by Anthology
“I’m not afraid.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’m not afraid of fire or snakes or pins or needles or anything.”
“I’ll take you away to my kingdom and we’ll live happily ever afterward. You’ll be the most beautiful queen in the world and everybody will love you.”
I wagged my tail and laid my head on her knees. She stroked my silky head and pulled my long black ears.
“Everybody will love me.” She was very serious now. “Will magic water uncharm you, poor old doggie?”
“You have to touch my forehead with a piece of the giant’s treasure,” I said. ‘That’s the only onliest way to uncharm me.”
I felt her shrink away from me. She stood up, her face suddenly crumpled with grief and anger.
“You’re not Owen, you’re just a man! Owen’s enchanted and I’m enchanted too and nobody will ever uncharm us!”
She ran away from me and she was already Office Helen by the time she reached the jeep.
After that day she refused flatly to go into the desert with me. It looked as if my game was played out. But I gambled that Desert Helen could still hear me, underneath somewhere, and I tried a new strategy. The office was an upstairs room over the old dance hall and, I suppose, in frontier days skirmishing had gone on there between men and women. I doubt anything went on as strange as my new game with Helen.
I always had paced and talked while Helen worked. Now I began mixing common-sense talk with fairyland talk and I kept coming back to the wicked giant, Lewis Rawbones. Office Helen tried not to pay attention, but now and then I caught Desert Helen peeping at me out of her eyes. I spoke of my blighted career as a geologist and how it would be restored to me if I found the lode. I mused on how I would live and work in exotic places and how I would need a wife to keep house for me and help with my paper work. It disturbed Office Helen. She made typing mistakes and dropped things. I kept it up for days, trying for just the right mixture of fact and fantasy, and it was hard on Office Helen.
One night old Dave warned me again.
“Helen’s looking peaked, and there’s talk around. Miz Fowler says Helen don’t sleep and she cries at night and she won’t tell Miz Fowler what’s wrong. You don’t happen to know what’s bothering her, do you?”
“I only talk business stuff to her,” I said. “Maybe she’s homesick. I’ll ask her if she wants a vacation.” I did not like the way Dave looked at me. “I haven’t hurt her. I don’t mean her any harm, Dave,” I said.
“People get killed for what they do, not for what they mean,” he said. “Son, there’s men in this here town would kill you quick as a coyote, if you hurt Helen Price.”
I worked on Helen all the next day and in the afternoon I hit just the right note and I broke her defenses. I was not prepared for the way it worked out. I had just said, “All life is a kind of playing. If you think about it right, everything we do is a game.” She poised her pencil and looked straight at me, as she had never done in that office, and I felt my heart speed up.
“You taught me how to play, Helen. I was so serious that I didn’t know how to play.”
“Owen taught me to play. He had magic. My sisters couldn’t play anything but dolls and rich husbands and I hated them.”
Her eyes opened wide and her lips trembled and she was almost Desert Helen right there in the office.
“There’s magic and enchantment in regular life, if you look at it right,” I said. “Don’t you think so, Helen?”
“I know it!” she said. She turned pale and dropped her pencil. “Owen was enchanted into having a wife and three daughters and he was just a boy. But he was the only man we had and all of them but me hated him because we were so poor.” She began to tremble and her voice went flat. “He couldn’t stand it. He took the treasure and it killed him.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “I tried to think he was only enchanted into play-dead and if I didn’t speak or laugh for seven years, I’d uncharm him.”
She dropped her head on her hands. I was alarmed. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder.
“I did speak.” Her shoulders heaved with sobs. ‘They made me speak, and now Owen won’t ever come back.”
I bent and put my arm across her shoulders.
“Don’t cry, Helen. He’ll come back,” I said. “There are other magics to bring him back.”
I hardly knew what I was saying I was afraid of what I had done, and I wanted to comfort her. She jumped up and threw off my arm.
“I can’t stand it! I’m going home!”
She ran out into the hall and down the stairs and from the window I saw her run down the street, still crying. All of a sudden my game seemed cruel and stupid to me and right that moment I stopped it. I tore up my map of fairyland and my letters to Colonel Lewis and I wondered how in the world I could ever have done all that.
After dinner that night old Dave motioned me out to one end of the veranda. His face looked carved out of wood.
“I don’t know what happened in your office today, and for your sake I better not find out. But you send Helen back to her mother on the morning stage, you hear me?”
“All right, if she wants to go,” I said. “I can’t just fire her.”
“I’m speaking for the boys. You better put her on that morning stage, or we’ll be around to talk to you.”
“All right, I will, Dave.”
I wanted to tell him how the game was stopped now and how I wanted a chance to make things up with Helen, but I thought I had better not. Dave’s voice was flat and savage with contempt and, old as he was, he frightened me.
Helen did not come to work in the morning. At nine o’clock I went out myself for the mail. I brought a large mailing tube and some letters back to the office. The first letter I opened was from Dr. Lewis, and almost like magic it solved all my problems.
On the basis of his preliminary structure contour maps Dr. Lewis had gotten permission to close out the field phase. Copies of the maps were in the mailing tube, for my information. I was to hold an inventory and be ready to turn everything over to an army quartermaster team coming in a few days. There was still a great mass of data to be worked up in refining the map. I was to join the group again and I would have a chance at the lab work after all.
I felt pretty good. I paced and whistled and snapped my fingers. I wished Helen would come, to help on the inventory. Then I opened the tube and looked idly at the maps. There were a lot of them, featureless bed after bed of basalt, like layers of a cake ten miles across. But when I came to the bottom map, of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape, the hair on my neck stood up.
I had made that map myself. It was Helen’s fairytale. The topography was point by point the same.
I clenched my fists and stopped breathing. Then it hit me a second time, and the skin crawled up my back.
The game was real. I couldn’t end it. All the time the game had been playing me. It was still playing me.
I ran out and down the street and overtook old Dave hurrying toward the feedyard. He had a holstered gun on each hip.
“Dave, I’ve got to find Helen,” I said.
“Somebody seen her hiking into the desert just at daylight,” he said. “I’m on my way for a horse.” He did not slow his stride. “You better get out of there in your stinkwagon. If you don’t find her before we do, you better just keep on going, son.”
I ran back and got the jeep and roared it out across the scrubby sagebrush. I hit rocks and I do not know why I did not break something. I knew where to go and feared what I would find there. I knew I loved Helen Price more than my own life and I knew I had driven her to her death.
I saw her far off, running and dodging. I headed the jeep to intercept her and I shouted, but she neither saw me nor heard me. I stopped and jumped out and ran after her and the world darkened. Helen was all I could see, and I could not catch up with her.
“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I
almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun. I saw a knot of horsemen on the horizon. They were heading for where Owen had been found. That boy had run a long way, alone and hurt and burdened.
I got Helen up to the office. She sat at her desk with her head down on her hands and she quivered violently. I kept my arm around her.
“It was only a storm inside our two heads, Helen,” I said, over and over. “Something black blew away out of us. The game is finished and we’re free and I love you.”
Over and over I said that, for my sake as well as hers. I meant and believed it. I said she was my wife and we would marry and go a thousand miles away from that desert to raise our children. She quieted to a trembling, but she would not speak. Then I heard hoofbeats and the creak of leather in the street below and then I heard slow footsteps on the stairs.
Old Dave stood in the doorway. His two guns looked as natural on him as hands and feet. He looked at Helen, bowed over the desk, and then at me, standing beside her.
“Come on down, son. The boys want to talk to you,” he said.
I followed him into the hall and stopped.
“She isn’t hurt,” I said. “The lode is really out there, Dave, but nobody is ever going to find it.”
‘Tell that to the boys.”
“We’re closing out the project in a few more days,” I said. “I’m going to marry Helen and take her away with me.”
“Come down or we’ll drag you down!” he said harshly. “We’ll send Helen back to her mother.”
I was afraid. I did not know what to do.
“No, you won’t send me back to my mother!”
It was Helen beside me in the hall. She was Desert Helen, but grown up and wonderful. She was pale, pretty, aware and sure of herself.
“I’m going with Duard,” she said. “Nobody in the world is ever going to send me around like a package again.”
Dave rubbed his jaw and squinted his eyes at her.
“I love her, Dave,” I said. “I’ll take care of her all my life.”
I put my left arm around her and she nestled against me. The tautness went out of old Dave and he smiled. He kept his eyes on Helen.
“Little Helen Price,” he said, wonderingly. “Who ever would’ve thought it?” He reached out and shook us both gently. “Bless you youngsters,” he said, and blinked his eyes. “I’ll tell the boys it’s all right.”
He turned and went slowly down the stairs. Helen and I looked at each other, and I think she saw a new face too.
That was sixteen years ago. I am a professor myself now, graying a bit at the temples. I am as positivistic a scientist as you will find anywhere in the Mississippi drainage basin. When I tell a seminary student “That assertion is operationally meaningless,” I can make it sound downright obscene. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it’s safe only if it is kept pure. I work hard at that, I have yet to meet the student I can not handle.
My son is another matter. We named him Owen Lewis, and he has Helen’s eyes and hair and complexion. He learned to read on the modem sane and sterile children’s books. We haven’t a fairy tale in the house—but I have a science library. And Owen makes fairy tales out of science. He is taking the measure of space and time now, with Jeans and Eddington. He cannot possibly understand a tenth of what he reads, in the way I understand it. But he understands all of it in some other way privately his own.
Not long ago he said to me, “You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”
And I have to tell him just what I did in the war. I know I found manhood and a wife. The how and why of it I think and hope I am incapable of fully understanding. But Owen has, through Helen, that strangely curious heart. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he will understand.
THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME
H.P. Lovecraft
I
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence.
When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definite statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account—showing it, with suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the li
ght of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy in 1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several, hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M. , while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.