The passage was less strongly lit than it had seemed in the being's memory, so that at first I did not notice the point where the bas-reliefs ended and a line of doors, containing heavy grilles, began. Not until a grey metal tentacle whipped through a grille to quiver within an inch of my face did I realise that here was the passage of the Xiclotl labour force cells. I cowered back, trembling, to edge along the opposite wall, jerking at the frequent infuriated crashings of the faceless beings against their cell doors, and yearning for the end of the journey. I finally passed the last locked portal and continued on down the spiralling ramp.
The memory of the injected recollections of the insect-creature was already dimming, so that I could hardly explain the premonition I felt a little further on. I gasped in shock when I rounded a curve and saw an eyeless figure standing with bony arms reaching — all the more hideous because, although the corpse was otherwise human, there were three arms held out. The unwavering posture which the thing held gave me the courage to approach it, as I suddenly remembered the vision of the room where the insects kept preserved specimens of their subjects. What sphere had spawned this object I did not think; nor did I linger to stare at the corpse, but passed by quickly between the others. I attempted not to look aside at what I hurried by, but my eyes persisted in straying to things — a frog-flipper attached to a tendrilled arm in one place, an insanely situated mouth in another — so that I was very relieved to quit that room.
When I came to the temple door and saw that it stood open, I hesitated expectantly. Glancing only once at the metal heads which leered, all joined to one body, over the open portal, I entered. I stopped short, for the memory of that huge image of Azathoth had grown dim. I did not look long at it; I would only have seen worse details with every glimpse, and the first view was bad enough. I will not describe everything about it; but basically it consisted of a bivalvular shell supported on many pairs of flexible legs. From the half-open shell rose several jointed cylinders, tipped with polypous appendages; and in the darkness inside the shell I thought I saw a horrible bestial, mouthless face, with deep-sunk eyes and covered with glistening black hair.
I almost turned and fled from the temple, thinking of the door that lay beyond the statue, and speculating over what the idiot god might now resemble. But I had come this far unharmed, and, noticing the sharpened rods propped against the base of the idol, I did not think that whatever lay beyond the bordered door could harm me. And so, conquering my revulsion at what leered frozenly above, I took up one of the weapons and made for that door. As I reached for the protrusion on the sliding grey panel I hesitated, for I heard a curious sound inside the hidden room — like the washing of the sea against black piles. It ceased immediately, but for some minutes I could not bring myself to draw the door open. In what form would Azathoth manifest itself? Might there not be some reason why the being was only worshipped during daylight? But all the while my hand was moving towards the projection, almost as though another will besides my own were directing it; so that when it dragged the sanctum door open, I battled to stop its progress. But by then the door was completely open, and I was standing staring at what lay beyond.
A long passage of the omnipresent grey metal stretched away for ten feet or so, and at its end stood, on first glance, a blank wall. Yet not quite blank — for a little way up there was a triangular metal door with a bar held across it in brackets. The passage was deserted, but from beyond the triangular door came a sound which I had remarked before — a liquid rolling.
I had to know the secret of the temple, and so stealthily approached the door and lifted the bar, which grated slightly. I did not open the door, but backed down the passage and stood at the other end. The wave-sound was rising now, as if something at the other side was approaching. Then the triangular portal began to rattle in its frame, and slowly it moved outward on its hinges.
And as I saw that metal triangle shifting with pressure from the other side, a wave of terror engulfed me. I did not want to see what lay on the other side of the door, and I turned and slammed the outer door without giving myself time to think. Even as I did so, a grating sound reverberated down the pasage and the triangular door crashed open. Through the crack as I slammed the door I saw something ooze into the corridor — a pale grey shape, expanding and crinkling, which glistened and shook gelatinously as still-moving particles dropped free; but it was only a glimpse, and after that it is only in nightmares that I imagine I see the complete shape of Azathoth.
I fled from the pyramid then. It was just daylight, and over the trees black shapes were flapping home. I plunged through the corridors of trees, and at one point one of the beings from Xiclotl started out into my path. What was worse, it drew back at my approach.
Though some of my possessions were left in my room there, I never returned to the inn at Brichester, and no doubt they still speak of me there as having died horribly. I thought that in this way I could make sure the insects could not harm me — but the first night after the experience in the clearing, I felt again that crawling in my brain. Since then I have frequently caught myself seeking persons gullible enough to be lured to the clearing, but always I have been able to fight off such impulses. I do not know how long I can continue to fight — and so I am going to use the one method to end this unholy preying on my mind.
The sun has sunk below the horizon now, leaving only a lurid glow which shines on the razor lying on the table before me. Perhaps it is only imagination which makes me seem to feel a restless, blinding stirring in my brain — at any rate, I must hesitate no longer. It may be that the insects will eventually overpower the world; but I will have done all that is possible for me to do to prevent the release of that whose shape I once glimpsed, and which still awaits impatiently the opening of the multidimensional gate.
The Render of the Veils
At midnight the last bus to Brichester had gone, and it was raining heavily. Kevin Gillson bitterly considered standing under the marquee of the nearby cinema until morning, but the high wind was driving the rain under it so that it provided no shelter. He turned the collar of his raincoat up as water began to ooze down his neck, and slowly walked up the hill away from the bus stop.
The streets were virtually deserted; a few cars which passed did not respond to his signals. Very few of the houses he passed were even lit; it depressed him to walk along the wet-black pavement which reflected wavering images of street lamps back at him. He met only one other person — a silent figure leaning in the shadow of a doorway. Only the red glow from a cigarette persuaded Gillson that anyone was there at all.
At the corner of Gaunt and Ferrey Streets he saw a vehicle approaching him. Half-dazzled by the reflection of the headlights, he made out that it was a taxi, travelling the streets for a final passenger of the night. He waved the bedraggled Camside Observer he was still clutching, and the taxi drew to a stop beside him.
'Are you still taking passengers?' he yelled through the partition.
'I was goin' home,' called back the driver. 'Still — if you've got some way to go — I wouldn't want you walkin' the streets on a night like this. Where to?'
Gillson ordered 'Brichester,' and made to get in. At that moment, however, he heard a voice calling something nearby; and turning, he saw a figure running through the rain towards the taxi. From the cigarette between his fingers and the direction from which he had come, Gillson guessed that this was the man he had noticed in the doorway.
'Wait — please wait!' the man was shouting. He clattered up to the taxi, splashing Gillson in the process. 'Would you mind if I shared your taxi? If you're in a hurry, it doesn't matter — but if I take you out of your way, I'll pay the difference. I don't know how I'll get home otherwise, though I don't live far from here.'
'Where do you live?' Gillson asked cautiously. 'I'm not in any hurry, but—'
'On Tudor Drive,' the man replied eagerly.
'Oh, that's on the way to Brichester, isn't it?' said Gillson, relieved. 'Sure, get in
— we'll both catch pneumonia if we stand here much longer.'
Once in the taxi, Gillson directed the driver and sat back. He did not feel like talking, and decided to read a book, hoping the other would take a hint. He took out the copy of Witchcraft Today he had bought on a bookstall that morning and flipped the pages a little.
He was just beginning a chapter when a voice broke in on him. 'Do you believe in that stuff?'
'This, you mean?' Gillson suggested resignedly, tapping the cover of the book. 'In a way, yes — I suppose these people believed that dancing naked and spitting on crucifixes would benefit them. Rather childish, though — they were all psychopathic, of course.'
'Fit to be consigned to a lurid book like that, I'd say,' agreed the other.
There was silence for a few minutes, and Gillson contemplated returning to the book. He opened it again and read the suitably garish blurb inside the cover, then put it down irritably as a trickle of water ran down his sleeve on to the page. He wiped this, then felt beside him for the book.
'But do you know what was behind all these witch-cults?'
'How do you mean?' Gillson inquired, leaving his book where it was.
'Do you know about the real cults?' continued the voice. 'Not the medieval servants of Satan — the ones who worship gods that exist?'
'It depends what you mean by "gods that exist",' replied Gillson.
The man did not appear to notice this remark. 'They formed these cults because they were searching for something. Perhaps you have read some of their books — you won't find them on the stalls like you did that one, but they are preserved in a few museums.'
'Well, I was once down in London, and I took a look at what they had in the British Museum.'
'The Necronomicon, I suppose.' He seemed almost amused. 'And what did you think of it?'
'I found it rather disturbing,' Gillson confessed, 'but not as horrifying as I'd been led to expect. But then I couldn't understand all of it.'
'Personally, I thought it was ludicrous,' the other told him, 'so vague… But of course if it had described what's only hinted at in there, no museum would touch it. I suppose it's best that only we few know… Forgive me, you must think me queer. Come to think of it, you don't even know who I am. I'm Henry Fisher, and I suppose you could call me an occultist.'
'No, please go on,' said Gillson. 'What you were saying there interested me.'
'What, about people searching for things? Why, are you searching for something?'
'Not really, though I have had a sort of persistent conviction since I was young. Nothing to bother about, really — just a kind of idea that nothing is really as we see it: if there were some way of seeing things without using your eyes, everything would look quite different. Weird, isn't it?'
When no answer came, he turned. There was a strange expression in Henry Fisher's eyes; a look of surprised triumph. Noticing Gillson's puzzlement, he seemed to control himself, and remarked:
'It's queer you should say that. I've had the same idea for a long time, and quite often I've been on the brink of finding a way to prove it. You see, there is a way to see as you would without using your eyes, even though you're actually using them — but not only can it be dangerous, it needs two people. It might be interesting for us to try… But here's where I get out.'
They had drawn up before a block of flats. Behind dripping trees a concrete path stretched to where yellow-and-black-painted windows mounted upward. 'Mine's on the ground floor,' Fisher remarked as he got out and paid the driver.
Gillson rolled the window down. 'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Did you mean it — what you said about seeing things as they really are?'
'Are you interested?' Fisher bent down and peered into the taxi. 'Remember I told you it might be dangerous.'
'I don't mind,' replied Gillson, opening the door and getting out. He waved the driver to leave, and it was not until they were standing and watching the tail-lights dwindle that he remembered he had left his book on the seat.
Although the trees still dripped, it had stopped raining. The two men walked up the concrete path, and the wind eddied around them, seeming to blow down from the frosty stars. Kevin Gillson was glad when they closed the glass doors behind them and entered a flowery-papered hall. Stairs led upward to other flats, but Fisher turned to a door to the left with glass panels.
Gillson had not really expected anything specific, but what he saw beyond that glass-panelled door amazed him. It was a normal living-room, with contemporary furnishings, modernistic wallpaper, an electric fire; but some of the objects in it were not at all normal. Reproductions of paintings by Bosch, Clark Ashton Smith and Dalí set the abnormal mood, which was augmented by the esoteric books occupying a case in one corner. But these could at least be found elsewhere; some of the other things he had never seen before. He could make nothing of the egg-shaped object which lay on the table in the centre of the room and emitted a strange, intermittent whistling. Nor did he recognise the outlines of something which stood on a pedestal in a corner, draped with a canvas.
'Perhaps I should have warned you,' Fisher broke in. 'I suppose it's not quite what you'd expect from the outside. Anyway, sit down, and I'll get you some coffee while I explain a little. And let's have the tape-recorder on — I want it running later so it can record our experiment.'
He went into the kitchen, and Gillson heard pans rattling. Over the clanking Fisher called:
'I was a rather peculiar kid, you know — very sensitive but oddly strong-stomached. After I saw a gargoyle once in church I used to dream it was chasing me, but one time when a dog was run over outside our home the neighbours all remarked how avidly I was staring at it. My parents once called in a doctor, and he said I was "very morbid, and should be kept away from anything likely to affect me." As if they could!
'Well, it was at grammar school that I got this idea — in the Physics class, actually. We were studying the structure of the eye one day, and I got to thinking about it. The more I looked at this diagram of retinas and humours and lenses, the more I was convinced that what we see through such a complicated system must be distorted in some way. It's all very well saying that what forms on the retina is simply an image, no more distorted than it would be through a telescope. That's too glib for me. I almost stood up and told the teacher what I thought, but I knew I'd be laughed down.
'I didn't think much more about it till I got to the University. Then I got talking to one of the students one day — Taylor, his name was — and before I knew it I'd joined a witch-cult. Not your naked decadents, but one that really knew how to tap elemental powers. I could tell you a lot about what we did, but some of the things would take too long to explain. Tonight I want to try the experiment, but perhaps afterwards I'll tell you about the things I know. Things like what the unused part of the brain can be used for, and what's buried in a graveyard not far from here…
'Anyway, some time after I joined, the cult was exposed, and everybody was expelled. Luckily I wasn't at the meeting that was spied on, so I stayed on. Even better, though, some of them decided to give sorcery up entirely; and I persuaded one of them to give me all his books. Among them was the Revelations of Glaaki, and that was where I read of the process I want to try tonight. I read of this.'
Fisher had entered the living-room, carrying a tray on which were two cups and a pot of coffee. Now he crossed the room to where the object stood veiled on a pedestal, and as Gillson leaned forward, pulled the canvas off.
Kevin Gillson could only stare. The object was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognise no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between the rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them. The strangest part was that he felt this was
an image of something living—something from a dimension where such an example of abnormal geometry could live. As he turned to speak to Fisher, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the thing had expanded and occupied almost the whole side of the room — but when he swung back, the image, of course, was the same size. At least, he was sure it was — but Gillson could not even be sure how high it had originally been.
'So you're getting illusions of size?' Fisher had noticed his puzzlement. 'That's because it's only the three-dimensional extension of the actual thing — of course in its own dimension it looks nothing like that.'
'But what is it?' asked Gillson impatiently.
'That,' said Fisher, 'is an image of Daoloth — the Render of the Veils.'
He went over to the table where he had placed the tray. Pouring the coffee, he passed a cup to Gillson, who then remarked:
'You'll have to explain that in a minute, but first I thought of something while you were in there. I'd have mentioned it before, only I didn't feel like arguing between rooms. It's all very well saying that what we see is distorted — say this table really isn't rectangular and flat at all. But when I touch it I feel a flat rectangular surface — how do you explain that?'
'Simple tactile hallucination,' explained Fisher. 'That's why I say this might be dangerous. You see, you don't really feel a flat rectangular surface there at all — but because you see it the way you do, your mind deludes you into thinking you feel the counterpart of your vision. Only sometimes I think — why would the mind set up such a system of delusion? Could it be that if we were to see ourselves as we really are, it might be too much for us?'
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants Page 9