by Anthology
I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and, ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real.
There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.
Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a non-vistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind—pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.
Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where delirious dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real?
My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer?
For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?
Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?
Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking elder things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust of a million centuries.
No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
THE SHAMAN
Annie Jones
“I need a vacation,” I said to myself. I’d had a stressful month at my job as supervisor of the perfume counter at one of the local department stores in Columbus, Ohio. I’d been thinking a while about a visit to some of the ancient Indian ruins in the Southwest, perhaps Arizona, inspired by my studies of ancient Southwest history.
So this particular Ju
ly day as I walked home from work, I spied a travel agency sign that was swinging in the breeze like a hand beckoning from a shaded side street away from the bustle of traffic.
The doorway was hung with those long strings of colored glass beads that were popular back in the sixties. I stuck my head through the beads and they gave a friendly, welcome jingle. There were no computers or telephones that I noticed, just a strange looking little man sitting behind a bare table. His hair was gun-metal gray and hung down to his shoulders. The brown leather vest he wore over a red flannel shirt was ornamented by a string of oddly shaped turquoise beads. His legs were stretched out to their fullest, and I could see brown leather leggings and moccasins beneath the table.
“Come in, traveler.” He motioned to me. He looked harmless, so being the trusting soul that I am, I walked in. I was surprised to find the floor covered with about an inch of sand. Nothing like atmosphere, I thought.
“I can tell,” he said, “you are looking to take a trip. A trip for a little rest and to find some excitement. Where would you like to go?” He paused. “The Southwest.” He answered himself. “Maybe some of the ancient Indian ruins?” His brown wrinkled face looked as if it might crack when he smiled warmly at me.
“How did you know?” I was surprised that he had guessed correctly.
“Oh, sometimes I can tell just by studying a person some. I have a brochure right here, and I know you will enjoy this trip.” He pushed a packet to the edge of the table. A gold ring worn smooth by the years gleamed on his finger.
I checked the itinerary, and to my astonishment, the trip was scheduled for today, a little earlier than I had been planning to leave. The brochure, filled with colorful pictures, told me I wanted to go to Verde Valley near Sedona, Arizona.
“Hurry home, pack light, return here within two hours, and we will send you on your way.” He had a strange but familiar singsong voice.
At that particular time, being brain dead from stress at work, it did not strike me as somewhat unusual having plans made out for me on such short order. So I rushed home, packed items I deemed necessary in my backpack, along with a few articles of clothing tucked in—I had plans to replenish my closet in Sedona. In less than two hours, I was back at the travel agency, backpack slung over my shoulder.
“First, we must get a picture of you. Please step into this little nook over here.” He guided me to a bright capsulelike container that I had not noticed the first time I went in. He mumbled something about being an “accidental visitor” or “accidental tourist” from the other side.
“Accidental Tourist?” I mused. I’d seen that movie years back.
He mumbled something else about me being his first customer, so to speak.
“Speak of what? Accidental what?”
He didn’t answer.
“Just sit right there on the little stool, and we’ll get you going, ma’am. Let’s see if I’ve figured out how to use this contraption correctly,” he said as he fumbled around with various colored buttons on the capsule. “Oh, and give my regards to the goddess if you should happen to see her.”
I was just about to ask him the cost of my vacation and about airline reservations and such—he hadn’t even asked my name or to see a credit card. But he shut the door and quick as a blink, I was no longer in the little chamber, or anywhere else in Columbus, but standing in the middle of a narrow dirt road surrounded by mountains of red rock, backpack still slung over my shoulder. I was startled, angry, frightened—a dozen things at once. Upon gathering my wits, I began following the road with hopes of finding someone who could tell me where I was.
The temp, I was certain, must have been somewhere around 118 degrees. I imagined myself melting right into the ground as I hiked over the rough terrain. After a short distance, I saw a path leading off the road to a grove of trees and decided some shade would be most welcome.
When I had packed my backpack I had actually given myself over to thoughts of survival. In case I happened to wander off the beaten path, I had packed a flashlight, a box of matches, a bottle of aspirin, some packages of peanut butter crackers—the orange kind that kids take to school in their lunch boxes. I also had a neatly folded yellow poncho decorated with leopard spots and six small bottles of Gatorade.
As I sat on the ground, leaning back against a tree, sipping my Gatorade, I saw that at the base of a cliff in the distance was a ruin that must have been deserted for decades.
Suddenly I stopped worrying about how I got here.
Ruins! This was just what I wanted to see.
I walked toward the cliff for a closer look and sensed a foreboding pall descending on the area. Being a lover of ancient Southwest history, my heart was touched as I looked at the small handprints that had patted the clay mud flat to make an outer wall for one of the rooms. The prints were not much bigger than a child’s. The walls were in pretty good shape with some crumbling, but years ago someone had lived behind them.
Several of the prints were a little larger than the rest and had an odd indent on the third finger of the right hand. I was certain the prints were the same size as mine. Reaching up, I placed my hands, fingers spread, into the hardened prints.
“My God, a perfect fit.” It was as if a bolt of lightning hit me. I fell, from heat exhaustion or surprise, and I’ve no idea how long I was out.
As I finally came to, I was aware of people standing around me speaking in a language I did not understand. I concentrated, and after a few moments it sounded as if they might be using an offshoot of Spanish. I speak a few words of that language—I studied it for two years in high school—but the dialect was wholly unfamiliar to me. Still, I managed to make out a few words: “woman,” “strange” or “odd,” and “pale.” All of them were obviously directed toward me. Could they be speaking an Indian language?
I was lying sprawled on the ground with my backpack to the side hanging onto my arm. As I pushed myself up with a moan, a gasp went up from the group, and some of them scurried away into the rooms under the overhanging rocks. Others shied away, but stood their ground. A dog, tail between its legs, barked from some distance back. A little girl, with her finger in her mouth, held onto her mother’s hand and gazed at me unafraid. They all wore primitive clothes.
“Where am I? Is this a movie set?” When I spoke, an excited garble of words went flying around the group. “Donde?” I said. Spanish for “where?”
One of the men boldly stepped up and knelt by my side. He didn’t look like any tourist, but he somehow looked familiar.
He pointed to me and spread his arms wide. (Where are you from?)
I understood that gesture, but didn’t know the words to answer.
“Hola,” I said. Maybe he understood Spanish.
“Whole-la?” he responded. He clearly didn’t understand.
How could I ask where I was? Maybe I was dreaming all of this. Maybe I was still in the photo booth in the travel agency and had hit my head.
Still, I decided to humor him, figment of my imagination or not. We did much gesturing with hands and nodding of heads and rolling of eyes, trying to make ourselves understood. While all of this was going on, the others began slowly drifting back to stand in a circle around us, but keeping a safe distance in case I made any sudden moves.
By pointing to him, and then to the people, and finally back to myself as I waved my arms to take in the area, I again asked where I was.
“Sin-agua,” he said. He flung his arms wide to indicate the area.
“No water? Sinagua?”
“Sin-agua.”
The History Channel junkie in me came to the fore and a revelation hit me like a proverbial brick. If I wasn’t dreaming, I was with a small group of nameless people who, years after their disappearance, had been called Sin-agua for lack of a better name, but also because of the lack of water in the area. Thus Sinagua—no water. I remembered a two-hour special I’d watched about them last year. They had been extinct for more than a thousand years. They had mysteriously
faded into history. How could I be with a people that had simply vanished?
After some decision was reached that I was harmless, two of the women lifted me to my feet and led me into one of the rooms, where it was surprisingly very cool. The wall held a decorative pattern of handprints made by the person who had patted the clay into place. Upon seeing the handprints, I remembered placing my hands in a perfect match.
Hours went by.
That evening the people were amazed that I could take a tiny piece of wood, rub it, and make a flame. They were astounded that I had a yellow magic stick that light would come out of at the mere press of a button, and everyone had to light the flashlight and scream in surprise and laughter.
The peanut butter crackers didn’t last long; they were passed around, with each person taking a bite. The Gatorade was sipped out of the plastic bottles with suspicion—until the sweet liquid hit a tongue, then a smile would light up the face.
Days passed.
They honored me by declaring I fulfilled the prophecy that a white goddess who could work magic would come to them. My image was cut into a large flat rock and outlined in black like several other forms painted there.
I found that they were a gentle people of small stature who farmed with very little water. From a river a little distance away, water was carried daily in pottery jars, and to their protest, I insisted in joining in as helper. Channels had been dug to the river for irrigation of their crops. This was a well established, organized little community.
As more days passed, I helped add rooms by using pieces of broken pottery to loosen the earth, mix it with water, and build more inner walls to make a sleeping area for myself.
My class ring became impacted with mud, and I was constantly digging earth from the grooves. The imprint of my ring made it obvious where I worked, and everyone knew which walls I had built. It became somewhat important to them that everyone have a small section of wall with the imprint of the “goddess’ ” hand, a wall that should stand forever strong against the elements.