Into the Weird: The Collected Stories of James Palmer

by James Palmer

  It was clear that I must choose my fate now. I just needed a new plan.

  Some of the men had set up a large canvas tent about three yards away from the ancient monument, the sarcophagus standing upright in the center of it. With our robes and hoods--one of which I had just donned--we would appear to any passersby in that remote field as Druids, a small group of which still flourished, practicing the old ways and mysterious rites of that bygone age before the Romans came.

  The men fluttered about the site installing long metal staves in the moist earth in and around the circle of stones. Atop these staves were affixed various metal pieces of strange and intricate design, bizarrely beautiful in their own way, but menacing in aspect when their purpose was taken into account.

  A light rain had begun to fall as Lao Fang emerged from the tent, his skin smooth, his long hair and thin mustaches black as onyx, even though the last time I had seen him there had been a grey tinge to his mane.

  As he often did, my Master wore a jade silken robe with gold trim that flowed around him, giving him the appearance of floating rather than walking across the Salisbury Plain toward Stonehenge. Ignoring me, for my head was concealed beneath my hood, he went straight to his lieutenants and began pointing and giving orders. “This morning dawns a new age,” I heard him say proudly. “The Age of Yogul!”

  I tried to think of a new plan, but what could I do? Any moment now I would be recruited into this new task, taking my own part into bringing about this new age of darkness, my similar actions through the previous eons burned into my memory. I could not allow this to go on.

  For a brief moment I contemplated suicide. But no, that would not clear my karmic debt, and I knew that I would simply be returned to this plane to once again to endure torment at Lao Fang’s hand, or someone like him. The Universe cried out for justice, and it beseeched me to carry it out.

  Lao Fang stood in the center of the circle of stones, while his minions formed a circle around them, drawing me into it with them. The Master raised his arms to the heavens and began speaking in an ancient, gutteral tongue, unrecognizable to modern ears. Strange energies began to arc between the staves, and I heard what I thought was a distant boom of thunder, but actually emanated from the middle of the circle of stones. A strange shape began to coalesce in the air above Lao Fang’s head. As if encouraged, my Master began talking louder, his voice carrying above the drone of the rain.

  If I were to do something, it would have to be now. I closed my eyes and had my first and last waking vision since my bizarre dreams began. A vision of the distant past. It was Stonehenge, half completed, the stone blocks bright and clean, their edges sharp, not worn smooth by time. I saw armies of men dragging identical blocks hundreds of miles across sheets of ice, which made the heavy stone easier to move. I saw these same men taking direction on where and how to place the stones from tall, thin men and women in flowing white robes, hovering above the scene in strange craft without visible means of propulsion. I knew then that this structure which Lao Fang now used for his own nefarious purposes was constructed by his sworn enemies, the Lemurians. And in this waking vision, they were looking directly at me, speaking to me. And they told me exactly what to do.

  The thing continued to coalesce above Lao Fang’s head, a blackness uncoiling and spreading like ink in a glass of water. The others stood in their circle, hooded heads down, involved in their own low chanting. Shaking off the last throes of my vision, I leaped into the center of the circle. The Master’s back was to me, and he couldn’t see me.

  I raced off to my right and pulled one of the staves from the ground, its energies sending a charge through me that made every hair on my body stand on end, but did not harm me. I ran with it to the other side of the collection of stones, sticking it in the ground at a precise point I had been shown by the long-dead Lemurians.

  The energy arcs increased in intensity, the shock throwing me to the ground at the base of one of the tall stones, which now seemed to glow with an energy all their own, an eerie pink light that seemed to repel the rain that pelted us.

  Lao Fang screamed as the energy flashed violently between this new configuration of staves, striking him and sending him flying from the circle. The thing that had begun to form above Stonehenge seemed to convulse and shrink.

  “No!” my former master shouted, pointing a long-taloned finger at me. “Kill him! Put the array back as it was!

  The rest of Lao Fang’s followers broke up the circle and ran toward me, shouting above the rain. The black cloud that coiled and writhed above us had begun to dim and dissipate somewhat, but in the center of it I could just make out the hideous visage of a giant toad, its cold reptilian eyes filled with malice and locked on mine. No, not malice. Cold indifference. This was the thing that Lao Fang sought to unleash upon the world.

  Rough hands grabbed me and stood me upright. Lao Fang bounded toward me, his taloned fingers raised toward my throat. “Explain yourself!” he hissed.

  I began to laugh then. It was the laugh of someone mad, and sounded inhuman to my ears which, for some unfathomable reason, made me laugh even more.

  When I had finished I gladly told him about my dream visions and how his plans had been thwarted by his long vanquished enemies the Lemurians.

  Lao Fang produced a shiny dagger from the folds of his robes. “I have lived countless eons and have enslaved millions of souls. But I have never met one who walked upon this earth more than once. I would like to study you, but under the circumstances it shall be more expedient to kill you. Until we meet again.”

  Lao Fang raised the dagger high and I braced for impact, my arms held fast by the fiend’s other minions.

  As he brought the blade down toward my heart a bright light pierced the rain-soaked dimness, followed by the blare of police sirens. Several lorries appeared with the markings of Scotland Yard.

  Lao Fang’s minions, perhaps remembering all of the crimes that brought them into slavery to him in the first place, forgot all about restraining me and scattered. Suddenly free, I dodged Lao Fang’s blow. This only served to anger the tyrant, and he lunged toward me again, seemingly oblivious to the chaos erupting all around us. Shots rang out and two or three of my former cohorts fell to the soggy ground.

  Lao Fang turned his head then, giving me the split second I needed. I swung my right fist hard, connecting with his left jaw. The villain fell backward and sprawled on the wet grass.

  I prepared to continue my assault, but two of his devotees came running from between the stones and snatched him up. “Come my Master,” one of them said. “The police are here. It is no longer safe.”

  Sputtering, glaring evilly at me, Lao Fang let himself be half dragged, half carried away while gun shots, sirens and bright lights erupted all around us.

  I turned and started to run, but a burly policeman tackled me. He put me on the ground on my stomach and twisted my arms round behind my back to shackle me. I laughed then, a loud belly laugh. I laughed until tears came to my eyes. I laughed because even though I was fettered, I was free of Lao Fang once and for all.

  “Blimey,” the burly cop said to one of his associates as he hoisted me to my feet. “This one’s out of his tree.”

  I was still laughing when they put me in the back of a lorrie with a few of my surviving associates, who all gave me hateful looks.

  My fellow slaves’ zeal had proved their undoing. They had killed a group of Druids who were to visit Stonehenge that day to perform one of their innocuous rituals, donning their robes and taking their place at the ancient monument. They believed Lao Fang’s summoning of his dark god Yogul would be successful, so they didn’t worry about any consequences, such as what the London police would think of this brazen act of collective murder.

  I told the authorities as much as I dared, from my colored past that brought me to Lao Fang’s opium den, to this very night. I left out my past-life dream visions and the dark god Lao Fang had almost succeeded in summoning. I gladly confessed to everythi
ng I had done in this life, hoping that it would matter in the next.

  Here I sit in my prison cell, writing this account for anyone who dares to read it. I do not know what happened to Lao Fang, but I know he is out there somewhere, waiting out Time itself in his sarcophagus, awaiting a time when his would-be judges and jailers are long dead and all memory of him has faded, when it will be safe for him to rise and torment the Earth once more. When that time inevitably comes I hope I am not there to see him.

  The Meteor Terror

  Mr. H.P. Lovecraft

  10 Barnes St.

  Providence, RI

  Dear Mr. Lovecraft,

  As a long admirer of your fiction, I could not help but share with you a strange occurrence that eclipses anything published so far in the pages of Weird Tales. As you are the master of outre fiction, I know you will appreciate this narrative, made all the more fantastic by the fact that it is actually happening, even now. I pray that you do not deem me mad, and will instead become the only other person alive who shares this terrible knowledge with me.

  By way of quick introduction, my name is Bradley S. Wallace. My father, Rupert Wallace, owns a small hardware store in the town of Mule Springs, Georgia, in the Northeastern part of the state. A rather precocious youth, I read voraciously many of the authors you hold dear, such as Lord Dunsany, Poe and Arthur Machen, and I still read widely in what has been labeled that callous expletive, the “pulps”, including Argosy, Astounding, and your own venerable Weird Tales.

  My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and take over the hardware store, even though I have always wanted to be a writer. So, off to college I went, to obtain a business degree. However, determined to have it my way, I graduated from the University of Georgia with a business degree and a minor in journalism.

  Now I help out at my father’s store and write newspaper articles for The Times. It is a kind of life, I suppose, but what I really dream of doing is what you, Clark Ashton Smith, Talbot Mundy, and Robert E. Howard do, and write for magazines like Weird Tales. You have inspired me so much over the years. Oh, but I get ahead of myself. I’m writing to tell you about the meteor, which I believe was the start of this whole mess.

  It fell from the sky on August 6th, 1936 around midnight. The general consensus is midnight because that was when John Cowart said he looked at his clock after a high-pitched screeching, followed by a loud explosion, woke him.

  The screech was reported to have been heard as far south as Oakwood and as far north as Tribble Gap. A few people who were out at that late hour reported seeing a bright flash of light accompanying the screech, and the town’s sheriff was rousted out of bed by a flurry of excited calls. Some thought a moonshine still had exploded; others thought the Henderson boys were playing with fireworks again. It being dark, nothing could be done to investigate, but at first light I received a phone call from my editor at The Times filling me in on all that had transpired, and ordering me to get out to the Cowart farm immediately.

  Being a family friend of the Cowarts, I knew I would have no problem getting to the bottom of this mystery and, dressing quickly and skipping breakfast, I borrowed my father’s car and sped toward the Cowart farm with due haste.

  The Cowart’s yard was already filled with vehicles as I pulled up to the large farmhouse. I noted the town’s only police car and the mayor’s truck as I exited my father’s car, notebook in hand. I hadn’t thought to grab his camera to get any photographic evidence at hand, but the paper had a young boy they could send out if needed. I was hoping I’d be greeted by the Cowarts’ oldest child, their lovely daughter Emmaline, but one of Mr. Cowart’s five sons was sitting on the porch, and he eagerly and excitedly summarized for me what had happened.

  “A big rock fell out of the sky,” he said, miming the object’s descent with an outstretched arm. “It fell in the field back yonder next to them woods.”

  “Is it still there?” I asked, wetting the tip of my pencil with my tongue.

  “Yeah. Daddy said it’s still hotter’n hellfire.”

  Grinning slightly at the young Cowart’s manly attempt at swearing, I asked him to show me the way to the meteor.

  The boy took off like a shot from a gun, and I scrambled to keep up with him along a well-worn, narrow footpath that wove its way through a small but verdant garden and down a hill to a recently plowed filled adjoining a thick stand of pine trees. A large black wound marred the neatly harrowed earth, where three men stood staring down into the shallow pit the meteor had made when it struck.

  The younger Cowart had reached the group before me and was tugging on the middle man’s overalls. The tall, thin form of John Cowart turned and looked at me. “Well, Danny boy. You come to write this up for the paper?”

  “Yes Sir,” I said. The mayor and sheriff turned to me as well. “Maybe this here college man can tell us what’s going on,” said Sheriff Myers.

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m not schooled in meteors,” I said, stepping closer to the hole. “But the paper wants to know what all the ruckus last night was about.”

  I immediately made out the source of the previous evening’s commotion. A rather large black rock was imbedded deep in the loam of Mr. Cowart’s field. It must have been traveling extremely fast, as it displaced a huge amount of dirt. Large mounds of earth were piled all around the crater, and the meteor had struck so hard that it even marred itself in the red Georgia clay far below the fertile farm soil.

  “I let this field rest last year,” said John Cowart, scratching his head. “I was gonna start plantin’ today. I guess I can forget that.”

  “You’re worried about plantin’, John?” said Mayor Wilson. “This here’s a find.”

  “Well,” said Sheriff Myers. “I’m just glad no one got hurt. If there’s nothin’ else, I’ll go make my report now.” He tipped his hat to all of us and trudged back the way I had come trailing after the Cowart boy. John and the Mayor continued staring into the hole.

  “What do you make of it, Danny?” the Mayor asked me.

  As I had told them before, I wasn’t an expert in meteors, but I share your keen interest in astronomy, Mr. Lovecraft, so I knew enough, I felt, to give my opinion of the strange event.

  “Well, most meteors break up when they hit the atmosphere. This one didn’t, unless it’s the remnant of a larger piece of rock. It’s also very heavy, and composed of some material that allowed it to withstand entry into our atmosphere, probably nickel-iron as opposed to carbonaceous chondrite.”

  John Cowart’s eyes grew wide. “Boy, I didn’t understand a word of that, except the part about it being heavy. It sure looks it.”

  “Iron, huh?” said the Mayor who, when he wasn’t running the town, owned a scrap metal business. “John, this could really be worth something, both as a space rock and as a huge chunk of useable metal. Let me weigh it. I’ll give you a good price.”

  “We don’t know for sure what it’s made of,” I interjected. “This is only a guess on my part.”

  John Cowart’s jaw worked as he stared at the space stone. “If I can get some straps around that thing, my tractor should be able to haul it out.”

  “I’ve got my truck,” offered Mayor Wilson. “Let me get it weighed for you.”

  “This is a rarity,” I said. “It should be studied by an expert, not sold for scrap.”

  Mayor Wilson glared daggers at me for my impertinence, while John Cowart simply stared into the pit as if deep in thought. Clearly he was weighing both of our options.

  “Danny boy,” he said. “Do you know someone who can take a look at this thing?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I can call the Astronomy department at the University of Georgia. Maybe even the Geology department. I’m sure they’d love to come and have a look at it.”

  John thought a moment, then nodded. “That sounds good, Danny. Why don’t you make the call?”

  Mayor Wilson grumbled a little, but in the end there was no more persuading Mr. Cowart to sell the hunk of sp
ace iron, so he left, leaving me to get a statement so I could write everything up for the paper’s afternoon edition. Later that morning, The Times sent a boy out with a camera, who took a picture to go along with the story. It appeared on the front page that afternoon, August 7th, 1936. I have included a clipping of the story in this letter for your review.

  Unusual as it was, this was straightforward enough. But nothing could prepare me for what was to happen next.

  As you can imagine, the meteor caused quite a stir in my small town. Everyone loved my article. Everyone, that is, but my father, who gave me his usual cold stare and put me back to work in his hardware store, as if I needed a good dose of hard work to cure my writing aspirations. I was content to do so, for I now had steady work from The Times, and I still spent my nights in literary pursuits, going into my closet and piling pillows by the door to muffle the tap of my typewriter keys so as not to wake my father.

  The University sent someone up to get a look at the meteorite and get a sample, for Mr. Cowart, for whatever reason, was hesitant to part with the entire object. Mr. Lewis Schuster, head of the Geology department, was kind enough to forward me a copy, having still remembered me from when I took his Introduction to Geology as part of my core curriculum. I copied that report exactly as it appears.

  Report on the Mule Springs Meteor and an Account of the Findings

  Prepared by Dr. Rupert Scott, Department of Geology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

  I arrived at the Cowart farm on August 10th at eleven twenty-seven in the morning. Mr. Cowart was friendly and had been expecting me. He took me to the site of the impact immediately, but much to my dismay he had already pulled the object from the deep crater it had made with his tractor, an action which he said caused the meteorite to crumble, leaving only a few good pieces left behind. Mr. Cowart had also filled in the hole. Since Mr. Cowart does not own a telephone, we were unable to confer about the meteor beforehand, or I would have told him to leave it alone until I arrived.