Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  “He is dead,” the papposilenos repeated. “Nor can his shade be tempted by the lyre.”

  Again, the poet heard the baying of dogs, closer now than before.

  “But there is something else I have heard the Pelasgoi say, when they believed no one was listening,” the poet said, hurriedly. “That is not dead which can eternal lie; and with strange eons, even death may die. In which case, I beg leave to doubt that Pan is truly dead, incapable of resurrection.”

  “Imbecile,” muttered the faun.

  “I have strayed across some kind of boundary, have I not?” the poet asked suddenly. “I am no longer wholly in the world I was before, where the paradoxical folk can only be glimpsed in poor light, and then only when the orderly mind is slightly disturbed. I have somehow strayed into your reality, in which you wear flesh by day, existing to the full and not in flickers of distortion.” Again, he was not at all sure that his final phrase could carry the meaning he intended to imply.

  “I wish it were so,” said the papposilenos, with a deep sigh, “but we are out of place, not you—and if we do not make haste, those dogs might bring us down.”

  “And if we do?” said the poet, obediently quickening his pace and drawing level with the ancient creature, who now seemed to be tiring of the uphill struggle. “If we reach the cave?”

  The faun snorted, half in annoyance and half in derision.

  “We might find a better death,” the papposilenos said gently.

  It seemed to the poet that his opportunity was going to waste after all, although it was hardly unexpected that the paradoxical folk should speak in paradoxes. “Why could the faun not carry the dryad?” he demanded bluntly. “He was strong enough to strangle me, and she’s by no means heavy.”

  “You do not understand what we are,” the papposilenos told him. “To put on flesh and to be able to bear burdens are different things.”

  “He’s carrying my bag,” the poet pointed out, “and you have my lyre.”

  “They are not burdensome,” the other replied. “They have weight, but not . . .” He abandoned the sentence, evidently lacking a word other than burdensome to signify what he meant.

  Fauns are personifications of lust, the poet thought, while nymphs are, among other things, innate objects of lust. Perhaps fauns and nymphs can only interact in certain ways—whereas I, who worship Aphrodite, with all her complexities, can treat her as if she were merely a heavy object.

  He was not sure that the latter argument was entirely true, though. In the same way that the proximity of the satyrs had stirred something within him, contact with the nymph was imparting further sensations, teasing his emotions. It occurred to him that there might be dangers in his situation over and above—or perhaps under and below—the veiled threat relating to the cave.

  But the faun is one thing, he added, following his train of thought, and the papposilenos is another. If love is complex, so islust. There is virile lust and absurd lust, lust that can be assuaged and lust that is futile. Nature is fecund, but also profligately, hecticallywasteful. Age mocks and travesties the aged. He calls me child, but I am not a child as the faun is a kid . . .

  He stopped himself. The more important thing, he suddenly thought, is the assurance that I have not crossed a boundary into their world, but that they have come into mine. Why?

  “Why are you here?” he asked the papposilenos, as the dogs gave voice again, so close this time that he could not doubt that the trail they were following was either his own or that of one of his companions.

  The strange, inhuman face turned to look into his own again.

  “To die, of course,” was his reply. “But better by far to reach the cave, if we can, than to face them.” He nodded in the direction of the hunting-pack.

  “I can protect you,” the poet was quick to say.

  “With this?” the papposilenos said, raising the lyre. “From the dogs, perhaps—but from iron-tipped arrows and iron-tipped spears? Orpheus charmed the shades of the dead, but the dead are weak. The living tore him apart—not even hunters, but angry women. Whatever price you paid for the lyre, it was sold in desperation.”

  The papposilenos had quickened his pace again, and the poet was struggling to keep up, although the faun had now overtaken them and seemed impatient that they were lagging behind.

  “Are you saying that it really is the lyre that Orpheus owned?” the poet asked.

  “I’ve seen it before and heard it played,” the aged satyr assured him. “But it cannot be owned and cannot be trusted.”

  The faun was practically dancing now, capering on his caprine legs, undoubtedly impatient because of the slowness of their progress.

  He wants to run on ahead, the poet thought, but dares not disobey the papposilenos. The dryad was beginning to weigh more heavily in his arms now—and there was something other than weight that was troubling him in the contact of her flesh, thehelplessness of her unconscious form. He felt an anger growing within him, at the dogs and the men that were following them.

  “I can protect you,” he said again to his exotic companions.

  “Not unless we can reach the cave,” said the paradoxical creature that seemed possessed of the wisdom of age despite the slow eclipse of his human fraction—and the papposilenos increased his pace yet again, so that he was now half running and half hobbling.

  The poet had to run too, in order to keep up with him, although the faun still seemed to be holding himself back, showing not the slightest sign of fatigue.

  In other circumstances, the poet might have considered laying his burden down in order that he might run faster, but if that had ever been an option, it was an option no longer. He would have lain down his life rather than lay down the unconscious dryad, even though he had been told that she would very likely die whatever he did. The burden had taken hold of him; he was as much under a spell as the animals he had learned to charm with the strings of the lyre.

  Was it the lyre, he wondered, that had brought him to this? No, he concluded. He was his own man. He had bought the lyre, at what the science of calculation told him was a fair price, and he had cultivated his own curiosity; he was still the master of his fate. If he could not put his burden down, it was not because he was a prisoner of lust or any other strange attraction. It was because he was a man and not a dog, a poet and not a hunter, a worshipper of Pan in the truest sense, who would not admit that the god could be truly dead while he still lived himself.

  Pan, he knew, could have defended the Pelasgoi against the invaders who had stolen their homeland and enslaved them. Pan had the gift of spreading panic, the divine wind of terror that no human—not even a Greek—could resist. Pan could reach out now, if he were not dead, and blast the hunters who were tracking the two satyrs, with that particular horror and that particular dread. Instead, he had seemingly consented to play dead, allowing his followers, his companions, to become fully manifest in the human world, in bright daylight, where they might be hunted down and exterminated. Why?

  Io Pan! the poet screamed, silently. Iä Shub-Niggurath!

  But there was no response.

  The slope was steeper now and becoming even steeper. The poet’s heart was pounding, and his legs were beginning to weaken. There was no sign yet of a cave ahead of them, although they were so high now that they had almost reached the cloud layer, and the gathering mist caressing the mountaintop sealed off his view no more than a hundred paces ahead.

  Behind him, where the slope was still sunlit, the dogs had changed their tune—they had sighted their prey. But the dogs were tired too, and there was a certain breathlessness in the signals they were giving.

  The poet risked a long glance behind. He could see the hounds, just as they could see him, but he could not see their human followers as yet, who must be even closer to exhaustion.

  He wanted to ask more questions, but he would not have had the breath to spare, even if his head ha
d not been buzzing with confusion.

  I need music! he thought. I need the music of the lyre, to calm my thoughts and soothe my heart and give me space to breathe.

  But the papposilenos had the lyre, and whether the ancient creature could play or not, he was merely holding it in his free hand, dangling idly by his side: a trivial burden, but a burden nonetheless.

  Io Pan! screamed the poet again, silently but with all the force of his anguish, no longer knowing what he was doing or why. Iä Shub-Niggurath!

  And this time, perhaps, the prayer—if it was a prayer— seemed to find an answer.

  Darkness fell, abruptly, although an instant earlier the sun had still been only halfway between its zenith and the western horizon. For a moment, the poet thought that he really had stepped into a hole and fallen into a grotto excavated in the mountain-side, but there were stars in the sky. They were the wrong stars, but they were certainly stars, and by their alien light he could still see the mountain slope up which he had run—and the chasing dogs.

  He stopped dead.

  The dogs were just as bewildered by the paradox as he was, and they faltered in their chase, uncertain what to do.

  The papposilenos had also stopped. He reached out and touched the poet on the shoulder. “I can take her now,” he said—and he raised his arm to offer the lyre in exchange. The faun was still dancing, but no longer drawing away. He still seemed angry, and was still protesting silently, but to no avail.

  The poet placed the dryad carefully in the aged satyr’s arms, took hold of the lyre, and then took half a dozen strides downhill, toward the dogs.

  When they saw him coming, they were able to make up their minds as to what they ought to do. They attacked. There were, as he had earlier estimated, at least forty of them.

  He struck the strings of the lyre. It had never made such a note before. The dogs stopped dead—not soothed, but scared.

  The poet began to play, reproducing a sequence he had composed and learned—but the melody that should have emerged, and presumably would have emerged in the light of the kindly sun, did not emerge here. Here, the air was different.

  He could feel that as he breathed it in, although it obviously had whatever air needed in order to sustain life, and perhaps in abundance, for the atmosphere seemed intoxicating.

  Sound, however, was not the same here as it was in the air he knew. The melody, like the starry sky, was wrong. Here, the sounds that should have soothed sowed distress. They sowed something akin to panic.

  It was, however, a selective distress. The faun laughed, and the aged papposilenos emitted a cross between a chuckle and a gurgle. If there was anything of horror and terror in the emotion that flooded their being, they obtained a perverse enjoyment from it. It delighted them.

  It did not delight the dogs. Nor did it delight the men who were following them: a dozen of them in all, some with arrows already fitted to their bows, others already lifting their javelins, ready to throw.

  The dogs howled and turned tail. Whether it was panic or not that they were experiencing, they hated it and wanted to get away. As the papposilenos had suggested, however, in his own perverse fashion, the music that worked its magic on the dogs did not stop the men with murder in their hearts. If they were stricken with terror or horror or any other psychic devastation, it did not stop them. They came on, howling with rage.

  Desperately, the poet played, but the little he had learned about the instrument’s capacity was useless now; his fingers flew over the strings, but the music that emerged was all wrong, all dark.

  This, he thought, is the cave. No mere covert in the mountain, but a world apart, where nature does not work as it does in my world. Great Pan is dead, indeed, and chaos is come again.

  He was filling up with horror and dread himself, but somehow, it was displaced from him. He had carried the dryad, and although she had been burdensome, the burden she had left in his inner being was insulating him from the worst effects of his own deadly work. For the moment, he was only partly human; for the moment, there was something of the tree in him. It would not last, he knew, but the magic he was making could not hurt him.

  It could hurt the hunters, but it could not strike them dead— and they were firing now and hurling their spears.

  The first few missiles fell short, but the hunters were skilled men who knew their art. Even subject to dire distress as they were, the greater number of them knew their range and knew their aim. They had been tracking the satyrs, but they had another, more dangerous, enemy now, and it was at the poet that their projectiles were all aimed.

  Within an instant, the poet knew, he would very likely be struck. He needed more than alien air. He might have called upon Apollo, then, or even Ares, but he knew better. They were the gods of the future, but for the moment he was not in the future but the unimaginably remote past, the cave of origins, of mythic time.

  “Iä Shub-Niggurath!” he screamed, for the third time, with all the force of his troubled lungs.

  And suddenly, he knew how to play the instrument he held. He was no longer part-tree but had something else within him that was far more alien. He was possessed by the goat with a thousand young: the parent not merely of the satyr-folk, but of Great Pan himself; something beyond a god, perhaps less powerful but infinitely more patient.

  For a moment, the poet had all the time in the world. He not only played the instrument, but understood it. He played, and the world dissolved; the stars in the sky went out, and the cave closed in; substance itself disappeared, and there was nothing but potential existence, governed by mathematical rules. The poet saw the sense of those rules, but he also saw the essential paradoxes lurking within and behind their glamour. He saw the beauty of numbers, but he also saw the irrationality of numbers, the relationships that refused expression in numbers. He saw everything, and played the music that was far more fundamental than the music of the spheres: the music of the ultimate weaving of matter itself.

  The blast struck all the hunters dead, instantaneously, and the satyrs too—but the satyrs, creatures of paradox themselves, died laughing, in a paroxysm of delight that was, in their own terms, eternal.

  The poet was not a prisoner of the lyre; nor, even though he was possessed by Shub-Niggurath, the weaver of gods, the spawner of spawn, the shaper of matter, the goat with a thousand young, was he a slave to that ultimate impulse. He was free. He was able to choose.

  But what choice, in all sanity, could he make?

  He had to go home. In the grip of the ultimate horror, the horror of the cosmic cave, he had nowhere to flee but home— not to Arcadia but to the place that had once been Arcadia, where history, philosophy, mathematics, and science were in gestation, ready to be nascent, to begin the process of becoming.

  He knew how to play that tune, and did so. Without ever losing his footing, without ever leaving the bare mountain-side, he wove the future that had always been incarnate within him, in his flesh, in his intellect, and in his nation. He wove the glory that would be Greece, and Rome, and every human reign thereafter.

  He wove his own forgetfulness as he did so, because he knew that he would be unable to bear what he remembered, if he were able to remember, in his own world, that he had once been possessed by Shub-Niggurath—but while he wove that particular oblivion, for the space of three or four bars of the ultimate music, he could not help but know, not merely everything that had happened since the dawn of time, but everything that could be predicted of the unknown future.

  There was less that was predictable than he might have imagined, but he not only saw the unfolding of the history of civilization, in all its awful, relentless logic, but the legacy of history, of science, of calculation, of understanding. And he saw that it was not only the particular hunters pursuing the satyrs that he had blasted with his curse, but billions of human hunters to come, in whom the seeds of knowledge would be the seeds of destruction. The human race, he saw, wou
ld not endure for more than ten thousand years from the moment it began to count years in earnest, and to create its own chronology; it would destroy itself, as befitted a culture that had made the choice to devote itself to civilization and commerce, whose entire life was founded on lies and calculation. As to what would come thereafter . . . well, it would not be Arcadia, but perhaps something akin to it.

  It was not a prospect that pleased him in any way at all, and he was glad to forget it.

  When the philosopher awoke on the mountain-side, there was a young woman lying beside him, entirely naked and entirely human. She was unconscious, but not badly hurt.

  Further down the mountain slope there was a pack of dogs, wandering around the corpses of their former masters, who had been struck dead, as if by divine lightning.

  The philosopher picked up the lyre that he had dropped and began to pluck the strings. As it sounded the familiar notes, he felt a strange sense of relief, although he could not imagine how it could possibly have produced different ones, because that would have been contrary to the principles of nature, which he understood very well, because he had discovered that there was a mathematical relationship between the various notes of the scale and the harmonic resonances between them, which he intended to work out more completely and teach his fellows.

  He could only play the notes one by one, though. He could not play music—although some strange fragment of fugitive memory informed him, nostalgically, that there had once been a time . . .

  The sounds he produced woke up the young woman. He found her some clothing in his bag, which lay on the ground a few paces way, although he could not remember having dropped it or how he had come to be so far up the mountain.

  The dogs did not give him any trouble when he walked back down the mountain, with the young woman by his side. The philosopher felt oddly proud of her presence, as if he had saved her life by means of some heroic deed, although he could not remember having seen her before he woke up to find her lying beside him.

  The name he gave her when she asked him who he was went unrecorded, as did the name she attributed to herself, but when history was born—because history abhors a vacuum infinitely more than it abhors a lie—its makers decided to call him Pythagoras, and hailed him as the father of mathematics and mysticism.