Collected Stories (4.0)

by James Wade

  On the last word, a fiendish shout of expectancy echoed up from below. Why didn’t the professor do something? I wondered shudderingly. Glancing at him, I saw him worriedly watching the passive Guest. But all thought was extinguished as, with a noise unequalled since the birth of the world, the sky cracked!

  There is no other way to express it. The darkness split, shrivelled and rolled up, and, from Outside, a hideous and unknown light bathed the Universe, as the Great Old Ones once more looked upon Earth.

  Of what I saw beyond the ragged shreds of the borders of our Space-Time continuum as new, final chants rose from the temple below, I can only begin to hint. I had the simultaneous impression of stupendous, amorphous entities; of fluid hyper-intelligences of dominating universal Evil; of an undimensioned chaos of impossible angular curves and curved angles; of a boiling, changing cauldron of moving, massing monstrosities approaching; then, being a mere human being, I fell backward to the ground and turned my face away. What I saw on the ground was almost as stupefying as the sky’s ghastly change.

  For there in the dirt was an overcoat, a hat, and a gray scarf, lying in crumpled disarray, while in the shadows of the wood a black form was disappearing!

  Seconds later, a titanic column of flame exploded from the forest and shot upward, sending showers of sparks flying everywhere. Its base left the Earth and it expanded swiftly, while moving upward at a rate inconceivable. Simultaneously, from the four points of the compass, four similar pillars of fire were propelled to the zenith, where they were superimposed on one another in the form of a colossal pentagram, or five-pointed star, silhouetted against the torn sky and the amorphous shapes streaming across it. I cowered in abject terror!

  “Come!” whispered Professor Sterns. “We have work to do!” He began copying strange designs, from the papers he held, onto the ancient stones of the shaft with a queer paste-like substance from a metal tube.

  “Now!” he exclaimed, throwing the implement aside, “help me with this stone!”

  We lifted the heavy Tibetan mystical stone, which had begun to glow with a curious russet light, to the lip of the shaft and cast it over. It fell inside with a crash, and immediately the shaft caved in amid cries of agony from below, which superseded the former chanting. The professor murmured a few indistinguishable words and made a curious sign with his right hand.

  “Our job is finished,” he said in a trembling voice. “We must escape the forest-fire.” For the woods from whence the Flame-Being had risen were indeed burning fiercely.

  We fled swiftly the way we had come, but not too swiftly for me to glance back and catch a glimpse of the fiery star vanquishing the beings from Outside, the hellish vision fading away, and the heavens returning to normal.

  But the rest of that flight through the fear-haunted forest is to me even more nightmarish than what had preceded it, and I shall never again know peace of mind, even though the newspapers babble reassuringly about a volcanic disturbance in Maine and its strange effect on the skies. For the answer which Professor Arlin Sterns gave in a shuddering whisper to my question about the identity of our mysterious Guest is forever burned into my brain. As we plunged through the nighted woods, he gasped to me,

  “It came to my door one night… It was black and as plastic as jelly… It sent a message into my mind telling me what I had to do tonight… telling me It would go with me… I got it to form into a piece about the shape of a man, and put those clothes on It to disguise It… It told me in my mind that It had come from the star Betelgeuze, 200 light years away with Its Brothers to combat the Great Old Ones!”

  And as we ran toward the car and the safety of civilization, there came back to me half-forgotten passages from the abhorred Necronomicon which caused me to tremble in a new ecstasy of fear and agony of remembrance, even though the Earth had been saved for a time...

  Ubbo-Sathla is that unforgotten source whence came the Great Old Ones Who dare oppose the Elder Gods being the Ones Who are of a black fluid shape. And Those Ones who came in the shape of Towers of Fire hurled the Old Ones into banishment… but they shall return; Those Who Wait shall be satisfied… And together shall take possession of Earth and all things that lived upon it and shall prepare to do battle with the Elder Gods…

  WHEN THE LORD OF THE GREAT ABYSS IS APPRIS’D OF THEIR RETURNING, HE SHALL COME WITH HIS BROTHERS AS TOWERS OF FIRE AND DISPERSE THE EVIL!

  Planetfall on Yuggoth

  (1972)

  By the time the Pluto landing was scheduled, people were tired of planetfall stories. The first human on the moon may have taken a giant step for mankind, as he claimed; but in the half-century following, each succeeding stage in the exploration of the solar system became more boring than the last. The technology was foolproof, the risks minimal, and most of the discoveries—while epoch-making for all the sciences—were too complex and recondite to be dramatized for the man in the street, or in front of his Tri-V screen.

  They even stopped giving the various expeditions fancy names, like that first Project Apollo to the moon, or Operation Ares, the Mars landing. They actually let one of the crewmen of the space craft—a radio operator named Carnovsky—name the Pluto jaunt, and he called it “Operation Yuggoth,” frivolously enough, after the name for the planet used in pulp fiction by some obscure author of the last century.

  Of course, the media dutifully carried the same stale old textbook research about how Pluto, the last planet to be discovered and the last to experience human visitation, was merely a tiny chunk of frozen gunk over three and a half billion miles from the Earth that took 248 earth years to circle the sun, and how if the sun was the size of a pumpkin (which it is not, so it was hard to make sense out of the comparison) Pluto would be a pea about two miles away, and how it was probably once a moon of Neptune that broke away into a very irregular orbit and thus possibly didn’t qualify as a real planet at all.

  The whole upshot seemed to be that here was another airless, lifeless, frozen world like all the others not on our sunward side—in which latter case they were airless, lifeless, sizzling worlds.

  After the invention of the long-predicted nuclear fission drive, even such vast distances were minimized; the trip would have taken only two weeks from Earth, and from the deep space station beyond Mars it wouldn’t last that long.

  No one except scientists expressed any disappointment that remoteness did forbid live Tri-V transmission, and they’d just have to wait for the films. The fact that a brief on-the-scene radio report was scheduled to be relayed via several earthside beams even drew complaints from a few music buffs.

  We had all seen pictures of the ship before (or ones just like it): a pair of huge metal globes connected by a narrow passage, never destined to touch the surface of any world—the little chemical-fuel scouts did all the real exploring.

  Altogether, it was shaping up as a megabore.

  The broadcast promised to be even more tedious than the build-up. Arrived in orbit over Pluto, the space craft reported no glimpse of the planet’s topography, due to a cloud of frozen mist—which, however, analyzed as not too dense for the scouts to penetrate. There was a lot of delay while the first scout was prepared and launched, carrying the radioman Carnovsky who had dreamed up the Operation Yuggoth tag and five other crewmen.

  Carnovsky gave a running account as the small rocket approached the surface and grounded. First he spoke of milky, churning mists hovering over the vast icefields, half-discerned under their high-power searchlights. Then, with mounting excitement, the crackling interplanetary transmission reported a lifting and clearing of the fog. Next came a gasp of awe and that incoherent babbling which was traced in part later to garbled, half-remembered quotations from the pulp writer who had fantasized so long ago about dark Yuggoth.

  Had Carnovsky gone mad? Did he somehow kill his fellow crewmen on the scout, after planting a time-bomb on the spaceship before they left it? In any event, no further transmission was ever received from either vessel after the hysterical voice
from the scout abruptly broke off.

  This is how the broadcast ended: “Mists are clearing—something big towering up dead ahead—is it a mountain range? No, the shapes are too regular. My God! It can’t be! It’s a city! Great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone—rivers of pitch that flow under cyclopean bridges, a dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities—an unknown world of fungous life—forbidden Yuggoth!

  "Is that something moving over the ice? How is it possible in this cold? But there are many of them, heading this way. The Outer Ones, the Outer Ones! Living fungi, like great clumsy crabs with membranous wings and squirming knots of tentacles for heads!

  “They’re coming. They’re getting close! I—“

  That was all; except that those few on Earth—those who were not watching the variety shows on their Tri-V’s but who were outside for some reason and looking at that sector of the sky where Pluto is located—experienced the startling sight of a bursting pinpoint of light as, over three and a half billion miles away, the atomic fuel of the spacecraft bloomed into an apocalyptic nova, writing finis to the ill-fated expedition, and to Operation Yuggoth.

  But scientists don’t discourage easily. They admit that Pluto may hold some unsurmised danger—though certainly not connected with Carnovsky’s hallucinations —and it may be best to stay away while unmanned probes gather more data.

  Now, though, they’re all excited about the plan to send a manned ship to a newly-discovered, unimaginably remote tenth planet that hasn’t even been named yet.

  The new project, for some reason, has been dubbed “Operation Shaggai.”

  The Nightingale Floors

  (1975)

  I

  Start talking about a broken-down old museum (one of those private collections set up years ago under endowments by some batty rich guy with pack-rat instincts)

  where strange things are supposed to happen sometimes at night, and people think you’re describing the latest Vincent Price horror movie, or the plot of some corny Fu Manchu thriller, the land that sophisticates these days call “campy” and cultivate for laughs.

  But there are such places, dozens altogether I guess, | scattered around the country; and you do hear some pretty peculiar reports about some of them once in a while.

  The one I knew was on the South Side of Chicago. They tore it down a few years ago during that big urban renewal project around the university—got lawyers to find loopholes in the bequest, probably, and scattered the ! exhibits among similar places that would accept such junk.

  Anyway, it’s gone now, so I don’t suppose there’s any harm in mentioning the thing that went on at the Ehlers Museum in the middle 1950’s. I was there, I experienced it; but how good a witness I am I’ll leave up to you. There’s plenty of reason for me to doubt my own senses, as you’ll see when I get on with the story.

  I don’t mean to imply that everything in the Ehlers Museum was junk—far from it. There were good pieces | in the armor collection, I’m told, and a few mummies in fair shape. The Remingtons were focus of an unusual ! gathering of early Wild West art, though some of them were said to be copies; I suppose even the stacks of f; quaint old posters had historical value in that particular | field. It was because everything was so jammed together,

  I so dusty, so musty, so badly lit and poorly displayed that ' the overall impression was simply that of some hereditary kleptomaniac’s attic.

  I learned about the good specimens after I went to | work at the museum; but even at the beginning, the place held an odd fascination for me, trashy as it might have appeared to most casual visitors.

  I first saw the Ehlers Museum one cloudy fall afternoon when I was wandering the streets of the South Side for lack of something better to do. I was still in my twenties then, had just dropped out of the university (about the fifth college I failed to graduate from) and was starting to think seriously about where to go from there.

  You see, I had a problem—to be more accurate, I had a Habit. Not a major Habit, but one that had been showing signs lately of getting bigger.

  I was one of those guys people call lucky, with enough money in trust funds from overindulgent grandparents to see me through life without too much worry, or so it seemed. My parents lived in a small town in an isolated part of the country, where my father ran the family industry; no matter to this story where or what it was.

  I took off from there early to see what war and famine had left of the world. Nobody could stop me, since my money was my own as soon as I was twenty-one. I didn’t have the vaguest notion what I wanted to do with myself, and that’s probably why I found myself a Korean War veteran in Chicago at twenty-six with a medium-size monkey on my back, picked up at those genteel campus pot parties that were just getting popular then among the more advanced self-proclaimed sophisticates.

  Lucky? I was an Horatio Alger story in reverse.

  You see, although my habit was modest, my income was modest too, with the inflation of the ’40’s and ’50’s eating into it. I had just come to the conclusion that I was going to have to get a job of some kind to keep my monkey and me both adequately nourished.

  So there I was, walking the South Side slums through pale piles of fallen poplar leaves, and trying to figure out what to do, when I came across the Ehlers Museum, just like Childe Roland blundering upon the Dark Tower. There was a glass-covered signboard outside, the kind you see in front of churches, giving the name of the place and its hours of operation; and someone had stuck a hand- lettered paper notice on the glass that proclaimed, “Night Watchman Wanted. Inquire Within.”

  I looked up to see what kind of place this museum-in-a- slum might be. Across a mangy, weed-cluttered yard I saw a house that was old and big—even older and bigger than the neighboring grey stone residences that used to be fashionable but now were split up into cramped tenement apartments. The museum was built of dull red brick, two and a half stories topped by a steep, dark shingled roof. Out back stood some sort of addition that looked like it used to be a carriage house, connected to the main building by a covered, tunnel-like walkway at the second story level, something like a medieval drawbridge. I found out later that I was right in assuming that the place had once been the private mansion of Old Man Ehlers himself, who left his house and money and pack- rat collections in trust to preserve his name and civic fame when he died, back in the late ’20’s. The neighborhood must have been fairly ritzy then.

  The whole place looked deserted: no lights showed, though the day was dismally grey, and the visible windows were mostly blocked by that fancy art-nouveau stained glass that made Edwardian houses resemble funeral parlors. I stood and watched a while, but nobody went in or out, and I couldn’t hear anything except the faint rattle of dry leaves among the branches of the big trees surrounding the place.

  However, according to the sign, the museum should be open. I was curious, bored, and needed a job: no reason not to go in and at least look around. I walked up to the heavy, panelled door, suppressed an impulse to knock, and sidled my way inside.

  “Dauntless, the slug-horn to my lips I set....”

  II

  The foyer was dark, but beyond a high archway just to the right I saw a big, lofty room lit by a few brass wall fixtures with gilt-lined black shades that made the place seem even more like a mortuary than it had from outside. This gallery must once have been the house’s main living room, or maybe even a ballroom. Now it was full of tall, dark mahogany cases, glass-fronted, in which you could dimly glimpse a bunch of unidentifiable potsherds, stuck around with little descriptive placards.

  The walls, here and all over the museum, were covered with dark red brocaded silk hangings or velvety maroon embossed wallpaper, both flaunting a design in a sort of fleur-de-lys pattern that I late learned was a coat of arms old Ehlers had dug up for himself, or had faked, somewhere in Europe.

  The building looked, and smelled, as if nobody had been there for decades. However, just under the arch stood a shabby bulletin bo
ard that spelled out a welcome for visitors in big alphabet-soup letters, and also contained a photo of the pudgy, mutton-chop bearded founder, along with a typed history of the museum and a rack of little folders that seemed to be guide-catalogues. I took one of these and, ignoring the rest of the notices, walked on into the first gallery.

  The quiet was shy-making; for the first time in years, I missed Muzak. My footsteps, though I found myself almost tiptoeing, elicited sharp creaks from the shrunken floorboards, just as happens in the corridors of the Shogun’s old palace at Kyoto, which I visited on leave during the Korean War. The Japs called those “Nightingale Floors”, and claimed they had been installed that way especially to give away the nocturnal presence of eavesdroppers or assassins. The sound was supposed to resemble the chirping of birds, though I could never see that part of it.

  I wondered what the reason was for Old Man Ehlers to have this kind of flooring. Just shrinkage of the wood from age, maybe. But then, he’d been around the world a lot in his quest for curios, probably. Maybe the idea for the floor really was copied from the Shogun’s palace. But if so, why bother, since it wasn’t the sort of relic that could be exhibited?

  Anyway, I walked through that gallery without giving the specimens more than a glance. I understand that the Ehlers Collection of North American Indian pottery rates several footnotes in most archaeological studies of the subject, but for myself I could never understand why beat-up old ceramic scraps should interest anybody but professors with lots of time on their hands and no healthy outlets for their energy. (Maybe that attitude explains my never graduating from college, or why I picked up a 'Habit instead of a Hobby; or both.)

  The next gallery was visible through another arch, at right angles to the first. Even after I had looked over the floor plan of the museum, and learned to make my way around in it somehow, I never really understood why one room or corridor connected with another at just the angle and in just the direction that it indisputably did. On this first visit, I didn’t even try to figure it out.