by Brian Lumley
“The atmosphere of the great cave is filled—tenuously, so as not to be blinding—with a living, gaseous, light-producing organism: the same … material … that my brothers and I wear above our heads in individual provision of light. An example is the nimbus which lights our path now!”
“One organism?” I questioned, puzzled by this apparent blunder of my divided, yet until now ordered even in division, psyche.
“Yes, one organism—and yet many! Polypous, you might say. It is a by-product of an experiment performed by a great race even before we and the Thuun’ha came to Earth; and we, like that race before us, have learned to harness it to our own needs. Not that the Thuun’ha require light—they are equally at home in the dark—but we have lighted their city even as Ib flourished in the natural light of its eastern oasis, as a monument to that long-dead seat of worship …”
“Their city? Then Lh-yib belongs to the Thuun’ha?”
“Certainly—did Thor dwell in Oslo, or Tanwahi in Atlantis? The city is of little real use to us, except to provide the Thuun’ha a basis for their worship. They believe us to be gods; have done so—in this world and others—for hundreds of thousands of years. We have no wish that it should be otherwise.”
“A million-year confidence trick—” I mused out loud. “How do you carry it off?”
As I said this the illumined, greenly—silhouetted creature quickly turned on me. He was frowning and his eyes glittered angrily. In that moment, dream or none, I knew that I was in the presence of a life-form far superior in every way.
“The Thuun'ha need us to no less a degree than your primitive forbears required their sun-gods. We are to them, in their limited spheres, as great a source of inspiration as have been and are the great deities of Earth to your species. Without their water-lizard gods they would have nothing to live for; and conversely, what is a god without his worshippers? We supply one another our needs. It is sufficient …” Without more ado he turned and again took up the eerie march along the gradually rising corridor.
More questions surged into my mind, demanding answers, but I held them back for the moment lest I perhaps further infringe on the lizard-thing’s congeniality. In any case I was somewhat distracted, had been for some little time, by a steadily increasing visibility in the tunnel hinting of an early emergence. Indeed only a little way further, when we had covered perhaps one third of a mile on our straight, rising course, we came to a flight of a dozen or so rough-hewn steps leading up to an open, lighted area. It was only on mounting those steps that I knew the truth—that for once my meagre sense of direction had not led me astray!
I saw immediately that we were still in the great cavern (to both sides magnificent depending stalactites merged with soaring, windowed spires of rock or precariously arching bridges), but the proximity of the weirdly-adorned ceiling and the level at which I surveyed those topmost ramparts of the city could bring only one vertigo—inducing conclusion!
We were standing on the back of that great natural bridge I had feared to cross—and the tunnel behind us had been carved through the solid rock of the wider root of that span …
A narrow, shallow, groove—like track, no more than two feet in width by six inches deep, had been cut down the centre of the bridge’s upper surface as a basic pathway, but not even a handrail guarded the naked edges of that path. And looking further ahead, maybe two hundred yards to the centre of the span proper, I could see that the width of the entire structure narrowed to no more than six feet or so, with the sides of the bridge falling away in a steep curve from the rudimentary walkway to the empty air beneath!
Why, crossing that section of the span, one would be able to look down at a steep angle onto the buildings almost directly below! Vertigo grabbed me then, squeezing me tight in its trembling fist, causing a momentary return of the rushing, tumbling sensation I had known at Devil’s Pool, and I went shakily to my knees in sick protestation.
Down there, crouching on the solid stone, where the edges of the bridge did not seem quite so close, my head cleared quickly and the roaring went out of my ears. I looked up. Bokrug was staring at me in strange, cold concern. From where I kneeled he was silhouetted against a stark background of stalactites, seeming for all the world to be standing on a great rough tongue within a mighty mouth of teeth about to snap shut. I shook my head weakly: “I can’t go across there!”
“Close your eyes and offer no resistance. I will carry you,” the creature told me. “It will only be for a minute or so, then you should be able to walk the rest of the way …”
“No!—no, I can’t …” I babbled unashamedly, backing away on all fours. The lizard-thing took four quick steps toward me, flat hands reaching out—
There came an enormous blackness … in which I drifted free … awash in soothing anaesthesia …
I do not know what the creature did to me, but whatever it was I came out of it far too soon. At first I stayed quite still, fearing the result of any unexpected activity on my part; for the supple, swaying motions I felt beneath me made it obvious that Bokrug was as good as his word. He was carrying me across the yawning abyss, over that narrow strip of nature—carved rock! Then sensing a tightening of his grip on me and believing myself about to be sat down, I opened my eyes—
Fortunately the sight froze me rigid, for the consequence of any movement I might have made at that instant was unthinkable. I was being carried in the ‘fireman’s lift’ position, slumped across the green creature’s back face down—yet my very first thought was that I was actually free and falling! For though at this, its thinnest point, the bridge must have been somewhat wider and sturdier than I had at first calculated, it had plainly been worked upon in anticipation of a grafting with some planned building—and I gazed in pure horror straight through the two—feet square jointing—hole cut vertically through its thickness, down at the points of the spires below and farther yet … to the narrow streets of the Sister City!
I do not believe I closed my eyes, there was no need, no time; in fact in a single instant there was … nothing! My mind seemed simply to shut down—went, as it were, into neutral…
My next—conscious?—thought, came when I felt my face being slapped by the flat, firm fingers of the green dream—being. I put up my hands to protect myself and the universal blur which everything was slowly cleared, outlines sharpening, until my vision—and apparently my other senses—returned to normal.
I found myself slumped at the edge of a wide landing, with the amphitheater—like steps of the great cavern's outer perimeter marching down from my position to the plain and the city below. Nearby, the natural bridge flung its fearsome arm out over those hideous heights which Bokrug had somehow crossed with me across his shoulders. I shuddered involuntarily as I saw again in my mind's eye the sight I had seen through that hole in the bridge.
Then, detecting an impatience in my weird companion's attitude, I managed to sit up. “A few minutes more and I’ll be all right,” I said, but the weakness of my voice belied its message.
“That is as well, for it will soon be the Time of the Mist,” the creature told me. “You must not be here when that time comes. For then the cavern fills with fumes which to you would be poisonous; but they are necessary to the well—being of the Thuun’ha.”
“The Thuun’ha! You keep mentioning them—and you say Lh-yib is their city—yet so far I haven't had a glimpse of any other single living thing … not even there!” I pointed down the steps and across the plain to the Sister City. “Just where are the … the Thuun’ha?”
“They are at worship: it is the Time. But soon it will be the Time of the Mist. Now, can you walk? Then come.”
I climbed unsteadily to my feet. “I can try to walk! Lead on.”
“Good.”
He led off then, fairly loping up the steps to the left in what I took to be unnecessary haste, heading for a dark entrance cut into the vertical rock face at the rear of the next landing up. I followed stumblingly, my legs weak, wearily cl
imbing to the landing where Bokrug had paused to wait beneath the arch of the tunnel.
I had only a few more yards to cover across that flat space when I saw the creature’s posture alter. His interest—not in me but in something behind me, something down on the floor of the cavern—quickened, and for a moment he stared intently. Then he beckoned urgently, indicating that I should join him without delay.
“Come,” he called, “come quickly!”
I glanced back over my shoulder, turning to see better, when my attention was drawn to the pyramid—like building and its stream. In fact it was the stream primarily that caught my eye. From its bubbling source high in the wall of the cavern to the pyramid it ran and sparkled as before, but beyond that building its bed lay exposed and already drying.
And then I saw something else. From previously unnoticed holes in the apex of that strange pointed structure, a thick green mist was billowing silently out, rolling down the four smooth sides and rapidly blanketing the plain in all directions. In no more than ten seconds the mist had spread to the outermost buildings of the city, while in the other direction it already eddied about the feet of the curving perimeter steps.
A few seconds more saw Lh-yib’s lower quarters completely swallowed, with the green mist billowing about the foot of the steps directly beneath my vantage point. I knew I should do as Bokrug had bade me and go into the opening to join him there, but somehow those curling, rapidly flowing tendrils of green had me utterly hypnotized; I seemed to be pinned to the landing, with feet of lead, incapable of movement! The mist swept eerily upward, reaching for me—and then Bokrug’s arms closed about my waist, lifting me bodily and sweeping me into the tunnel in the wall of rock.
From perhaps twenty yards within that gloomy entrance we paused to look back, and there, where the tunnel opened into the cavern, an opaque green wall swirled threateningly, oddly luminous, mysteriously deadly.
“You see?” Bokrug said simply. “It is the Time of the Mist.” He pointed at the swirling wall of green. “Fortunately for you, at times such as this, the tunnels are made to breathe outwardly, so that the mist may not penetrate within them. Can you not even now feel the breathing of the tunnel?”
As he voiced his question I could indeed feel a rising breeze issuing from the unknown caves in the rock; and with this refreshing wind there came a sound, a throbbing, ululant echo, beautifully melodious yet utterly weird in its evocation of an alien choir, and I looked enquiringly, apprehensively, at the lizard—thing.
“The Thuun’ha,” he answered my unspoken question. “They offer their thanks, their praise, for the provision of the Mist of Life. As it was in Ib, so is it in Lh-yib, the Sister City!”
For a few moments longer the green creature stood there at my side, watching the silently swirling mist and listening to those ethereal ‘songs’; then, without another word, he turned and set off again, beckoning for me to follow.
Suddenly I felt completely fatigued and leaned myself against the wall of the tunnel. When only the strange halo showed, bobbing eerily away from me through the near—distant darkness, I managed to rouse myself from my weary torpor to follow as quickly as my leaden limbs would allow …
We covered most of the rest of the way—about a mile as I judged it, on a slightly downward course—without further talk, the silence only being broken when we came to a large, obviously artificial gallery. There I was led past a number of strangely inscribed tunnel entrances—and cautioned against ever attempting their exploration! I was ordered to shun one hole in particular, with the lizard—thing offering vague but dark hints of grim retribution should I ever disobey.
My only desire by then was to sleep (I was genuinely, terribly fatigued even knowing myself to be already asleep) and I did not bother myself to answer. Indeed, my weariness was such as to make me incapable of total comprehension, so that when finally my grotesque guide ushered me beneath one of the gallery’s archways, informing me that the cave within was to be my own personal quarter, I was only too pleased to sink down there and then in the darkness of Bokrug’s departure to pass almost immediately into deep, still slumbers within slumbers …
XI: Reflections in a New Environment
Dream-Phase Five
[The Masters Case: From the Recordings of Dr Eugene T. Thappon]
It is somehow hard for me now to try to describe my new ‘home’ in that strange cave leading off from the great gallery. There is a hazy patch in this particular area of my memory, which, like the haze that follows close on more orthodox dreams, threatens to blot out the sequence entirely. I remember that lining the walls there were diversely shaped, handy-sized patches of oddly resilient, fibrous, blossomless heather, of remarkably regular surfaces: apparently grown by nature to furnish beds, tables and chairs as proper-seeming and as comfortable to me as any I had known in the waking world.
I found myself on one of those ‘beds’ on rising from my exhausted sleep within that greater sleep, and if I had had any doubts whatsoever before of the fact that I was only dreaming or suffering incredibly detailed hallucinations, well, such doubts had obviously been unfounded. I knew this as soon as I saw the firefly cloud hovering with luminous familiarity above my head and lighting up in subdued but almost friendly phosphorescence all but the most secret corners of my cave. I had somehow ‘acquired’ a halo, exactly similar to that possessed by my Bokrug archetype.
Subsequent exploration led me to the discovery in a smaller adjoining cave of a pool of crystal water lying in a smooth—lined basin of stalagmitic rock. This basin had been formed by the constant dripping of water from the tip of one lone stalactite in the middle of the low ceiling. I remember how at first sight of the pool, with my face mirrored darkly in a patch of reflected firefly light, I became aware of yet another progression of my fantastic dream—state. For I had a beard and moustache, and I found it amazing that my mind could so ‘rationalize’ as to create for me these ‘natural’ alterations in my dream—physiognomy. Likewise my clothes were soiled and tattered and I had lost my shoes. I remembered having had my shoes in that earlier part of the sequence at the cave of the mushrooms. And all this, I conjectured, was but the delirious fruit of my fever; while, in all probability, I was still asleep at The George or, at worst, motionless on some specialist’s couch in Harley Street—‘in a condition of extreme shock and nervous exhaustion …’
Further exploration only went to substantiate the extent of my mental degeneration, for even natural body-functions had not been overlooked in the great hallucination, and I found a small-mouthed pit with a raised rim—looking like a small crater or blowhole—in that corner of the main cave most removed from the resilient beds of etiolated heather. So … I could wash and answer the calls of nature … but what of food? The lizard-thing had said I would be brought food, and having checked my cave over and discovered all there was to know of it, suddenly I found myself hungry.
I believe that it was while I was taking my first wash in the oddly—warm water of the rock-basin that I sensed a presence in the main cave. By the time I returned through the low, natural doorway to my “living-room”, my visitor—whoever or whatever—had gone; but resting upon one of the higher, flat-topped, heather-like clumps of growth I found a laden platter. Well, perhaps laden is not the best word; but at least the platter contained food of sorts. There were three poached fish, each about six inches long and quite fat, and half-a-dozen small mushrooms. The platter was garnished with what looked like greyish lettuce. It was the first real food I had taken in—how long? I remember eating the lot with relish.
After my meal I sat on one of the beds and thought one or two things out. To the best of my knowledge at that time, a meal taken in a dream could not possibly be physically satisfying, and yet I actually knew the feeling of satisfaction! Could it be that this was my dream-interpretation of a parallel occurrence in the real world? Supposing for a moment that I was in a coma of sorts, under care somewhere—in a hospital, for instance—and supposing further that I was
being regularly fed intravenously or by some other means. It would be a simple matter for a mind as far gone as mine to interpret the feeling of well-being derived from such feedings as being actual hunger-relief sensations brought on by feeding myself on the fare of this cavern-world. This was a conclusion I could well accept, but I did not like to dwell on the same theory as applied to my answering the calls of nature! Someone, somewhere, must be finding in me a very difficult charge indeed! But of course, all that was sheer guesswork.
And yet (I told myself desperately), my mind must at least be attempting to hold on to a degree of rationality. Otherwise I would not now be able to make these … well, these rationalizations!
I went back to square one, right back to my accident, dwelling in detail on the things that had happened to me since.
Surely this prolonged dream, or sequence of connected dream-hallucinations, was no more fantastic than that other dream I had known on my first night in Bleakstone, when I had completely relived three years of my earlier life in one single night! And surely there could be no stranger nightmare than that I had known when the fossilized bones had taken on living flesh before my eyes? And what of my earlier symptoms following hard on the accident, when my mind used to blank completely? On those occasions (I tried to console myself), I had been far worse off than now, for then at times my brain had literally ceased to function; whereas now, horrible though the experiences were, at least I did know experiences! Better to dream and be aware of it than to wander mindlessly as I had on that occasion when I had thought to go rock-hounding!
Often after that first time—in the ‘days’ that followed—I would sit in my mind-cave and ponder the strangeness of it all. But at other times my lonely ponderings were relieved by the presence of a visitor, Bokrug, keeping his word (or obeying the instructions of my errant Id), coming to talk to me of the waking world and other things, and to bring me food.