The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 4: Nictzin Dyalhis

by Nictzin Dyalhis

  “And the veil can never be lifted,” I mourned. “Nor will these mysteries ever be solved. There are no more Rosetta stones inscribed in unknown tongue together with one familiar to modern scholars. And some of the great lost races and their works passed so long ago that absolutely no traces, however slight, remain to show that ever they lived and moved beneath the sun and moon and stars. Unless,” I added, as an afterthought, “science makes greater progress with some form of radio than is now possible.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Carman interrupted. “It’s barely possible that some fragmentary bits of knowledge can be recovered. Perhaps not to the satisfaction of exact science, but still of sufficient interest to satisfy your prying curiosity as well as my perfectly normal interest.”

  “Wherein do the two differ,” I snapped.

  “Your curiosity concerns itself with how they lived, what they wore, and the progress they made along the lines of material achievement,” he replied, smiling slightly at getting a rise out of me; which, by the way, I had never succeeded in doing with him; for a more equable temper than he possessed, I had never encountered, while mine is short-lived at best, and, also, highly explosive.

  “While my normal interest is chiefly concerned with their intellectual attainments, the extent of their knowledge regarding the finer forces of nature and their possible uses,” he elucidated.

  “Just what are you driving at, Leonard?” I demanded, his words arousing within me a rapidly awakening interest.

  “Simply that I believe they progressed along quite other lines than we of this modern age, thus giving rise to the tales of an ’Ancient Wisdom,’ now lost. And I likewise think that under certain circumstances, it may be recovered, if not wholly, at least in part.”

  “And the method?” I queried. I was not at all skeptical now. He’d fully convinced me, and I felt, even before he replied that he already had a working basis with which to make an attempt to solve the otherwise unsolvable.

  “I can have the method here any evening you may select,” he assured me gravely.

  “Right now, if that is possible,” I stated, and he agreed. He stepped to the phone and called a number, and a moment later—“Otilie?” Apparently the answer was satisfactory, for he asked: Can you come to where I am, this evening?” Again the response was as he desired, for he gave minute directions for reaching my place. I was curious about this “Otilie,” and showed it, and he increased my mystification by smiling enigmatically, and saying, “Wait.”

  In about fifteen minutes a taxi stopped before the house. Carman went to the door to admit the strangest-looking being I’ve ever seen. As I had surmised from the name, “Otilie” was a woman, but such a woman!

  She was a hunchback; wry-necked, with a pronounced squint in her left eye. Her nose had been mashed flat at some time, her mouth hung slackly open, revealing gnarled yellow fangs, and she walked with a decided limp. Add to all this, a muddy brown skin and you have the picture. All in all, she was the most unprepossessing figure imaginable—until I noticed her hands. They were beautifully kept, with long tapering fingers, and seemed those of an artist or a musician.

  Later, I learned that Otilie was a Finn, and that she was wholly illiterate. But when one looked at those hands and listened to her voice, a clear, bell-like contralto, one forgot all else about Otilie in sheer, downright fascination.

  “Get me a stack of paper and a few pencils,” Carman demanded. Rapidly he cleared the top of my library table, placed a chair for Otilie, and escorted her to her seat as if she had been an empress.

  “Under normal conditions,” he explained rapidly, “Otilie cannot read or write. But under other conditions she does some surprising things with automatic writing.”

  I felt disappointed, let down. So his “method” was merely automatic writing! I think he saw my feeling reflected in my face, for he smiled tolerantly and told me very gravely:

  “Henri, you’ve known me for a long time, and you know that I do not lie to my friends. When I state that Otilie is phenomenal, and has proven it time and again, to my entire satisfaction, I think that you may well believe it.”

  “Otilie,” and he turned to the queer-looking woman, “do you know anything about Atlantis, or the dead and gone civilizations of antiquity?”

  “No,” she said. “Otilie knows nothing of those. What do you want to find out? I’ll try and see what we can get.”

  She picked up a pencil, inspecting it critically, laid it flat in her hand, and commenced making long, slow, magnetic passes, stroking the pencil with the fingertips of her right hand. And as she stroked, the pencil, her face, which, despite her grotesquerie, wore an habitual expression of pain and sullen discontent, assumed gradually an abstracted expression, and her usual harsh breathing grew calm and even. The change was so amazing I was dumfounded. She appeared remote, detached, as if between herself and the ordinary world were measureless gulfs of time, space, and condition.

  She ceased stroking the pencil, poised it on a sheet of paper, and nodded slightly at Carman. For a minute or so the pencil moved in aimless figure eights, and Carman looked at me with deepest significance.

  Suddenly the pencil started off, apparently by its own volition. Watching closely, I am prepared to state that Otilie’s hand followed the pencil, rather than the pencil following her hand.

  “Atlantan,” it wrote, and paused, again describing figure eights. Yet Carman had queried concerning “Atlantis.” A second later it wrote “Tekala, priestess of Atlantan,” Then, “Kalkan the Golden.”

  “And who was Tekala?” queried Carman softly.

  Otilie’s face grew rapt, her eyes lit with an inward fire, her entire figure and features were transformed.

  “H-m,” grunted Carman. “This is a new one. Never saw Otilie like this before. Wonder what’s coming.”

  We were not long in finding out!

  “Who is Tekala?” The deep, mellow tones of Otilie’s voice became wistful, dreamy, filled with a strange reverent awe. “She is lovely, beautiful, with all the beauty I never had and can never have! But she says I am to let her speak for herself.”

  Silence reigned supreme in that quiet study of mine, but Carman and I felt the presence of a fourth personality, one of an alien nature, with a will so terrific in its impact that ours were less than naught beside it.

  Added to that was a queer impression of incredible antiquity, plus age-long sorrow, patience beyond human concept, and longing unendurable.

  Abruptly the lights dimmed, grew dully red, blinked and went out. Otilie gulped, audibly, Carman whistled softly, and I swore feelingly. Then I noted a faint glow of light close by Otilie and wondered vaguely if she were becoming phosphorescent.

  But the glow increased, became a faint aura gradually growing in brilliance to a nimbus whose center was a radiantly, exquisitely beauteous being, formed of tenuous light. It was, at moments, hard to distinguish from its nimbus, while at other moments it became clear and distinct, revealing itself as a form unmistakably feminine in contour, yet robed and shrouded in particles of light, so that its actual apparel was largely a matter of conjecture. Yet there was majesty expressed in that luminous figure, a stateliness shown in the poise of the head, and an air of conscious power compelling respect.

  “This,” I thought, “is no materialization flummery common to séances, but a genuine apparition—progressed to a stage far in advance of ordinary humanity.”

  It took me but a second to think thus far, and it took less than that long for our shining visitant to grasp my thought, read it, and appreciate it at its true evaluation. She stared at me for a long minute, then smiled slightly—and oh, the pathos of that smile! It would have wrung the heart of a stone image! It brought a lump to my throat, and caused my eyes to sting and blur with an unaccustomed mist.

  And again the radiant vision stared unbelievingly, but then, to my utter surprise, it—or she, rather—moved swiftly till the outer edge of her aura was well within a foot of my body, and the
re she stood, obviously reading me as a scientist might study some strange and unusual form of life.

  Meantime I gazed up into her face, watching it change from curiosity to understanding, and from that to genuine hope and satisfaction. And I know that I would have given anything and everything I owned could I but lift from her the burden of sorrow, or whatever it was which gave even her smile such wistful pathos.

  But apparently our visitor was not as yet completely satisfied, for she moved over beside Carman, her nimbus well nigh touching him. She started, as if surprised, but her expression of doubt lightened somewhat, as does that of one who recognizes an old friend.

  One look she cast at Otilie, and that look bespoke absolute pity for the poor ugly travesty, who was watching her with visible adoration writ large in her strange eyes, and again our visitor nodded, as to a friend well liked.

  Once more she nodded, vehemently this time, and moved with the speed of light, standing by Otilie’s left side. She stretched out her shapely right arm, laying her hand caressingly on Otilie’s shoulder. I saw Otilie shudder with ecstasy at the touch, and then her hand began following the pencil, but with a speed I’m positive the poor creature could not have achieved unaided.

  But that pencil was bewitched; it was writing in letters and words of liquid golden light! And its first question showed plainly the interest our visitor took in all three of us:

  “How are you named, you man of a younger race, who are of so deep intuition that you can read my lost condition in my features; and who holds so great sympathy and pity that you would alleviate my lot, if you could?

  “And who are you, man with the calm gray eyes, you to whom emotions are strangers, being replaced by curiosity instead, ever seeking to probe into the secrets of antiquity and the lost lore of the elder races?

  “And who are you, little Sister whom I envy, for you have the most precious gift in all the world—freedom, while my body and mind are held helpless prisoners in a dreary prison, not even on the bosom of the kindly earth, but far down in the dim gloom of the bed of old ocean?”

  And at that point Carman interrupted. “Lady,” he asked in all seriousness, and his very tone bespoke his absolute belief in what she had caused to appear on the paper, “lady, you speak of yourself as being a prisoner, yet you have appeared here! And if indeed you indited that message through the hand of Otilie, I ask you to explain how you know our language, if you are of such great antiquity as your appearance implies.”

  “I am an Atlan,” flashed the response on the paper beneath Otilie’s hand, “and this is but my projected spirit you do now behold. As to my understanding of your language—bethink you: If I be indeed of so great antiquity as I have claimed, and if I wield sufficient powers to be enabled to appear to you here, then in the course of all the long ages, I have had sufficient time in which to learn it.”

  Carman nodded, fully satisfied, gave our names, Henri d’Armond; Leonard Carman, and plain Otilie. Then he coolly voiced the same question I was about to ask:

  “May we be told—”

  “Who I am, and why I thus appear before you? For long I have sought the society of wise men of this day and age who could understand and believe, and perchance, help me to escape an eon-old doom. And it seems that at last I have found my goal—or have I, for I dare not hope too greatly.

  “But let me tell you three my tale, which will fully clear up the mystery of the Lost Land—and afterward—who knows? At the least, it may entertain you, and may meet with credence, and perchance I shall feel less lonely thereafter in my prison cell—”

  And then, as Carman nodded eagerly, the pencil fairly flew across the pages, and Carman read the words aloud, while Otilie and I hung spellbound on every word as the strangest tale ever told unfolded itself:

  * * * *

  I am Tekala. I am that woman who with a single motion of her hand destroyed a continent and its inhabitants! Truly, a terrible tale to tell in such few words; therefore I will amplify.

  It was late in the day, and the sun was slowly sinking to his rest in the calm waters of the great western sea. In the streets of Kalkan the Golden, sacred city of the sun-god, the lights were commencing to gleam; and overhead the silver stars were adorning the purple skies with gorgeous splendor.

  I stood beside old Ixtlil the high-priest on the flat top of the highest tower of the great sun temple. The unearthly beauty of the scene held us both, old paba [father; priest] and young priestess in breathless enthrallment for a moment. It was a spell I dreaded to break, yet something within me drove me to voice the question which had vexed me for over a year.

  “Tell me, O paba” I said softly, “who am I, and who my parents, for I never knew them. All I remember is the temple, and naught else know I, and my sister-priestess Malixi taunts me when, daily, we prepare the flowers for the altar. Tell me, O paba, and relieve my mind.”

  Very gravely the old paba surveyed me, and I saw in his keen old eyes a twinkle of tolerance for my youth and natural feminine curiosity, which not even the temple discipline could entirely eradicate.

  “Tekala, little Daughter of Heaven,” he murmured, laying his gentle hand on my bowed head, “it were better that you know not, for it is an evil story; but it is your right to know. Also, there is another reason why you should not, but of that, later. So—

  “You are the first-born of wicked king Granat and his no less evil consort, Queen Ayara! But they wanted a man-child, and being what they are, when you disappointed them, you were placed in a boat on a dark, stormy night, and sent adrift, the tide running strongly out at the time. That was some sixteen years gone.

  “A fisher-craft picked you up in the dawn, far out of sight of land. The captain, an adherent of the Old Gods, brought you to me, deeming you more than mortal, so beautiful a babe you were, and your robe so richly embroidered.

  “The symbol embroidered on that garb of yours told me your identity. So I went straight to the royal palace carrying you in my own arms, whence not king, queen, or the most brutish guardsman dared remove you lest the wrath of the Sun God punish such sacrilege.

  “Full into their sneering royal faces I hurled my denunciation of them and their evil ways, prophesying that in a day to come the babe they’d rejected would repay them, unless they accepted the will of the Lords of Life, and reared you as parents should.

  “They laughed in my face, bidding me rear the brat, myself, if I wanted her. So, seeing that through them spoke the voice of Destiny—which is above all gods, even the sun and moon—I bowed to them and left their palace. Two sons have come to them since that time, and young demons they are! And I say that when Granat and Ayara pass to their appointed places—which are not in the sun-mansions—those two princes will complete the work begun by their parents, and this race of Atlan will be wiped forever from the face of the earth, so thoroughly that naught remains but a tradition!”

  The old paba lapsed into silence. I felt his eyes probing me, reading my soul. A strange look came on his beautiful old face and he whispered:

  “Our Lord the Sun forefend! Let it not be by her hand…not hers…not hers!” So low his tone I knew the words were not for my hearing…

  * * * *

  From the temple below us arose confused shoutings, thunderous crashes, and a chorus of ear-piercing screams and shrieks from the quarter where dwelt the priestesses. I nearly swooned! But old Ixtlil was a father indeed in that moment. He grasped my shoulder and shook me back to common sense.

  “It has come,” he said quietly. “The blow falls sooner than I expected, but ’tis ever thus! Now, Tekala, hasten after me, for this temple is no longer a safe place for you.”

  Down a narrow winding stair he led, and I followed, until I wondered if we would never cease descending. Finally we came into a great circular room, and across this he led into a small crypt.

  “This is no time for false modesty,” he said sternly. “Take off all your robes immediately.”

  Dazedly I obeyed. In the center of the li
ttle room was a big, flat disk of copper let into the floor, and to that Ixtlil motioned me, and I stepped on it. What he did I know not, but from all directions at once came peculiarly tinted light-rays of purplish hue, beating on my skin like a shower of needles. After a time Ixtlil did something which caused the purple rays to give place to a brilliant flood of light like that of the sun on a clear day.

  He pointed to a wide, tall silver mirror against one wall, and I saw myself, and marveled at the magic which had changed the pale gold of my flesh to a brown tint so dark that I looked like any savage maid of the outlands. Even my light brown hair had become blue-black.

  Truly the tale of Ixtlil’s magic had not stated the half! Men said that he was past-master and sole custodian of all the magic lore and ancient wisdom brought from the stars by the Shining Ones, that he knew the secret of Life. In short, he was believed to be all-wise and all-powerful, but that could not have been true, or—but perhaps it was true, and in his mysterious way he worked through my hand, despite his aversion to using me, whom he loved, as an instrument.

  He brought a robe fashioned from a beautiful panther-skin, a broad belt of silver bosses and links, a bow and a quiver of arrows, a long-bladed bronze knife, and bade me dress and equip myself. Then he handed me a leathern pouch attached to a beaded baldric so that it hung from my right shoulder to my left hip.

  “In this pouch,” he stated, “are a full year’s supply of tiny food tablets. One will sustain you for an entire day. Also, there is a bottle of jade containing a wine so potent that one drop allays a day’s thirst even in the hottest desert. Ten drops on the tongue of a dying man can renew his lease of life for a year, unless his wounds are hopeless. A small box of basanite contains a salve that heals wounds, sores, and bites of insects and reptiles, be they ever so poisonous. This ring”—and he slid an armlet of some dull, white metal lighter than chalk, above my elbow—“will become icy-cold whenever an enemy is nigh, but it will glow, warm and comforting, at the proximity of safety.

  “Long ago I foresaw this catastrophe, and made all in readiness against the day of your need. Come now!” He pressed a stud against one wall and a section opened.