“This man—” Eugenia’s voice was proud, but it was not the pride of wife for husband, so much as the gracious pride of a queen bestowing a knightly honor. “This man worked in a secret laboratory—endlessly, tirelessly, heroically without despair or giving up. He—Ahmed, son of a long and ancient line of Arabian scientists. He worked with the new forces, the new knowledge. He made possible the old dream that was impossible before the new knowledge. He built the Philosopher’s Stone. Combined powers of electricity and magnetism forged it. And then—the powers of evil rose in fury, as they have always done. The kingdom was destroyed. I, who protected Ahmed, was forced to abdicate. He came with me, loyal to me, and we two have hidden our secret. But the other half of the Stone, they took.”
“The other half—?”
“The other side of the shield. The obverse. The dark side. For Ahmed himself had been compelled to forge it, when he learned the truth—that only combined with the binder of an opposite and nearly equal force, are permanence and stability added to the light which reveals, but has by itself no material substance. There are thought forms. There are forms of light and of darkness. Light and matter have a common quotient; but to weld them into one, the vibratory forces which oppose them must be present also. Present in a balance finely determined; a proportion exhaustively analyzed, made a little less in potency, but present as God has balanced the forces that support the stars and planets.”
I look back, wondering at myself; and a little proud.
Because I understood him, and I believed him. It must be that when you hear an absolute truth, you recognize it; however little you’ve thought the thoughts which could prepare you for it, you know, and you say to yourself that you know. And you behave accordingly. Like a man to whom it has been given to understand.
“The other light, the dark one. The one he is standing in, that comes from the little flashlight there. That was the one that showed horrible things in the forest. And they couldn’t be solid and real, because—that is the other half of the stone, the obverse. Neither one is much good without the other. And he has the half that makes things that are evil appear.”
I was thinking aloud, as much as answering Ahmed, but his eyes lit up, and then he and Eugenia exchanged a look which flashed the most utter triumph.
“He knows. He is on our side, now,” Ahmed said; and she breathed a sigh of relief, and pressed my hand.
Yes, I was on their side. But—
“What is it you want me to do?” I asked her. “And—what can he do? I can keep Wolfert and his wife quiet with my gun. But if he—used force, would—would my bullets stop him?”
I could feel the fury, the cold hate, pouring at me from the dark-clad figure standing in the circle of lurid light. I could imagine those long arms leaping at me, the dark cloak with its horror of clinging bats enfolding, smothering me.
“His force is what he is using. He must act through other hands,” Ahmed told me. “If he can possess our lantern, or rather what is in it; if he can secure the good half of the Philosopher’s Stone, through the physical means of Wolfert and Matthe; then he will be able to materialize.
“No one—least of all I—know all the things the Philosopher’s Stone can do. If the good preponderates, all things exposed to its emanations will come into better vibrations, higher forms of being. The sick will be healed—your wound was healed just now because of the temporary power of the unbalanced Stone, for it was only a surf ace wound. The true Stone would cure much worse deviations from what is sound and whole. But, you see the converse is true also. If he can possess our half of the Stone, and unite it with that which he has—making the adjustment so that the evil is the stronger—then the emanations of the thing will be evil, and what evil can manifest itself only as a fantasy and a powerful mental force, will be able to incarnate itself as well.
“He will incarnate himself.”
As it stood, then, he was powerless. Only through others could he act; and if he was trying to force his way into my mind, he was not succeeding.
For I hated him, and I meant to see that Eugenia and Ahmed had their way with the dark light, with the thing in the little flashlight that made it shine.
“I’ll hold Wolfert and Matthe with my gun. I’ll shoot if I must,” I promised; “Take the flashlight, and get out the other half of your Stone. It’s yours. You made the two halves, didn’t you? Both of them. So you know how to put them together, and in the right proportion. Can you do it here?”
“It will have to be!” Ahmed said promptly. There was something in his voice that made me wonder. Regret. Or fear. But he walked across the little shake-down porch, and lifted the flashlight.
I half expected Wolfert and Matthe to try to stop him. I was ready for it. The butt of the gun would do, I thought.
And I thought that I mustn’t look into that dark corner from which the light had vanished. Ahmed had put it out, by the simple expedient of pressing his thumb on the button. And yet, I didn’t want to look into that corner. It would be empty, now, in the pale, white light from the hurricane lantern hung from a hook. But there would be Something there—a malignancy. I didn’t want to confront it.
“We will have to hurry.” Ahmed’s voice now was all urgency.
“The Dark One is still there, although invisible. He will try to create confusion in your mind, my friend. You are strong in part because of the light that healed your wound. It made you very open to perceptions of truth. But that part may fade, and we must hurry now.”
He busied himself with the flash. Something slid out of it into the palm of his hand, and he winced as he held it closed under his fingers.
“The touch is not pleasant,” he said.
Eugenia had been working over the little lantern, where it lay smashed on the floor. She also had taken out a small object, and this also she held so that I could not see. Only, through Ahmed’s locked fingers trickled small broken rays of the greenish light; and through Eugenia’s, a rosy gleam, which made her flesh appear translucent and daintily veined.
They turned from me, then, and I saw that they meant to walk away from the house, out into the leaf-roofed night.
“There is some danger,” Ahmed said, turning back to speak to me when they had descended the steps. “This should be done in a laboratory, under very exact conditions.
“You see, the Stone must unite its two halves, previously forged, at an exact temperature. This temperature, strangely enough, is about that of the normal human body; I think the Stone when it is united becomes actually a living thing, perhaps a sort of link between the inorganic and the organic world.
“It will not unite firmly, unless the two halves are—as now—equal. After the union is made, very carefully, the evil half must be chipped away. Lessened a very little bit; so that the good will predominate, without appreciable loss of any element. This balance, as I think I’ve said, is as delicate as the balance of the Universe itself.
“But—even over-excitement, even a slightly raised temperature in Eugenia or in myself; these might cause fusion to take place violently. Hence, the danger.
“Of course—if one of us is cold; if we were to feel, one or both of us, that deadly fear which causes subnormality—than the fusion might not take place at all.
“We can only try, Mr. Conant. But—if the first unfortunate circumstance should develop; if Eugenia and I should both receive a shock comparable to a strong shock of electricity. Then, Mr. Conant, I confide to you what may be the last hope of the world.
“You would find the stone lying where it had fallen, Mr. Conant. And you would take the risk of carefully chipping from it a very small sliver or particle of the dark side of that stone.
“It is strange, is it not? The obverse of the coin, the constant balance of forces and discoveries?
“Fission of the atom, and its potential power to destroy
every living thing and the planet itself. And in the same period of time, the fusion of the proper elements into what may become the magic stone of the ancients, potent to transmute that which is evil into that which is good!”
I felt a sudden burning desire to help, in some way, to be a part of the danger, to share in the glory, I took a step forward—
“Please stay where you are, Mr. Conant!” Ahmed said, sharply.
He and Eugenia walked a little way down the path, to where stood the well from which—she had told me—they drew all their water. It seemed to me very strange that they paused beside the well. The moon threw a broken shaft of light on them, and on the well, a beautiful old-fashioned well with some kind of trailing vine grown up over it.
I saw the silver flash of moonlight as Ahmed drew up the dripping bucket, using the hand that was free. He tilted the bucket carefully into a tin cup there on the flat coping, and lifted the cup to Eugenia’s lips. She drank from it, and then he drank, and then he poured out the water on the ground.
The moonlight made a cascade of light of the arc of water, as it fell. It was like drinking a toast, and drinking it in moonlight.
The man and woman standing there turned to face each other, then, and they joined hands there in the moonlight. They joined hands, but it was not exactly that: they held out each a hand to the other, and it was the hands holding the two halves of the Philosopher’s Stone that met so, and the two halves were held to each other so—and pressed firmly together. I could see their figures show the tension. I could feel the tension in the very air, in the whole big night. Like a powerful magnetic force, a big current of electricity, and the funny smell of ozone.
Two awkward scrambling forms dashed past me.
I had forgotten Wolfert and Matthe, and they were hurling themselves down there. I knew what they intended. To snatch the stone the minute it had fused together, to beat down the frailer woman and the man who was rapt in the moment, in the thing he was doing there. They would murder Ahmed and Eugenia both, to get that stone. But until Ahmed and Eugenia’s hands fell apart, and one of them held the fused, united stone—they would wait that long.
I started down the steps. If they started something, I must be there. I wouldn’t be able to shoot, whatever they did, because of the danger of hitting Ahmed and Eugenia; who were beyond them.
I started down the steps, but I didn’t make the bottom step before it happened.
A column of flame shot from earth to heaven. Silent, swift, it came and was gone.
But—Ahmed and Eugenia were a part of that flame. For a split instant they were flame. Then—they were not.
Wolfert and Matthe were there. They were lying face down on the ground, fallen as they were still running, leaping forward. And they were dead.
I spent hours in that spot. I don’t know how many hours.
Did I find the Philosopher’s Stone?
I don’t know… Or yes, I’d rather say I didn’t, but of course I did.
There was this stone. It wasn’t luminous, any more. There were queer things about it, yes.
One side was light, and the other side was dark. It reminded me, somehow, of the moon, Earth’s eternal, inscrutable partner in space. One side visible, and one side never glimpsed at all. Because that was how this stone struck me.
It was about two inches in diameter, and round—flattened at the poles, I started to say. I found it strangely planet-like. Strangely living, too. The flame, that soaring column of fire and light and silence, hadn’t left things hot, or burned around there, and the round stone was neither hot nor cold. It was just about the temperature of a man’s hand. Not my hand, I could feel the fever of too much excitement and nerve strain burning in me. So to me it had the slightly cooler touch of a normal person’s hand when you have a fever. Poor Eugenia had looked burning, flaming with hope and excitement, when she had walked out there into the moonlit night with Ahmed. I realize now, that she, at least, must have been much too far off the norm to achieve that impossible laboratory exactitude of normal temperature Ahmed had said was needed for safety.
So it was up to me to carefully chip away a bit of the dark side of this stone.
* * * *
I studied it. It was the strangest blackness, or darkness. Darkness visible. Once more I had to recreate that phrase. Looking at it was like looking into a soft nothingness that had a hypnotic effect. It set me to dreaming, as a psychoanalyst sets a patient off by having him look at something bright. Only this was the reverse of bright; the obverse, Ahmed would have said. Yet it drowned your gaze, lost you in a soft, dark dream.
By and by I began to wonder why I had assumed that the dark side was the evil side, and the bright one—the light one, with just the look of the inside of a sea shell, was the one that was powerful for good. Ahmed had implied that—I guessed. Maybe even Ahmed didn’t know how it would seem, once it was fused.
Then I began to wonder what would happen to me, if I handled it roughly.
Or how anyone could know just how much of it ought to be chipped or slivered away.
And finally, I began to wonder how any of it could be true.
I had two dead people on my hands, dead of a sort of shock, probably electrical in nature, which seemed actually to have annihilated the physical bodies of Eugenia, once queen of East Sylvania, and Ahmed, her scientific protégé against whom the people of East Sylvania had risen.
I had in my hands a stone which—perhaps—had chemical properties they had loosed in putting the two halves of it, with varying and unknown chemical compositions, together.
Maybe a slip in handling the thing would cause more destruction, a lot of it. Not merely myself; there’s that chain reaction they talk about in connection with the atom bomb. There’s radioactivity, and a lot of other things I know even less about.
It seemed like a miracle, the way things around that spot were unharmed: except for poor, unattractive Wolfert and his wife, who were dead, and the two who were gone. The organisms of men and animals are different from other things.
Anyway, miracle or not, the pretty sylvan well was as before, silent and lovely in the moonlight.
I tossed the strange little stone into the well. I heard it splash. I thought: Who was it that went looking for truth at the bottom of a well?
And I thought I heard Someone laugh. An ugly, sardonic laugh, that mixed itself up with little squeaking noises.
The noises were bats. The night was full of them.
It would be hard to get a stone, just one little round stone, out of the bottom of a deep well, wouldn’t it? No man in his senses would undertake a job like that. Of course, he didn’t get his way either—whichever one of the various demons escaped from their own place he was.
But the thing I wake up at night over is this.
He may find another pair of hands to serve him, someday; a pair of hands belonging to a stupid clod of a person just foolish enough to do a stupid thing like that. Drain a well in the deep forest, and grub out a rather ordinary looking round stone, and chip away just a little of the light side—
And if that happens, fission or fusion, it won’t matter much. If the world isn’t blown up, it will change, and not in a good way. What is bad could be so incredibly worse, and what is good could be so incredibly destroyed.
And yet—the man who caused all that would be powerful. More powerful than Nero or Caligula.
I wish I had never seen the dark form in the shadows.
THE STRANGER FROM KURDISTAN, by E. Hoffmann Price
Originally published in Weird Tales, July 1925.
“You claim that demonaltry went out of existence at the end of the Middle Ages, that devil-worship is extinct? No, I do not speak of the Yezidis of Kurdistan, who claim that the Evil One is as worthy of worship as God, since, by virtue of the duality of all things, go
od could not exist without its antithesis, evil; I speak rather of a devil-worship that exists today in this twentieth century, in civilized, Christian Europe; secret, hidden, yet nevertheless quite real; a worship based upon a sacrilegious perversion of the ritual of the church… How do I know? That is aside from the question; suffice it to say that I know that which I know.”
* * * *
So high was the tower of Semaxii that it seemed to caress the very stars; so deep-seated were its foundations that there was more of its great bulk beneath the ground than there was above. Bathed in moonlight was its crest; swathed in sevenfold veils of darkness was its ponderous base. Old as the pyramids was this great pile of granite which took its name from the ruined city, of equal antiquity, sprawled at its base.
A dark form approached, advancing swiftly through the gloom-drenched ruins, a darkness among the shadows, a phantom that moved with sinister certitude.
Suddenly the shadow halted, and in its immobility became a part of the surrounding darkness. Other and lesser forms passed, slinking silently to the cavernous entrance of Semaxii, there vanishing in its obscure depths. And all were unaware of the form that had regarded them from its vantage point.
A cloud parted. A ray of moonlight fought its way through the Cimmerian shadows, dissolving all save one, the darkest; and this darkest one it revealed as the tall form of a man wrapped in a black cape, and wearing a high silk hat.
Another rift in the clouds; more light, which now disclosed the features as well as the form of the shadowy stranger; haughty features with a nose like the beak of a bird of prey; the cold, pitiless eye of an Aztec idol; thin lips drooping in the shadow of a cynical smile; a man relentless in victory and magnificent in defeat.
“The fools have all assembled to pay tribute to their folly; seventy-seven of them who will tonight adore their lord and master…and with what rites? It is long since I have witnessed…
The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Tales Page 13