The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

by Clark Ashton Smith

  Centuries, cycles of wild and various visions followed, with no other thread of unity than the lust for unlawful knowledge and power, or pleasure beyond the natural limits of the senses, which was common to all the selves of the dreamer. Then, with casual suddenness, the phantasmagoria took an even stranger turn.

  The scene of these latter dreams was not the earth, but an immense planet revolving around the sun Yamil Zacra and its dark companion, Yuzh. The name of the world was Pnidleethon. It was a place of exuberant evil life, and its very poles were tropically fertile; and the lowliest of its people was more learned in wizardry, and mightier in necromancy, than the greatest of terrene sorcerers. How he had arrived there, the dreamer did not know, for he was faint and blinded with the glory of Yamil Zacra, burning in mid-heaven with insupportable whiteness beside the blackly flaming orb of Yuzh. He knew, however, that in Pnidleethon he was no longer the master of evil he had been on Earth, but was an humble neophyte who sought admission to a dark hierarchy. As a proof of his fitness, he was to undergo tremendous ordeals, and tests of unimaginable fire and night.

  There was, he thought, a terrible terraced mountain, lifting in the air for a hundred miles between the suns; and he must climb from terrace to terrace on stairs guarded by a million larvae of alien horror, a million chimeras of the further cosmos. Death, in a form hideous beyond the dooms of Earth, would be the price of the least failure of courage or any momentary relaxation of vigilance. On each of the lower terraces, when he had attained it after incalculable jeopardy, there were veiled sphinxes and hooded colossi of ill to whose interrogations he must give infallible answer. And having answered them correctly, thus evading the special doom assigned for the ignorant or forgetful, he must commit himself to the care of those Gardeners whose task was the temporary grafting of human life on the life of certain monstrous plants. And after the floral transmigration, in which he must abide for a stated term of time, there were other transmigrations for the acolyte to undergo on his way to the mountain-summit, so that no order of life and sentience should be foreign to his understanding…

  In another dream, he had nearly gained the summit, and the rays of Yamil Zacra were upon him like ever-falling sheets of levin-flame in the cloudless air. He had passed all of the mountain’s guardians, except Vermazbor, who warded the apex, and was the most terrible of all. Vermazbor, who had no visible form, other than that derived from the acolyte’s profoundest and most secret fear, was taking shape before him; and all the pain and peril and travail he had endured in his ascent would be as nothing, unless he could vanquish Vermazbor…

  Chapter II:

  The Wearing of the Amulet

  When Woadley awakened, all of these monstrous and outré dreams were like memories of actual happenings in his mind. With bewilderment that deepened into consternation, he found that he could not dissociate himself from the strange avatars through which he had lived. Like the victim of some absurd obsession, who, knowing well the absurdity, is nevertheless without power to free himself, he tried vainly for some time to disinvolve the thoughts and actions of his diurnal life from those of the seekers after illicit things with whom he had been identified.

  Physically, his sensations were those of preternatural vigor, of indomitable strength and boundless resilience. This, however, contributed to his alarm and mental dislocation. Almost immediately, when he awakened, he became aware of the heavy carving, pressing against him like a live and radiant thing in his pocket. It thrilled him, terrified him inexpressibly. An excitement such as he had never known, and bordering on hysteria, mounted within him. In a sort of visual hallucination, it seemed that the early morning room was filled with the lambence of some larger and more ardent orb than the sun.

  He wondered if he were going mad: for suddenly, with a sense of mystic illumination, he remembered the passage in the old manuscript regarding Yamil Zacra and the dark amulets; and it came to him that the thing in his pocket was one of these amulets, and that he himself was the fleshly tenement of certain of the fiery particles from Yamil Zacra. His reason, of course, tried to dismiss the idea as being more than preposterous. The information on which he had stumbled was, he told himself, a fragment of obscure folklore; and like all such lore, was crass superstition. In spite of this argument, which could have seemed incontrovertible to any sane modernist, Woadley drew the carving from his pocket with a fumbling haste that was perilously near to frenzy, and laid it on the library table beside the dilapidated volume that had been its repository.

  To his infinite relief, his sensations quickly began to approximate their normal calmness and sanity. It was like the fading of some inveterately possessive nightmare; and Woadley decided that the whole phenomenon had been merely a shadowy prolongation of his dreams into a state between sleeping and waking. The removal of the plaque from his person had served to dissipate the lingering films of slumber. Reiterating to himself this comfortable assurance, he sat down at once and wrote a letter of protest to the dealer who had mistakenly supplied him with the volume of ungodly and outrageous ana. Still further relieved by this vindication of his natural, everyday self, he repaired to the bathroom. The homely acts of shaving and bathing contributed even more to the recovery of his equanimity; and after eating an extra egg and drinking two cups of strong coffee at breakfast, he felt that the recovery was complete.

  He was now able to re-approach the engravure with the courage and complacency of one who has laid a phantom or destroyed a formidable bogy. The malignant profile, jetty and phosphorescent, seemed to turn upon him like a furious gargoyle. But he conquered his revulsion, and, wrapping it carefully in several thicknesses of manila paper, he sallied forth toward the local museum, whose curator, he thought, would be able to resolve the mystery of the carving’s nature and origin.

  The museum was only a few blocks away, and he decided that a leisurely saunter through the spring air would serve as a beneficial supplement to the hygiene of the morning. However, as he walked along the sun-bright avenue into the city, there occurred a gradual resumption of the dream-like alienage, the nervous unease and derangement, that had pursued him on awakening from that night of prodigious cacodemons. Again there was the weird quickening of his vital energies, the feeling that the flat image was a radiant burden against his flesh through raiment and wrapping-paper. The phantoms of foundered and unholy selves appeared to rise within him like a sea that obeyed the summoning of some occult black moon.

  Abhorrent thoughts, having the clearness of recollections, occurred to him again and again. At moments he forgot his destination…He was going forth on darker business, was faring to some sorcerers’ rendezvous. In an effort to dispel such ridiculous fantasies, he began to tell over the treasures of his library…but the list was somehow confused with dreadful and outlandish volumes, of which the normal Woadley was altogether ignorant or had heard but vaguely. Yet it seemed that he was familiar with their contents, had summarized their evil formulas, their invocations, their histories and hierarchies of demons.

  Suddenly, as he walked along with half-hallucinated eyes and brain, a man jostled him clumsily, and Woadley turned upon the offender in a blaze of arrogant fury, the words of an awful ancient curse, in a rarely studied language, pouring sonorously from his lips. The man, who was about to apologize, fell back from him with ashen face and quaking limbs, and then started to run as if a devil had reached out and clawed him. He limped strangely as he ran, and somehow Woadley understood the specific application of the curse he had just fulminated in an unknown tongue. His unnatural anger fell away from him, he became aware that several bystanders were eyeing him with embarrassing curiosity, and he hurried on, little less shaken and terrified than the victim of the malediction.

  How he reached the museum, he was never quite able to remember afterwards. His inward distraction prevented him from noticing, except as a vague, unfeatured shadow, the man who descended the museum steps as he himself began to climb them. Then, as if in some dream of darkness, he realized that the m
an had spoken to him in passing, and had said to him in a clear voice, with an elusively foreign accent: “O bearer of the fourth amulet, O favored kinsman of Yamil Zacra, I salute thee.”

  Needless to say, Woadley was more than astonished by this incredible greeting. And yet, in some furtive, unacknowledged way, his astonishment was not altogether surprise. Recalled by the voice to a more distinct awareness of outward things, he turned to stare at the person who had accosted him, and saw only the back of a tall, gaunt figure, wearing a formal morning coat and a high-piled purplish turban. Apparently the man was some kind of Oriental, who had compromised between his native garb and that of the Occident. Without turning his head, so that Woadley could have seen his face or even the salient portions of his profile, he went on with an agile gait that appeared to betoken immense muscular vigor. Woadley stood peering after him, as the man strode quickly along the avenue toward the low-hanging matutinal sun; and, dazzled by the brilliant light, he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the stranger had disappeared in a most unaccountable fashion, as if he had dissolved like a vapor. It was impossible that he could have rounded the corner of the long block in that brief instant; and the nearby buildings were all private residences, a little withdrawn from the pavement, and with open lawns that could hardly have offered concealment for a figure so conspicuous.

  Two hypotheses occurred to Woadley. Either he was still dreaming in his arm-chair, or else the man who had spoken to him on the steps was an hallucinatory figment of the aberration that had begun to submerge his normal consciousness. As he climbed the remaining stairs and entered the hall, it seemed that circles of fire were woven about him, and his brain whirled with the vertigo of one who walks on a knife-edge wall over cataracts of terror and splendor pouring from gulf to gulf of an unknown cosmos. He fought to maintain corporeal equilibrium as well as to regain sanity.

  Somehow, he found himself in the curator’s office. Through films of dizzying, radiant unreality, he was conscious of himself as a separate entity who received and returned the greeting of his friend Arthur Collins, the plump and business-like curator. It was the same separate entity who removed the carving from his pocket, unfolded it from the quadruple wrapping of brown paper, laid it on the desk before Collins, and asked Collins to identify the object.

  Almost immediately, there was a reunion of his weirdly sundered selves. The floor became solid beneath him, the webs of alien glory receded from the air. He realized that Collins was peering from the carving to himself, and back again to the carving, with a look of ludicrous puzzlement on his rosy features.

  “Where on earth did you find this curio?” said Collins, a note of faint exasperation mingling with the almost infantile perplexity in his voice. The fresh color of his face deepened to an apoplectic ruby when he held up the carving in his hand and perceived its unnatural weight.

  Woadley explained the circumstances of his finding of the object.

  “Well, I’ll be everlastingly hornswoggled if I can place the thing,” opined Collins. “It’s not Aztec, Minoan, Toltec, Pompeiian, Hindu, Babylonian, Chinese, Graeco-Bactrian, Cro-Magnon, Mound-Builder, Carthaginian, or anything else in the whole range of archaeology. It must be the work of some crazy modern artist—though how in perdition he obtained the material is beyond me. No mineral of such weight and specific gravity has been discovered—if you don’t mind leaving it here for a few hours, I’ll call in some expert mineralogists and archaeologists. Maybe someone can throw a little light on it.”

  “Surely, keep the thing as long as you like,” assented Woadley. There was a blessed feeling of relief in the thought that he would not have to carry the carving on his person when he returned home. It was as if he had rid himself of some noxious incubus.

  “You don’t even need to return it to me,” he told Collins. “Send it directly to Peter Calvin, the book-dealer. It belongs to him if to anyone. You know his address, I dare say.”

  Collins nodded rather absently. He was staring with open, semi-mesmeric horror at the baleful gravure. “I wouldn’t care to meet the original of this creature,” he observed. “The mind of its creator was hardly imbued with Matthew Arnold’s ‘sweetness and light.’”

  Toward evening of that day, Woadley had convinced himself that his morning experiences, as well as the dreams of the previous night, were due to some obscure digestive complaint. It was, he told himself again and again, preposterous to imagine that they were connected in any way with the star Yamil Zacra or a dark amulet from Yamil Zacra or any other place. By some kind of sophistry, the vague, elastic explanation had somehow included the disturbing incident of the curse; and he was willing to admit the possibility of an element of auto-suggestion in the strange greeting he had heard, or seemed to hear, from the man on the museum stairs. The foundations of his being, the fortified ramparts of his small but comfortable world, which had been sorely shaken in that hour of tremendous malaise, were now safely re-established.

  He was perturbed and irritated, however, when a messenger came from the museum about sunset, with a note from Collins and a package containing the little plaque. He had thought himself permanently rid of the thing; but evidently Collins had forgotten or misunderstood his instructions. The note merely stated, in a fashion almost curt, that no one had been able to place either the material or the art-period of the carving.

  Leaving the package unopened on his library table, he dined early and went out to spend the evening at one of his clubs. Returning home at the usual hour of 10:30, he retired very properly to his bedroom with the hope that his unholy nightmares would not be repeated.

  Sleep, however, betrayed him again to forgotten worlds of blasphemy, of diabolism and necromancy. Through eternal dreams, through peril, wonder, foulness, ghastliness and glory, he sought once more the empire barred by a wise God to finite man. Again he was alchemist and magician, witch and wizard. Reviling and scorn, and the casting of sharp stones, and the dooms of thumbscrew and rack and auto-da-fé, he endured in that quest of the absolute. He dabbled in the blood of children, in filth and feculence unspeakable, and the ultimate putrefaction of the grave. He held parley with the Dwellers in pits beyond geometric space, he gave homage to hideous demons seen by the aid of Avernian drugs that blasted the user. From sea-corroded Atlantean columns, he gleaned a lore that seared his very soul in the gleaning; on lost papyri of prehistoric Egypt, and tablets of green brass from Eighur tombs, he found the wisdom that was henceforth as a mordant charnel-worm in his brain. And great, by virtue of all this, was the reward that he won and the masterdom he achieved.

  His stupendous dreams of Pnidleethon were not resumed on that night; but with certain other dreams the pristine tradition of Yamil Zacra and the five amulets was interwoven. He sought to acquire one of the fabled amulets, seeking it throughout his avatar as a Hyperborean wizard, in archetypal cities and amid subhuman tribes. A lord of earthly science and evil, he had aspired madly to that supreme evolution possible only through the amulet, by which he would return through the riven veils of time and place to Yamil Zacra. It seemed that he pursued the quest in vain through life after life, till the great ice-sheet rolled upon Hyperborea; and the night of nescience came upon him, and he was swept away from his antique wisdom by other lives and deaths. Then there came darker visions, and more aimless seekings unlit by the legend of Yamil Zacra, in ages when all wizards had forgotten the true source of their wizardry; and after these, he dreamed that he was Oliver Woadley, and that somehow he had come into possession of the longed-for talisman, and was about to recover all that he had lost amid the dust and ruining of cycles.

  From his final dream, he awakened suddenly and sat bolt upright in bed, clutching at the pocket of his old-fashioned nightgown. There was a glowing weight against his heart, and the grey morning twilight about him was filled with an illumination of infernal splendor. In an exaltation of rapturous triumph, no longer mingled with any fear or doubting or confusion, he knew that he wore the amulet and would continu
e to wear it thereafter.

  Early in his sleep, he must have risen like a noctambulist to untie the thing from the parcel on the library table, where, later, he found the small cardboard box and crumpled paper in which Collins had returned it to him.

  Chapter III:

  “I am Avalzant, the Warden of the Fiery Change.”

  In telling me his story, Woadley was somewhat vague and reticent about his psychological condition on the day following the second night of necromantic dreams. I infer, though, that there were partial relapses into normality, fluctuations of alarm and horror, moments in which he again mistrusted his own sanity. The complete reversal of his wonted habits of thought, the flight of his strait horizons upon vertiginous gulfs and far worlds, was not to be accomplished without intervals of chaos or conflict. And, yet, from that time on, he seems to have accepted his incredible destiny. He wore the amulet continually, and his initial sensations of vertigo and semi-delirium were not repeated. But under its influence, he became literally another person than the mild bibliophile, Oliver Woadley…

  His outward life, however, went on pretty much as usual. In answer to the vehement epistle of complaint he had written to Peter Calvin, he received an explanatory and profusely apologetic letter. The untitled manuscript had belonged to the library of a deceased and eccentric collector, which Calvin had purchased in toto. A new and near-sighted clerk had been responsible for the misplacing of the dark volume amid the set of Jane Austen, and the same clerk had packed the set for shipment to Woadley without detecting his error. Calvin was very sorry indeed and he was sending Volume X by express prepaid. Woadley could do whatever he pleased with the old manuscript, which was more curious than valuable.