by Brian Lumley
The night was perfectly calm and hardly a breeze disturbed the warm air. It was when this stillness was broken that I awoke once more. I had heard the iron gate to the garden slam shut. Thoroughly disgruntled by the night’s disturbances I leapt out of bed and threw open the window. Old Cartwright was in the garden beside the tree. His eyes were wide open and staring at the thing, which was leaning toward him in that horribly familiar fashion.
Though I was surprised that the old boy was out there I was doubly astonished to note that he was attired only in his nightshirt. Could it be that he also was walking in his sleep? It seemed so. I opened my mouth to call out to him—but even as I did so I saw something which caused the breath to whoosh out of my lungs as my body constricted in a sudden agony of horror.
Something was happening to the ground around the plant’s base! My first thought was molehills sprouting up about the trunk of the freak from the heath and around Old Harry’s feet.
But the things coming up out of those little mounds of soil were not moles!
Roots!
My mind went numb with dreadful terror, a gibbering evil gripped my brain as I stumbled from the window to reel away across the room. I tried to cry out, to scream, but my throat seemed completely paralysed. The weirdness of the tree’s mobility and the queer nocturnal gropings of its roots aside—I had finally recognised in Old Cartwright’s actions an exact replica of my own earlier that night!
I lurched drunkenly down the hall to the door and unlocked it with fumbling, dead fingers. I tottered out into the night knowing that something monstrously unnatural was happening, aware that but for pure good fortune I might have been in the old man’s place. As the night air hit me I regained control and ran down the garden yelling to the old man to get away—to get well away from the tree, the glowing horror…
But I was too late!
His naked feet stuck out from under the bright monster’s branches—branches which were all folded downwards, covering his body. Then, as I went down on my knees in shock and disbelief, I saw that which twisted my mind and blasted my nerves into these useless knots that they have been ever since.
I had had the right idea about the tree—but I had looked at the problem in the wrong way! The thing was a freak, a mutation caused by radiations from another world. It had no parallel on Earth; and I, like a fool, had tried to compare it with the fly-traps. True, the thing from the blasted heath did draw its nourishment from living things, but the manner of its feeding was nonetheless the same as for most other soil-sprouted plants—it fed through its roots!
Those slender roots, hidden from above by the way in which the branches had folded down, were all sharply thorned—and for each thorn there was a tiny sucker. Even as I watched, hypnotised, those vile roots were pulsing down into Cartwright’s open mouth…until his lips began to split under the strain of their loathsome contents!
I began to scream as I saw the veins in the trunk and branches start their scarlet pulsing, and, as the entire plant commenced throbbing with a pale, pinkish suffusion, I passed into a merciful oblivion. For Old Cartwright’s entire body was jerking and twitching with a nauseating internal action which was not its own—and all the time his dead eyes stared and stared…
There is not much more to tell. When I recovered consciousness I was still half insane. In a gibbering delirium I staggered to the woodshed and returned with the axe. Moaning in morbid loathing I cut the tree—once, twice—deeply across the trunk, and in a fit of uncontrollable twitching I watched the horror literally bleed to death!
The end had to be seen to be believed. Slowly the evil roots withdrew from Cartwright’s body, shuddering and sluggishly pulling back underground, releasing their grisly internal hold on his bloodless form. The branches and leaves writhed and twined in a morbid dance of death; the horrible veins—real veins—pulsed to a standstill and the whole tree started to slope sideways as a terrible disintegration took hold on it. The unnatural glow surrounding the thing dimmed as it began visibly to rot where it stood. The smell of utter corruption which soon started to exude from the compost the hell-plant was rapidly becoming forced me to back away, dragging Old Cartwright’s corpse after me.
I was brought up short by the garden fence and that was where I stayed, shivering and staring at the rapidly blackening mass in the garden.
When at last the glow had died away completely and all that remained of the tree was an odorous, sticky, reddish-black puddle, I noticed that the first light of dawn was already brightening the sky. It was then that I formed my plan. I had had more than my fill of horror—all I wanted to do was forget—and I knew the authorities would never believe my story; not that I intended trying to tell it.
I made a bonfire over the stinking spot where the plant had been, and as the first cock crowed in the distance I set fire to the pile of leaves and sticks and stood there until there was only a blackened patch on the grass to show that the horror from the heath had ever stood there. Then I dressed and walked into Marske to the police station.
• • •
No one could quite understand the absence of Old Cartwright’s blood or the damage to his mouth and the other—internal—injuries which the post-mortem later showed; but it was undeniable that he had been “queer” for a long time and lately had been heard to talk openly about things that “glowed at night” and trees with hands instead of leaves. Everyone had known, it appeared, that he would end up “in a funny way”.
After I made my statement to the police—about how I had found Old Cartwright’s body at dawn, in my garden—I put through another call to London and told my botanist friend that the tree had been destroyed in a garden fire. He said that it was unfortunate but did not really matter. He had to catch an evening plane to South America anyway and would be away for many months.
He asked me to see if I could get another specimen in the meantime.
• • •
But that is not quite the end of the story. All that I have related happened last summer. It is already spring. The birds have still not returned to my garden and though each night I take a sleeping pill before locking my door I cannot rest.
I thought that in ridding myself of the remainder of my collection I might also kill the memory of that which once stood in my garden. I was wrong.
It makes no difference that I have given away my conches from the islands of Polynesia and have shattered into fragments the skull I dug from beneath the ground where once stood a Roman ruin. Letting my Dionaea Muscipulas die from lack of their singular nourishment has not helped me at all! My devil-drums and death-masks from Africa now rest beneath glass in Wharby Museum along with the sacrificial gown from Mua-Aphos. My collection of ten nightmare paintings by Pickman, Chandler Davies and Clark Ashton Smith now belong to an avid American collector, to whom I have also sold my complete set of Poe’s works. I have melted down my Iceland meteorite and parted forever with the horribly inscribed silver figurine from India. The silvery fragments of unknown crystal from dead G’harne rest untended in their box and I have sold in auction all my books of Earth’s elder madness.
Yes, that which I once boasted of as being the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum is no more; yet still I am unable to sleep. There is something—some fear that keeps me awake—which has caused me of late to chain myself to the bed when I lie down.
You see, I know that my doctor’s assurance that it is “all in my mind” is at fault, and I know that if ever I wake up in the garden again it will mean permanent insanity—or worse!
For the spot where the spring grass is twisted and yellow continues to glow feebly at night. Only a week ago I decided to clear the very soil from that area but as soon as I drove my spade into the ground I was sure I saw something black and wriggly—like a looped off root—squirm quickly down out of sight! Perhaps it is my imagination but I have also noticed, in the dead of night, that the floorboards sometimes creak beneath my room—and then, of course, there
is that other thing.
I get the most dreadful headaches.
Dylath-Leen
In my first couple of months as a recruiter—in March 1969, to be precise—I wrote my first Dreamlands story, “after” HPL of course. While “Dylath-Leen” would later go into my Titus Crow/De Marigny Mythos novel The Clock of Dreams as a chapter in its own right, at the time of writing it was my first attempt at this sort of story. As such it was mainly unconnected to later Dreamlands stories that would feature David Hero (called “Hero of Dreams”) and his fellow adventurer Eldin (“the Wanderer”), which wouldn’t be written until the late 1970s–early ’80s. Anyway, after reading the story in my Arkham collection The Caller of The Black, L. Sprague de Camp particularly liked it and wrote to ask if he might include it in a fantasy collection he was planning. Well, that never happened, but in any case it was nice to know that this fine author had enjoyed it. And it’s my hope that you will too.
“If aught of evil ever befalls the
people of Dylath-Leen, through their
traffick with certain traders of ill
repute, then it will not be my fault.”
—Randolph Carter
I
Three times only have I visited the basalt-towered, myriad-wharved city of Dylath-Leen; three curious
visits which spanned I fancy almost a century of that city’s existence. Now I pray that I have seen it for the last time; for though Dylath-Leen exists only in dream, beyond the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, when I think back on my visits there—remembering my waking studies and those tales heard in my youth of dreams and how they affect the waking world—then I shudder in strange dread.
I went there first in my late teens, filled with a longing—engendered by continuous study of such works as The Arabian Nights and Gelder’s Atlantis Found—for wondrous places of antique legend and fable and centuried cities of ages past; nor was my longing disappointed.
I first saw the city from afar, wandering in along the river Skai with a caravan of merchants from distant places, and at sight of the tall black towers which form the city’s ramparts I felt a strange fascination for the place. Later, lost in awe and wonder, I took leave of my merchant friends to walk Dylath-Leen’s ancient streets and alleys, to visit the wharfside sea-taverns and chat with seamen from every land on Earth—and with a few from more distant places. I never once pondered my ability to chatter in their many tongues, for often things are simpler in dream, nor did I wonder at the ease with which I fitted myself into the alien yet surprisingly friendly scene; after all, I was attired in robes of dream’s styling, and my looks were not unlike those of many of dream’s peoples. I was a little taller than average, true, but overall Dylath-Leen’s diverse folks might well have passed for those of any town of the waking world, and vice versa.
Yet there were in the city others, strange traders from across the Southern Sea, whose appearance and odour filled me with a dread loathing so that I could not abide to stay near where they were for long. Of these traders and their origin I questioned the tavern-keepers, to be told that I was not the first from the waking world whose instinct found in those traders traces of hinted evil and deeds not to be mentioned. Another had warned long ago that they were fiends not to be trusted, whose only desire was to spread horror and evil throughout all the lands of dream. Certain of the taverners even remembered that dreamer’s name; Randolph Carter, he had called himself, and had been known to be a personal friend of that great lord of sky-floating Serannian and of the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celephais, King Kuranes, once a dreamer of no mean repute himself. But when I heard Carter’s name mentioned I was quietened, for an amateur at dreaming such as myself could not dare aspire to walk even in the shadow of one such as he. Why! Carter was rumoured to have been even to Kadath in the Cold Waste, to confront Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, and more—he had returned from that place unscathed! How many could boast of that?
Yet loath though I was to have anything to do with those traders, I found myself one morning in the towering tavern of Potan-Lith, in a high bar-room the windows of which looked out over the Bay of Wharves, waiting for the galley I had heard was coming to the city with a cargo of rubies from an unknown shore. I wanted to discover just what it was of them which so repelled me, and the best way to do this, I thought, would be to observe them from a safe distance and location at which I, myself, might go unobserved. I did not wish to bring myself to the notice of those queerly frightening people of unguessed origin. Potan-Lith’s tavern with its ninety-nine steps served my purpose admirably. I could see the whole of the wharfside spread beneath me in the morning light; the nets of the fishermen drying, with smells of rope and deep ocean floating up to my window; the smaller craft of private tradesmen rolling gently at anchor, sails lowered and hatches laid back to let the sun dry out their musty holds; the thagweed merchants unloading their strongly scented, dream-within-dream-engendering opiates garnered in exotic Eastern parts; and, eventually appearing on the horizon, the sails of the black galley for which I so vigilantly waited. There were other traders of the sane race already in the city, to be sure, but how could one get close to them without attracting unwanted attention? My plan of observation was best, I was certain, but I did not know just what it was I wished to observe—nor why…
It was not long before the black galley loomed against the entrance to the bay. It slipped into the harbour past the great basalt lighthouse and a strange stench driven by the South Wind came with it. As with the coming of all such craft and their weird masters, uneasiness rippled all along the waterfront as the silent ship closed with its chosen wharf and its three banks of briskly moving oars stilled and slipped in through their oarlocks to the unseen and equally silent rowers within. I watched eagerly then, waiting for the galley’s master and crew to come ashore, but only five persons—if persons they truly were—chose to leave that enigmatic craft. This was the best look at such traders I had so far managed, and what I saw did not please me at all.
I have intimated my doubts with regard to the humanity of those…men? Let me explain why. Firstly their mouths were far too wide. Indeed, I thought that one of them glanced up at my window as he left the ship, smiling a smile which only just fell within the boundaries of that word’s limitations, and it was horrible to see just how wide his evil mouth was. Now what would any eater of normal foods want with a mouth of such abnormal proportions? And for that matter, why did the owners of such mouths wear such queerly moulded turbans? Or was it simply the way in which the turbans were worn? For they were humped up in two points over the foreheads of the wearers in what seemed especially bad taste. And as for their shoes: well, those shoes were certainly the most peculiar footwear I had ever seen—in or out of dreams—being short, blunt-toed and flat, as though the feet within were not feet at all! I thoughtfully finished off my mug of muth-dew and wedge of bread and cheese, turning from the window to leave the tavern of Potan-Lith.
My heart seemed to leap into my mouth. There in the low entrance stood that same merchant who had so evilly smiled up at my window! His turbaned head turned to follow my every move as I sidled out past him and flew down the ninety-nine steps to the wharf below. An awful fear pursued me as I ran through the alleys and streets, making my feet fly faster on the basalt flags of the wider pavements, until I reached the well known, green-cobbled courtyard wherein I had my room. But even there I could not get the face of that strangely turbaned, wide-mouthed trader from beyond the Southern Sea out of my mind—nor his smell from my nostrils—so I paid my landlord his due, moving out there and then to head for that side of Dylath-Leen which faces away from the sea and which is clean with the scents of window-box flowers and baking bread, where the men of the sea-taverns but rarely venture.
There, in the district called S’eemla, I found myself lodging with a family of basalt quarriers. I was accorded my own garret room with a wide window, a bed and mattress of fegg-down; and soon it was as though I had been born into
the family, or might have seemed so had I been able to imagine myself a brother to comely Litha.
Within the month I was firmly settled in, and from then on I made it my business to carry on Randolph Carter’s word of warning, putting in my word against the turbaned traders at every opportunity. My task was made no easier by the fact that I had nothing concrete to hold against them. There was only the feeling, already shared by many of the folk of Dylath-Leen, that trade between the city and the black galleys could bring to fruition nothing of any good.
Eventually my knowledge of the traders grew to include such evidences as to make me more certain than ever of their evil nature. Why should those black galleys come in to harbour, discharge their four or five traders, and then simply lie there at anchor, emitting their foul odours, showing never a sign of their silent crews? That there were crews seems needless to state; with three great banks of oars to each ship there must have been many rowers! But what man could say just who or what such rowers were? Too, the grocers and butchers of the city grumbled over the apparent frugality of those singularly shy crews, for the only things the traders bought with their great and small rubies were gold and stout Pargian slaves. This traffic had gone on for years, I was told, and in that time many a fat black man had vanished, never to be seen again, up the gangplanks into those mysterious galleys to be transported to lands across uncharted seas—if, indeed, such lands were their destination! And where did the queer traders get their rubies, the like of which were to be found in no known mine in all Earth’s dreamland? Yet those rubies came cheaply enough, too cheaply in fact, so that every home in Dylath-Leen sported them, some large enough to be used as paper-weights in the homes of the richer merchants. Myself, I found those gems strangely loathsome, seeing in them only the reflections of the traders who brought them from across nameless oceans.