I walked forward toward the eyes, holding out my arms to preserve my balance. Twice I nearly stumbled, and a sharp stone pricked through the thin soles of my moccasins.
The ground was littered with incredibly ancient rocks; and the sand was soft and wet, and it gave beneath me. For a moment I imagined that from somewhere beyond the narrow gray confines of the temple there came a current of sickly, evil-smelling air blowing noiselessly in the dark. I felt the unwholesome warmth upon my cheeks and throat. But worst of all was a sense of evil that enveloped me like a putrid shroud.
I resolved to anticipate the embrace of Ishtar, and I deliberately stared into the eyes before me. They blazed with unconcealed fury. My body sought to rebel and the palms of my hands grew damp with the fear of Ishtar; but my will kept me from the brink of the pit. I thought: “It is very queer that Ishtar does not challenge me. It is very strange that she does nothing but stare with her large soulless eyes.” Then I became dumb. I saw that the eyes before me were divided into tiny sections, and the idea came to me that Ishtar’s eyes were complex, like the eyes of a fly, and consisted of a million million blazing orbs. The eyes before me were not human!
*
I retreated until my back.was against a high, jutting wall. I ran my hands rapidly back and forth across the stone to assure myself that the wall was high and firm. The wall was a protection against the evil changeling of the night. It was a buttress of the visibly strong and real against the shadowy and amorphous. I quietly drew my revolver from its holster and leveled it at the glaring, unblinking green eyes. My revolver could wreck the darkness, cleave it in two, tear it to shreds. My revolver was a symbol of power brought to bear upon evil that sulked, that stabbed in the back.
I sought to orient myself to the unaccustomed weapon. The thought of the sudden, brutal bark of a revolver in that shrouded place seemed a desecration, and my fingers trembled upon the breech. A queer paralysis held me; for a moment I felt like a corpse standing in a shroud. I was tortured by the fear of noise and action, of anything that would unsettle the darkness and make the situation drastic. For a moment I wavered, and turned over in my mind the advisibility of going on my knees to Ishtar and asking her pardon; and then suddenly courage swelled within me like a wave.
I dared to press upon the trigger; and the loathsome blackness disappeared in a plethoric glare which swallowed the earth. Nothing existed but an evanescent and transcendent whiteness; and the darkness quivered like jelly and fell away and writhed on the knees of the night. And then from the matrix of the glare came a thunderous report, and sound took the place of light, and the darkness came rushing back. I shut my eyes, and cried out. My knees threatened to give way beneath me. But I thought: “One shot is not enough.
I must take care to see that Ishtar does not escape.”
I discovered that I had no desire to see Ishtar. With my back against the wall and my revolver throttling the darkness I rejoiced that I could not see—
I know not what! But I discerned in the momentary glare low, crumbling walls, and leaning altars, and black, satyrlike faces carved in black basalt, and I was filled with horror and awe inexpressible, and I thought that Miss Beardsley had concealed strange realization beneath her flippancy. She had tried to warn me: “This place is as mournful as Erebus. The "perversity of nature has entered into the rocks; they seem alive.”
The whole business looked ugly, and it especially explained the villagers’ fear of the temple of Ishtar. There was dead silence for five minutes or more, and then I threw aside the thing of flame that had failed to justify its boast of strength. I heard a metallic ring as it went clattering over the stones. The eyes of Ishtar had moved nearer; and I felt that I had sounded the depths of anguish, and that I now dangled above an unreverberate abyss. Far above me through a fissure I saw the stars, but they glittered so weakly that they seemed to exude darkness and not light.
What if I should go on my knees to Ishtar and entreat her to love me? Perhaps her eyes would grow soft; perhaps I should see her and find her beautiful. The camel-drivers had found her beautiful. They had come in from the desert and she had comforted them with kisses and killed them with love.
“I could love you!” I said to the eyes, and I loathed the sound of my own voice. I knew what I had done, but I should never have spoken to Ishtar had not some force superior to my will persuaded me that utter destruction is more desirable than suspense.
At once the eyes grew immense and soft and tender in the night. They lost their snakelike glitter. They advanced toward me, and I heard a low swishing sound, as if something smooth and soft were crawling on its hands and knees over a rough, uneven surface. A curiously indescribable odor, acrid and necrophilic, came to me on the tiny breath of air blowing noiselessly in the dark. And then from beyond the narrow, gray borders of the temple I heard a sudden, sharp exclamation of fear and pain.
It was a voice of pity and terror in the night, shaming the eyes of Ishtar. It arose from the dark spaces, tender and full of infinite compassion and infinite fear, and it softened the hard edges of the darkness.
“Stay back,” I shouted. “I shall take care of this.”
The voice rose to a higher pitch; it swelled in the darkness and formed phrases and sentences and pleaded and reproached.
“Oh, Arthur, I warned you! I told you that nothing good would come of sleeping here. Arthur, where are you?”
“Miss Beardsley,” I cried, “you must go back. It is nothing. No hurt will come to you.”
“It is something, Arthur, and I would face it with you. I have no fear, Arthur. There is nothing in the darkness that can hurt us. Only our fears hurt us, and make monsters of the darkness. You must banish fear, Arthur —and I will help you!”
I knew that Miss Beardsley had rounded the gray walls, and that she walked within the temple, directly beneath the lowering, menacing eyes of Ishtar.
I saw the eyes narrow and their softness disappear and a cold fury flame in their pupilless depths.
“Arthur!” called Miss Beardsley, and I knew that she stood not three yards from me. I could have stepped forward and touched her in the darkness. “Arthur!” The voice was reproachful and despairing.
I moved forward to intercept her, and I saw the eyes drop and swerve to one side. They struck against something soft, and I heard a sudden, frightened scream; and I knew that Miss Beardsley had been attacked, and thrown forcefully upon the ground.
I left the protection of the wall and went down on my hands and knees, groping among gray, cutting stones. Surely, I thought, there must be some way of breaking through, of tearing the darkness apart and rescuing Miss Beardsley.
I shivered and moaned and struggled with the darkness, and the most awful terror filled my mind. I pulled myself forward over the sharp stones until my body became one great sore, and my clothes hung in rags and my eyes filled with tears. For it was all dark and indistinct ahead, and I could not reach Miss Beardsley.
Low, choking gasps came from Miss Beardsley, followed by sobs and guggles, and I heard a thrashing and a retching. “This is lethal horror!” I thought. One solitary, tremendous purpose acted like a tonic upon my will. Ishtar was the horror in the night, and I must save Miss Beardsley from her dark, loathsome paws!
I recognized the menace of Ishtar with a new acuteness. The unearthly evil of Ishtar would imperil the soul of Miss Beardsley, for the goddess would not be satisfied with a mere body, an empty husk. I was fighting, then, to save both the body and soul of Miss Beardsley. I struggled forward, trying to murder the dark with my two hands. I suffered pain. In the darkness, in the night,
I knew a great hurt. And Miss Beardsley was crying and moaning three yards from me.
It seemed frightful to me, my inability to reach Miss Beardsley. I had climbed and climbed over rough, gray stones, and my hands and knees were covered with blood, but I could not reach Miss Beardsley. She retreated from me. Something was carrying her off, dragging her ruthlessly over the stones.
&nbs
p; Suddenly my hands and knees went wet. My thoughts became confused, but I knew that I knelt in something wet. It seemed as if I had passed from agony into dumb, unreasoning delirium. I raised one hand slowly out of the wet. I did not confess my fears to myself; I did not openly acknowledge them. Things remained blurred and indefinite in my mind. But in the back of my brain the fear lurked like a panther about to spring.
I raised the hand slowly. I understood dimly that I could not live if the wet confirmed my fear. But it was not blood. It wasn’t. Blood was less thick, less cold.
I knew that I knelt in dark slime of the earth. A godless slug that had never seen the sun and moon and stars might leave such slime. I shut my eyes, without precisely knowing why, and my brain became quite quiet. I would go on and on, and find Miss Beardsley!
I crawled forward on my hands and knees over the dark earth. It seemed as if I was going on forever, and yet I knew intuitively that I should eventually find light—and Miss Beardsley. Something that left dark, evil-smelling slime in its wake and that had eyes like the eyes of Ishtar was carrying Miss Beardsley away over the dark. And I would discover its retreat and destroy it utterly. My heard beat wildly, and a buzzing commenced in my brain, but I ground my teeth together, and went on and on.
I followed a trail of foul-smelling slime, and my whole body ached. Formless shapes branched and grew in my mind. I thought aloud: “Will there be no end? Is there no dawn? Will dawn never come up over the desert, all white and clean and radiant? Is there nothing but formless dark that conceals a blasphemous slug that is not human, that leaves slime in its path?”
For the first time I had found voice! I decided to try again, and I pierced the dark with the sharp insistence of my voice. I sought an answer; I sought assurance. There was a sort of malicious cruelty in the silence, and I sought to lessen the torture, to ease the tension as I crawled forward on my hands and knees.
“Miss Beardsley, you must have faith. I am coming for you on my hands and knees. The way is long, and there will be much pain—but you must fight Ishtar through your will!”
“Arthur, it is squeezing me. It is soft, and I cannot grip it. It flips away from me. You must hurry! But I shall not fear, Arthur. Fear is deadly, and will destroy us both.”
Long and white and smooth was the passage that opened out before me, and ran down into the earth. Into my mind came fragments of horrid superstition, and malicious memory, and a phrase from Joseph Glanvill which Poe had once quoted: “the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus!”
The passage before me was a tunnel of nightmare, and with my brain I doubted; but I saw the, tunnel clearly, and the light streaming out of it.
And the thing that had carried Miss Beardsley over the rough ground, the thing of slime and night, had crept into the tunnel, and it did not expect me to follow. Or did it expect me to follow?
Through interminable windings and turnings I clambered on my hands and knees. The tunnel narrowed and threatened to embrace me, and then it widened until I could not glimpse in the wavering light its high, sloping top. Forward I pressed through the shadows, and shouted and wept in the darkness; and far ahead I heard an audible swishing, as the thing crawled through the damp cold, leaving a trail of slime and unspeakable odor in its wake.
The impressions left me by that horrible descent were profoundly grave and unforgettable. But some destiny over which I had no control had arranged that I should suffer, and as I crawled downward on my hands and knees I knew that no bestial god could survive that destiny. Suffering and terror would be mine, but out of the night would come a marvelous dawn, and the confused discords about me would somehow harmonize one with the other, and I should listen with exaltation and ecstasy to a gorgeous and stupendous symphony. I would return from the brink of the pit, and Miss Beardsley and I would face the new dawn together. Why is a cold, ill-lighted tunnel that twists and turns superior to the darkness? Why did I feel a resurgence of confidence as I moved forward over the cold ground?
For eternities I crawled forward on my hands and knees, and then, quite unexpectedly, upon turning a bend I saw it. Stupendous and awful! And to think that one might anywhere, unexpectedly, come upon such an abomination. “What is the use of going on?” I thought. “This thing cannot be. If it exists there is no longer any reason for living—if it exists we are all hopeless, helpless, wretched creatures living in an hallucination, living on the edge of an abyss, living in a dream from which it is death to awake. We live surrounded by a Walpurgis night of obscene shapes; flaffing harpies that would tear out our brains and glut upon our bodies in sleep; ghoulish, black-lipped incubi; serpents of nightmare from Acheron; Calibans from Tartarus; we live surrounded by famine and pestilence and death—if such as this can exist under the stars!”
I gnawed at the ends of my fingers to keep from shrieking. Miss Beardsley, lay in a pool of ooze, the muscles of her face relaxed; and an awful, indescribable agony shone in her eyes. Her arms hung limp at her sides, but the fingers of her right hand opened and closed convulsively. Above her in the dim light, its face in profile against the dark, ageless, boulder, crouched the thing that I had followed through the darkness, the shadowy, lethal thing of unutterable evil that had left a dark, noisome trail of slime behind it.
Its doglike head was covered with scales, and a long, reptilian tongue protruded from between its black, bulbous lips. Its eye in profile seemed large and gray; but the tunnel-light had glazed it, and it no longer glittered. It was quite hopeless from a sane or human point of view, and when I raised my arm in a gesture of despair and fury it hissed, and spat at me. I knew that I should shiver and grow frigid at its touch. For a moment I did not think that I could ever move again; and I wondered if Miss Beardsley suffered pain. I longed to soothe and console her, to assure her that I understood.
“I shall attend to this!” I said, but I had no intention of attending to anything. My mind ran in one narrow^ channel, to the exclusion of everything that should have concerned me. “If it does not move, I am safe,” I thought. I stood very still, fearing that if I moved an inch I should bring it down upon me. In fancy I felt its cold nostril nuzzling my face. I knew that it would nuzzle me and nuzzle me until I perished of horror and loathing. I was more upset than I cared to acknowledge. I suppose I thought of Miss Beardsley; but one thing comes back now, and shames me—my vile, shocking cowardice.
But something destroyed my shivering inhibition of muscle and will, and sent me forward like a released spring. I saw its body! The head had held me back, and tied my muscles into knots and filled me with shameless fright; but the body called for quick, decisive action. I went forward instantly, and did what I had to do. But before I joined with it in' that foggy earth-crypt I bent with amazing agility, and picked from the ground a thin, sharp stone.
I remember severing with one stroke the great, doglike head, and I remember how the black arterial blood ran out of the neck and spattered over my arms and legs. I know that the body twisted and writhed in the cavern gloom, and tied itself into knots, and monstrous, fleshy folds.
I can see it now, writhing and twisting in the shadows; and I see the severed head lying beside Miss Beardsley on the ground. The jaws open and close; and the eyes are amazed, almost indignant, like the eyes of a child who has been punished for what it does not consider a wrong.
When I had finished, and the folds lay still, I got up and walked over to where Miss Beardsley lay upon the cold, hard ground. I realized that sympathy and pity would never do. Miss Beardsley needed more drastic medicine.
“Get up!” I shouted at her. “I don’t intend to stand here and wait for you. . Get up!”
Miss Beardsley moaned, and her lips quivered; but a pink tinge crept back into her cheeks.
“Get up at once!” I shouted.
A moment more and she was on her feet, her blue eyes flashing with anger, and a red blush covering her throat and cheeks. I knew then that she was sa
ved, and I drew her quickly toward me, and away from the headless thing on the ground.
“We’ll be in time for breakfast,” I told her. “I have ordered ostrich eggs and pomegranates. We shall sit on the terrace and watch the dawn come up over the desert!”
“Oh, but my aunt never rises so early,” said Miss Beardsley.
“For once,” I responded, “we shall do without a chaperon.”
I led her out into the cool night. For a moment we stood under the gray wall of the temple of Ishtar, and then we walked arm in arm, toward the hotel. “You are worth a dozen Ishtars,” I told her.
“That is not very complimentary,” she said. “To tell me that I am only worth—”
In a moment my arms were about her, and I knew the sweet magic of her yielding body.
3
At noon my guide came to me. “You will never guess what we found in the ruin,” he said.
“A snake?” I asked.
His face became horribly solemn. “Yes, and no! We found a headless woman! But that is not all. The gray sacrificial stone was covered with blood; and upon it lay the head of a snake—a hooded cobra!”
Miss Beardsley shivered, and plucked at my sleeve: “In the village they tell queer tales. They say—they say that you killed Ishtar!”
My guide’s small eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said. “And we are grateful. Your courage has delivered us from Ishtar—the were-snake!”
Below the balcony our camels eyed us with tolerant, disillusioned eyes.
It Will Come to You
Bannerman had assured him that he would like this job.
“Cromer, you couldn’t have anything nicer,” Bannerman had pointed out.' “It’s right down your, alley. I’ll make out the credentials and bright and early tomorrow morning you’ll be working again.”
Cromer always seemed to be out of a job. Then Bannerman would summon him, new credentials would be prepared, and he’d have a soft snap for a week or two.
Mythos and Horror Stories Page 21