasn’t quite so. In places traditions have kept on – I can’t tell you how – and certain archaic life-forms have managed to struggle thinly down the aeons in hidden spots. There were cults, you know – bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.

  ‘It had a colony, though, that didn’t sink; and when you get too confidential with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he’s likely to tell you wild tales about it – tales that connect up with whispers you’ll hear among the mad lamas and flighty yak-drivers on the secret table-lands of Asia. I’d heard all the common tales and whispers when I came on the big one. What that was, you’ll never know – but it pertained to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously long time ago, and could be made to live again – or seem alive again – through certain processes that weren’t very clear to the man who told me.

  ‘Now, James, in spite of my confession about the fever, you know I’m not bad as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as much as the next man – maybe a little more, because down there in the Hoggar country I did something no priest had ever been able to do. They led me blindfolded to a place that had been sealed up for generations – and I came back with Surama.

  ‘Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he knows? – why does he speak English – or any other language, for that matter – without an accent? – why did he come away with me? – and all that. I can’t tell you altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and images and impressions with something besides his brain and senses. He had a use for me and my science. He told me things, and opened up vistas. He taught me to worship ancient, primordial, and unholy gods, and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I can’t even hint to you. Don’t press me, James – it’s for the sake of your sanity and the world’s sanity!

  ‘The creature is beyond all bounds. He’s in league with the stars and all the forces of Nature. Don’t think I’m still crazy, James – I swear to you I’m not! I’ve had too many glimpses to doubt. He gave me new pleasures that were forms of his palaeogean worship, and the greatest of those was the black fever.

  ‘God, James! Haven’t you seen through the business by this time? Do you still believe the black fever came out of Tibet, and that I learned about it there? Use your brains, man! Look at Miller’s article here! He’s found a basic antitoxin that will end all fever within half a century, when other men learn how to modify it for the different forms. He’s cut the ground of my youth from under me – done what I’d have given my life to do – taken the wind out of all the honest sails I ever flung to the breeze of science! Do you wonder his article gave me a turn? Do you wonder it shocks m
e out of my madness back to the old dreams of my youth? Too late! Too late! But not too late to save others!

  ‘I guess I’m rambling a bit now, old man. You know – the hypodermic. I asked you why you didn’t tumble to the facts about black fever. How could you, though? Doesn’t Miller say he’s cured seven cases with his serum? A matter of diagnosis, James. He only thinks it is black fever. I can read between his lines. Here, old chap, on page 551, is the key to the whole thing. Read it again.

  ‘You see, don’t you? The fever cases from the Pacific Coast didn’t respond to his serum. They puzzled him. They didn’t even seem like any true fever he knew. Well, those were my cases! Those were the real black fever cases! And there can’t ever be an antitoxin on earth that’ll cure black fever!

  ‘How do I know? Because black fever isn’t of this earth! It’s from somewhere else, James – and Surama alone knows where, because he brought it here. He brought it and I spread it! That’s the secret, James! That’s all I wanted the appointment for – that’s all I ever did – just spread the fever that I carried in this gold syringe and in the deadlier finger-ring-pump-syringe you see on my index finger! Science? A blind! I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill! A single pressure on my finger, and the black fever was inoculated. I wanted to see living things writhe and squirm, scream and froth at the mouth. A single pressure of the pump-syringe and I could watch them as they died, and I couldn’t live or think unless I had plenty to watch. That’s why I jabbed everything in sight with the accursed hollow needle. Animals, criminals, children, servants – and the next would have been—’

  Clarendon’s voice broke, and he crumpled up perceptibly in his chair.

  ‘That – that, James – was – my life. Surama made it so – he taught me, and kept me at it till I couldn’t stop. Then – then it got too much even for him. He tried to check me. Fancy – he trying to check anybody in that line! But now I’ve got my last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject, James – I’m healthy – devilish healthy. Deuced ironic, though – the madness has gone now, so there won’t be any fun watching the agony! Can’t be – can’t—’

  A violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst his horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of Alfred’s story was sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he could not say; but in any case he felt that the man was a victim rather than a criminal, and above all, he was a boyhood comrade and Georgina’s brother. Thoughts of the old days came back kaleidoscopically. ‘Little Alf’ – the yard at Phillips Exeter – the quadrangle at Columbia – the fight with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommelling . . .

  He helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do. There was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked forgiveness for all his offences, and commended his sister to the care of his friend.

  ‘You – you’ll – make her happy,’ he gasped. ‘She deserves it. Martyr – to – a myth! Make it up to her, James. Don’t – let – her – know – more – than she has to!’

  His voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton rang the bell, but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the stairs for Georgina. She was firm of step, but very pale. Alfred’s scream had tried her sorely, but she had trusted James. She trusted him still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge and asked her to go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might hear. He did not wish her to witness the awful spectacle of delirium certain to come, but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there calm and still, very like the delicate boy he had once been. So she left him – the strange, moonstruck, star-reading genius she had mothered so long – and the picture she carried away was a very merciful one.

  Dalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium were not vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant strength restrained the frenzied contortions of the mad sufferer. What he heard from those swollen, blackening lips he will never repeat. He has never been quite the same man since, and he knows that no one who hears such things can ever be wholly as he was before. So, for the world’s good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that his layman’s ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic and meaningless to him.

  Toward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and began to speak in a firm voice.

  ‘James, I didn’t tell you what must be done – about everything. Blot out these entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr Miller. All my other notes, too, that you’ll find in the files. He’s the big authority today – his article proves it. Your friend at the club was right.

  ‘But everything in the clinic must go. Everything without exception, dead or alive or – otherwise. All the plagues of hell are in those bottles on the shelves. Burn them – burn it all – if one thing escapes, Surama will spread black death throughout the world. And above all burn Surama! That – that thing – must not breathe the wholesome air of heaven. You know now – what I told you – you know why such an entity can’t be allowed on earth. It won’t be murder – Surama isn’t human – if you’re as pious as you used to be, James, I shan’t have to urge you. Remember the old text – “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” – or something of the sort.

  ‘Burn him, James! Don’t let him chuckle again over the torture of mortal flesh! I say, burn him – the Nemesis of Flame – that’s all that can reach him, James, unless you can catch him asleep and drive a stake through his heart . . . Kill him – extirpate him – cleanse the decent universe of its primal taint – the taint I recalled from its age-long sleep . . .’

  The doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek toward the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very suddenly into a deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever, since he knew the dread germ to be noncontagious, composed Alfred’s arms and legs on the lounge and threw a light afghan over the fragile form. After all, mightn’t much of this horror be exaggeration and delirium? Mightn’t old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a long chance? The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and down the room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A second’s rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands, and he was presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.

  Dalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment he thought the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed his heavy lids he saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in the yard, whose stout planks flamed and roared and crackled heavenward in the most stupendous holocaust he had ever seen. It was indeed the ‘Nemesis of Flame’ that Clarendon had wished, and Dalton felt that some strange combustibles must be involved in a blaze so much wilder than anything normal pine or redwood could afford. He glanced alarmedly at the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went to call Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of living fire.

  ‘The clinic’s burning down!’ she cried. ‘How is Al now?’

  ‘He’s disappeared – disappeared while I dropped asleep!’ replied Dalton, reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to sway.

  Gently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at once for Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from outside cast a weird glow through the window on the landing.

  ‘He must be dead, James – he could never live, sane and knowing what he did. I heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things were going on. He is my brother, but – it is best as it is.’

  Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

  Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare. James and Georgina paused hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through the landing window. Then from the sky came a thunderous peal, as a
forked bolt of lightning shot down with terrible directness into the very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle ceased, and in its place came a frantic, ululant yelp as of a thousand ghouls and werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and slowly the flames resumed their normal shape.

  The watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had shrunk to a smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which had kept the firemen from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded the curious. What had happened was not for vulgar eyes – it involved too much of the universe’s inner secrets for that.

  In the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more than put her head on his breast and sob.

  ‘Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you know, while I was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned – the clinic, and everything in it, Surama, too. It was the only way to save the world from the unknown horrors he had loosed upon it. He knew, and he did what was best.

  ‘He was a great man, Georgie. Let’s never forget that. We must always be proud of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic even in his sins. I’ll tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good or evil, was what no man ever did before. He was the first and last to break through certain veils, and even Apollonius of Tyana takes second place beside him. But we mustn’t talk about that. We must remember him only as the Little Alf we knew – as the boy who wanted to master medicine and conquer fever.’

  In the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found two skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering – only two, thanks to the undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a subject of debate among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly an ape’s or a saurian’s skeleton, but it had disturbing suggestions of lines of evolution of which palaeontology has revealed no trace. The charred skull, oddly enough, was very human, and reminded people of Surama; but the rest of the bones were beyond conjecture. Only well-cut clothing could have made such a body look like a man.