The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics)

by Smith, Clark Ashton

  "Jim, you are ridiculous."

  "A great little bluffer, aren't you? Well, I know all about it …Red-hot letters to a red-hot mama!" He fairly sneered the last words. "Bye-bye. And don't forget what I told you."

  He was gone before Ethel could think of another rejoinder.

  "Well, that's that," she thought, biting her lip. "I've simply got to get Leonard's letters back and destroy them. They're the only evidence. Jim can be nasty, of course — but he couldn't really prove anything without them."

  Five minutes later, she was ransacking Jim's room, hoping desperately that he had not taken his key-ring with him. Where would it be? It was not on the bureau, where he often left it. But sometimes he left it in his pocket. She remembered that he had been wearing a suit of brown and black checks that morning, instead of the blue serge suit he usually wore in the office.

  She opened the clothes-closet. The blue serge was hanging next to the door. And thank heaven, the key-ring was in one of the coat-pockets. S he knew the office-key by sight. There it was, between the door-key

  of their bungalow and the key of an old trunk. She called Leonard on the phone.

  "Jim is out of town until late to-morrow. And I have the key. Will you help me to do a little burglarizing?"

  "Any time, darling."

  "Not till tonight, of course. The stenographer might be there during the day. You can take me to dinner, if you want to, and we'll visit the office afterwards."

  "That's a good plan. Nothing like combining pleasure with business. Shall I call for you at the house about six-thirty?"

  "That will be fine, Leonard. But you needn't be so flippant. Supposing we don't recover the letters?"

  Ethel and Leonard were very gay that evening; and neither spoke of the missing letters, as they sat in an alcove of a fashionable restaurant. There was a tenseness beneath their gaiety, however; and they were repeating to themselves over and over the same unanswered query with which their phone conversation had ended. The tenseness grew. With a tacit agreement, they did not linger over their dessert.

  A short drive in Leonard's car, and then they entered a downtown building. They boldly took the elevator to the third story. Before them, in a long, deserted hall, was the lettered glass of an office door, with the words: JAMES DREW, Fire Insurance. Ethel took the key-ring from her vanity bag and unlocked the door.

  She turned on the light and began to examine her husband's desk. It was strewn with unsorted papers; and none of the drawers had been locked. She pulled them out one by one and went through them systematically. Nothing of interest in the first two — only business documents. But what were these letters in the third drawer, lying beneath some legal papers?

  The letters were not those for which she was looking. But nevertheless, what were they doing in her husband's desk? They were addressed to Jim; and the writing and stationery were feminine. Indeed, they fairly reeked of femininity: the mauve paper had been perfumed with sandalwood. Ethel did not recognize the writing; but her natural curiosity was not lessened by this fact.

  She opened one of them and began to read it. The letter began: "Darling Piggy," and was full of endearments and amorous allusions, couched in the diction of a demimonde. It was signed, "Your red-hot tootsie-wootsie, Flora," with a row of crosses before and after the name.

  Ethel's cheeks and eyes were burning as she turned to Leonard. She was shocked and amazed — also indignant. She would not have believed Jim capable of this sort of thing. Who was this low woman with whom he had gotten himself involved?

  "Have you found something?" asked Leonard.

  "I've found plenty." She gave him the letter with no further comment and proceeded to open and read the next.

  "Why, the old devil!" exclaimed Leonard, when he had caught the purport of the epistle. "This is rich." He ended with a chuckle.

  "Do you think it so funny?" Ethel asked stiffly.

  "Well, I'll be — " Leonard wisely checked himself, reflecting that no man could foresee a woman's emotional reactions.

  Ethel gave him the second letter and opened the third. There were nearly two dozen in the pile. She and Leonard read them all. Most of them were damnatory proof of a vulgar liaison. Many referred to secret meetings, even to nights that had been spent together in hotels by Jim and the writer, under assumed names. One of them enclosed a snapshot, showing Jim with his arm around a plump and luscious brunette in a one-piece bathing suit of extreme brevity. The snap-shot commemorated one of their outings. The woman's full name, Flora Jennings, was signed to one of her letters — comparatively formal note which evidently dated from the beginning of the acquaintance.

  "I'll divorce him!" cried Ethel when she had finished the last letter.

  "But how about my letters? We haven't found them yet."

  Ethel did not reply. She was re-reading one of the mauve-tinted epistles. Then, as she stuffed the whole packet into her vanity bag, she said:

  "I'm going to take those letters with me — even if I haven't found yours."

  "A fair exchange is no robbery," chuckled Leonard.

  Jim had returned from his business trip. He and Ethel were at the breakfast table again. "Did you do what I told you?" he asked gruffly, after a period of sullen pre-occupation with his food.

  "What was that, Jim?" Ethel's tone was very sweet and guileless.

  "What I told you about that d-—n lounge-lizard," he snapped.

  "And who is the lounge-lizard, pray?"

  "Don't try any more bluff with me … I told you to watch your step with Leonard Alton."

  "Oh, I remember now. You said some silly things about Leonard ....Which reminds me that the dear boy took me out to dinner, night before last."

  "What?" Jim was almost apoplectic with rage. "Say, do you think you can go on getting away with murder? I found a bunch of billets-doux from this Leonard person in your bureau the other day. They certainly told me all I needed to know — they ought to have been written on asbestos instead of paper. Do you think I'm going to stand for any more of this? I've got those letters in a safety deposit box at the bank. But I'll deposit 'em with a lawyer, if there's any more funny business."

  "Why, what an odd coincidence," laughed Ethel. "I put some letters in a box at the bank, myself, only yesterday."

  "You did? What letters?" Jim was plainly puzzled.

  "Oh, some letters on mauve paper, scented with sandalwood. They were written to you, Jim, by someone named Flora Jennings … So, I think you'd better not say anything more about Leonard."

  DOUBLE COSMOS

  It is for the reader to decide how much importance can be attached to the manuscript left by Bernard Meecham. Doubtless few will consider it anything more than a record of delirium induced by the strange drug that Meecham had compounded. Even from this standpoint the record possesses a certain medical interest: for it throws a startling light on the possibilities of human sensation. And if one accepts Meecham's experiences at his own valuation, it will be seen that the veil of a new and heretofore unsuspected world has been lifted.

  Meecham, a brilliant young chemist, had made from the beginning a special study of narcotic drugs. He had been freed by an ample inheritance from the necessity of commercializing his knowledge and his talents, and was thus able to give his whole time to the specialty which absorbed him so deeply. A recluse, he was incommunicative regarding the aim of his researches; and the revolutionary theory he had conceived was not known to his colleagues. This theory, as well as the outcome of his experiments, he confided only to the manuscript written and dated shortly before his unexplained disappearance. The manuscript was found lying on his laboratory desk. It is now published in accord with a brief, unaddressed note of instructions also left behind by Meecham.

  The Manuscript

  Even in my childhood, I began to suspect that the world about us was perhaps only the curtain of hidden things. The suspicion was born following my recovery from an attack of scarlet fever attended by intervals of delirium. In that delirium, r
ecalled dimly afterwards, I had seemed to live in a monstrous world peopled by strange misshapen beings whose actions were fraught with terror and menace; or, when not menacing, were wholly cryptic and unearthly. This realm of shadow had seemed no less real than the world perceived by my normal senses; and during my convalescence I believed that it still existed somewhere beyond the corners of the familiar room; and I feared that its horrible specters might reappear at any moment.

  My nightly dreams, which were often very strange and vivid, also served to confirm my intuition of other spheres and secret aspects of the known world. Each night it seemed to me that I stepped across the border of an actual land lying conterminous with the lands of day, but accessible only in sleep.

  Such beliefs, whether pure fantasy, or fantasy mingled with an obscure truth, are no doubt more or less common to imaginative children.

  However, as my faculties matured, I did not wholly dismiss them but was led into speculations concerning the enigmas of human perception and the workings of the sense-mechanism. It soon occurred to me that the five classified senses were very poor and doubtful channels for the cognition of reality; in fact, that their testimony regarding the nature of our surroundings might well be partially or wholly erroneous. The fact that all so-called sane and normal people, possessed of sight, hearing and the other senses, agreed substantially in their impressions of outward phenomena, might prove only the existence of common flaws or limitations in the sensory apparatus of the species. The thing called reality, perhaps, was merely a communal hallucination; and certainly, as science itself had tended to prove, man could lay claim to no finality of perception. The imagery discerned by the human eye was not that beheld by the multi-faceted eye of an insect; the colors that man saw were not perceived by the bird. Where, then, was actuality?

  Inevitably, following this line of thought, I became interested in the effect of drugs, especially those narcotics which modify sensation so profoundly and in such varied and fantastic ways. I read with absorption such books as De Quincey's Opium Eater, The Artificial Paradises of Charles Baudelaire, and the almost forgotten Hashish-Eater of Fitzhugh Ludlow. This literary interest soon led me to study the chemistry of narcotics as well as their physiological action. Herein, I felt, were profound mysteries and a clue to secrets which none had yet unraveled.

  Thus began the ten years of research and experiment which have left me a nerve-shaken wreck at twenty-nine. The earlier stages I must summarize briefly, for little enough time remains in which to record that inconceivably awesome discovery on which I stumbled in the end.

  My laboratory was equipped with the finest and subtlest apparatus, and I procured for analysis all narcotic drugs familiar to modern chemistry, together with certain others found by explorers in remote savage regions. Opium and all its derivatives, the extract of hashish and the dried plant itself—mescal, atropine, peyote, kava—these and numerous others were the subjects of my experimentation. From the very first I had conceived an inkling of a strange and seemingly unauthorized theory; and to prove the theory it was necessary to study the effect of drugs on my own sensory system. Also, I was compelled to invent an incredibly delicate photo-electric device, a graph for the tracing and registration of obscure neural impulses.

  My theory was, that the visions, the so-called hallucinations induced by drugs, were not due to a mere derangement of the sensory nerves, but sprang from the excitation of some new and undeveloped sense. This sense, though more complex and esoteric than the others, was akin to sight; and I suspected that its organ was one of the glands, probably the pineal. I did not disregard the function of growth-regulation assigned to the pineal gland by endocrinologists, but merely surmised a secondary function wholly latent under the conditions of everyday life.

  Under the terrific stimulus of drugs, this third eye was partially awakened, affording distorted, broken glimpses of that larger reality which the outward senses failed to mirror. Through it, perhaps, one could behold dimensions higher than the three to which our perceptions were limited. Small reliance, however, could be placed on the testimony of the organ; for I felt sure that no known drug was powerful enough to rouse it into full consciousness. It was like the untaught eye of a newborn babe, which beholds its surroundings without any true perception of the form, distance, perspective and relationship of objects. Thus the mad variety, the wavering, ever-shifting fantasy, of narcotic visions; thus their alternations and minglings of horror, splendor, grotesquery, obscurity. Yet through them infinite vistas of untold realms were shadowed darkly upon the mind of man.

  I shall say only that I succeeded in demonstrating, through the graphic device that I had invented, the direct influence of narcotics on the pineal gland, and the temporary activating of that gland as a sort of optic organ. The reactions recorded by this instrument while I was enduring the effect of hashish were unusually strong, and markedly similar to those which the graph had detected in the human eye during the reception of sight-images. Thus was confirmed my thesis of an objective world behind the teeming phantasmagoria evoked by drugs.

  It remained now to invent or compound a drug sufficiently potent to stimulate the new eye into full and mature awareness of this hidden world. I shall not record here the details of my many trials and failures with complicated mixtures of strange alkaloids. Nor shall I record the elements of the composite super-drug through which I attained eventual success at the cost of a fatally shattered nervous system - or perhaps something worse. I do not wish others to pay the price that I have paid.

  My first sensations under the new drug were similar to those induced by a strong dose of Cannabis indica. There was the same protraction of the time-sense, by which mere minutes were stretched out into ages; and the same spatial expansion, by which my laboratory walls appeared to recede to an immense distance, and my own body, as well as the familiar objects about me, extended themselves to prodigious height and length. The legs of my chair were tall as the famed sequoias. My hand and arm, reaching up to make sure that the graph was correctly adjusted on my forehead over the pineal gland, seemed to scale a gulf like that of some profound canyon. A carboy loomed like a giant monument.

  All this was familiar to me, and I felt somewhat disappointed. Was the new compound a failure, like the others?

  I closed my eyes, as I had often done before, to shut out any ordinary sight-impressions that might obscure the vision of the third optic. Certain details disappeared and others were added but the imagery on which I peered remained fundamentally the same. Then, gradually, there was a change, and the scene before me divided itself into what I can only describe as two different planes or levels, distinct from each other as water and land.

  The first plane was composed of my immediate surroundings, the laboratory and its fixtures, which had now become transparent as if permeated by some sort of radio-active light. My own body shared in this transparency, but, together with all the objects around me, retained clearly separate outlines.

  Beyond this immediate plane was the second, in which everything seemed to possess a comparative solidity and opaqueness. I gazed on a medley of strange-angled forms that might have materialized from a geometrician's nightmare. These forms were immense, complicated, mysterious. Then, slowly, I perceived that they were an apparent extension of the forms in my own plane, thus accounting for my original impression that everything about me had stretched itself out to inordinate length and distance.

  It is hard to describe exactly what I saw, since my vision doubtless included an extra dimension. My limbs and body, my chair, the tables, shelves, bottles and littered chemical apparatus, all seemed to protract themselves at incredibly oblique angles into the medley of super-Euclidean shapes that crowded the new world. My eyes, like those of an infant learning to see, gradually began to distinguish detail and establish proportion and perspective where all had seemed meaninglessly blurred and chaotic at first glance.

  My attention centered itself on a figure that seemed to correspond to my own. This fi
gure, seated on a vaguely chair-like structure, was of colossal size. It presented a hundred strange facets, convexities, concavities. However, I made out the various parts equivalent to human head, torso, arms and legs. The figure appeared to sit facing me, for there was a multi-angled suggestion of eyes, mouth and other features in the immensely proportioned head.

  Was this, I wondered, a living entity like myself? If so, what was my relationship to this being in a world never before penetrated by human vision? [Had the super-drug revealed to me the doppelganger of my own self, in a fourth dimension?]

  At length a very simple experiment occurred to another, there was the same apparent reversal that a reflection would present.

  Now I rose to my feet and began to walk around the laboratory, tottering a little at first from that loss of control I have mentioned. The other-dimensional figure also rose and walked, with the same shaky and uncertain steps. I picked up a beaker. The entity took in his hand a baroquely shaped vessel and raised it aloft. From sheer weakness, the beaker slipped from my fingers, crashing into many fragments. T he vessel held by the being dropped at the same moment, and its shards littered that otherworld floor.