Mythos and Horror Stories Page 12

  “The second morning we reached the whitewashed houses of Pompelo and trembled at the fear that was on the place. There was a wooden amphitheater east of the village, and a large open plain on the west. All the immediate ground was flat, but the Pyrenees rose up green and menacing on the north, looking nearer than they were. Scribonius Libo had reached there ahead of us with his secretary, Q. Trebellius Pollio, and he and the edile Mela greeted us in the forum. We all —Libo, Pollio, Mela, Balbutius, Asellius and I— went into the curia (an excellent new building with a Corinthian portico) and discussed ways and means, and I saw that the proconsul was with me heart and soul.

  “But Balbutius and Asellius continued to argue and at times the discussion grew very tense. Libo was an utterly admirable old man, and he insisted on going into the hills with the rest of us and seeing the awful revelations of the night. Mela, ghastly with fright, promised horses to those of us who were not mounted. He had pluck—for he meant to go himself.

  “It is impossible even to suggest the stark and ghastly terror which hung over this phase of the dream.

  “Surely there never was such evil as that which brooded over the accursed town as the sinking sun threw long menacing shadows amidst the reddening afternoon. The legionaries fancied they heard the rustling of stealthy, unseen and ominously deliberate presences in the black encircling woods. Occasionally a torch had to be lighted momentarily in order to keep the frightened three hundred together, but for the most part it was a dreadful scramble through the dark. A slit of northern sky was visible ahead between the terrible, cliff-like slopes that encompassed us and I marked the chair of Cassiopeia and the golden powder of the Via Lactea. Far, far ahead and above and appearing to merge imperceptibly into the heavens, the lines of remoter peaks could be discerned, each capped by a sickly point of unholy flame. And still the distant, hellish drums pounded incessantly on.

  “At length the route grew too steep for the horses and the six of us who were mounted were forced to take to our feet. We left the horses tethered to a clump of scrub oaks and stationed ten men to guard them, though heaven knows it was no night nor place for petty thieves to be abroad! Am then we scrambled on—jostling, stumbling and sometimes climbing with our hands’ help up places little short of perpendicular. Suddenly a sound behind us made every man pause as if hit by an arrow. It was from the horses we had left, and it did not cease. They were not neighing but screaming. They were screaming, mad with some terror beyond any this earth knows. No sound came up from the men we had left with them. Still they screamed on, and the soldiers around us stood trembling and whimpering and muttering fragments of a prayer to Rome’s gods, and the gods of the East and the gods of the barbarians.

  “Then there came a sharp scuffle and yell from the front of the column which made Asellius call quaveringly for a torch. There was a prostrate figure weltering in a growing and glistening pool of blood and we saw by the faint flare that it was the young guide Accius. He had killed himself because of the sound he had heard. He, who had been born and bred at the foot of those terrible hills and had heard dark whispers of their secrets, knew well why the horses had screamed. And because he knew, he had snatched a sword from the scabbard of the nearest soldier—the centurion P. Vibulanus—and had plunged it full-length into his own breast.

  “At this point pandemonium broke loose because of something noticed by such of the men as were able to notice anything at all. The sky had been snuffed out. No longer did Cassiopeia and the Via Lactea glimmer betwixt the hills, but stark blackness loomed behind the continuously swelling fires on the distant peaks. And still the horses screamed and the far-off drums pounded hideously and incessantly on.

  “Cackling laughter broke out in the black woods of the vertical slopes that hemmed us in and around the swollen fires of the distant peaks we saw prancing and leaping the awful and cyclopean silhouettes of things that were neither men nor beasts, but fiendish amalgams of both—things with huge flaring ears and long waving trunks that howled and gibbered and pranced in the skyless night. And a cold wind coiled purposively down from the empty abyss, winding sinuously about us till we started in fresh panic and struggled like Laocoon and his sons in the serpent’s grasp.

  “There were terrible sights in the light of the few shaking torches. Legionaries trampled one another to death and screamed more hoarsely than the horses far below. Of our immediate party Trebellius Pollio had long vanished, and I saw Mela go down beneath the heavy caligae of a gigantic Aquitanian. Balbutius had gone mad and was grinning and simpering out an old Fescennine verse recalled from the Latin countryside of his boyhood. Asellius tried to cut his own throat, but the sentient wind held him powerless, so that he could do nothing but scream and scream and scream above the cackling laughter and the screaming horses and the distant drums and the howling colossal shapes that capered about the demon-fires on the peaks.

  “I myself was frozen to the helplessness of a statue and could not move or speak. Only old Publius Libo the Proconsul was strong enough to face it like a Roman Publius Scribonius Libo, who had gone through the Jugurthine and Mithridatic and social wars—Publius Libo three times praetor and three times consul of the republic, in whose atrium stood the ancestral forms of a hundred heroes.

  He and he alone had the voice of a man and of a general an triumphator. I can see him now in the dimming light of those horrible torches, among that fear-struck stampede of the doomed. I can hear him still as he spoke his last words gathering up his toga with the dignity of a Roman and a consul: ‘Malitia vetus—malilia vetus est—venit—tanden, venit…’

  “And then the wooded encircling slopes burst forth with louder cackles and I saw that they were slowly moving. The hills —the terrible living hills—were closing up upon their prey. The Miri Nigri had called their terrible gods out of the void.

  “Able to shriek at last, I awoke in a sea of cold perspiration.

  “Calagurris, as you probably know, is a real and well-known town of Roman Spain, famed as the birthplace of the rhetorician Quintilianus. Upon consulting a classical dictionary I found Pompelo also to be real, and surviving today as the Pyrenean Village of Pampelona.”

  He ceased speaking, and for a moment the three men were silent. Then Algernon said: “The Chinaman had a strange dream too. He spoke of the horror on the mountains—of great things that came clumping down from the hills at nightfall.”

  Little nodded. “Mongolians as a rule are extremely psychic,” he said. “I have known several whose clairvoyant gifts were superior to a yoga adept’s often astounding feats of precognition.”

  “And you think that Hsieh Ho’s dream was a prophecy? whispered Imbert.

  “I do. Some monstrous unfettering is about to take place. That which for two thousand years has lain somnolent will stir again and the ‘great things’ will descend from their frightful lair on the Spanish hills drawn cityward through' the will of Chaugnar Faugn. We are in propinquity to the primal, hidden horror that festers at the root of being, with, the old, hidden loathsomeness which the Greeks andj Romans veiled under the symbolical form of a man-beast— the feeder, the all. The Greeks knew, for the horror left its lair to ravage, striding eastward in the dawn across Europe, wading waist-deep in the dark Ionian seas, looming monstrous at nightfall over Delos, and Samothrace and far-off Crete. A nimbus of starfoam engirdled its waist; suns, constellations gleamed in its eyes. But its breath brought madness, and its embrace, death. The feeder—the all.”

  The telephone bell at Little’s elbow was jangling disconcertingly. Stretching forth a tremulous hand he grasped the receiver firmly and laid it against his cheek. “Hello,” he whispered into the mouthpiece. “What is it? Who is speaking?”

  “From the Manhattan Museum.” The words smote ominously upon his ear. “Is Mr. Algernon Harris there? I phoned Doctor Imbert’s house and they gave me this number.”

  “Yes, Harris is here.” Little’s voice was vibrant with apprehension. “I’ll call him.”

  He turned the i
nstrument over to Algernon and sank back exhaustedly in his chair. For a moment the latter conversed in a low tone; then an expression of stunned incredulity appeared on his face. His hand shook as he put back the receiver and tottered toward the fireplace. For an instant he stood staring intensely into the coals, his fingers gripping the mantel’s edge so tightly that his knuckles showed white. When he turned there was a look of utter consternation in his eyes.

  “Chaugnar Faugn has disappeared,” he cried. “Chaugnar Faugn has left the museum. No one saw him go and the idiot who phoned thinks that a thief removed him. Or possibly one of the attendants. But we know how unlikely that is.”

  “I’m afraid we do,” Little said, grimly. “I am to blame,” Algernon went on quickly. “I should have insisted they patrol the alcove. I should have at least explained to them that someone might try to steal Chaugnar Faugn, even if Ulman’s story had to be kept from them.”

  He shook his head in helpless frustration.

  “No... no... that would have done no good. A watchman would have been utterly impotent to cope with such a horror. Chaugnar Faugn would have destroyed him

  hideously in an instant. And now it is loose in the streets!”

  He walked to the window and stared across the glittering harbor at the darkly looming skyline of lower Manhattan. “It is loose over there,” he cried, raising his arm and pointing. “It is crouching in the shadows somewhere, alert and waiting, preparing to...” He broke off abruptly, as if the vision his mind had conjured up was too ghastly to dwell upon.

  Little rose and laid a steadying hand on Algernon’s arm. “I haven’t said I couldn’t help,” he said. “Though Chaugnar Faugn is a very terrible menace it isn’t quite as omnipotent as Ulman thought. It and its brothers are incarnate manifestations of a very ancient, a very malignant hyperdimensional entity. Or call it a principle, if you wish—a principle so antagonistic to life as we know it that it becomes a spreading blight, as destructive as a nest of cancer cells would be if cancer could be transplanted by surgical means into healthy tissue, and continue to grow and proliferate until every vestige of healthy tissue has been destroyed. But it is a cancer whose growth I can at least retard. And if I am successful I can send it back to its point of origin beyond the galactic universe, can cut it asunder forever from our three-dimensional world. Had I known that the horror still lurked in the Pyrenees I should have gone, months ago, to send it hack. Yes, even though the thought of it now fills me with a loathing unspeakable, I should have gone.

  “I am not,” he continued, “a merely theoretical dreamer. Though I am by temperament disposed toward speculations of a mystical nature, I have forged a very concrete and effective weapon to combat the cosmic malignancies. If you’ll step into my laboratory I’ll show you something which should restore your confidence in the experimental capacity of the human mind when there is but one choice confronting it—to survive or go down forever into everlasting night and darkness.”

  ***

  6. The Time-Space Machine

  Roger Little’s laboratory was illumed by a single bluish lamp imbedded in the concrete of its sunken floor. An infinite diversity of mechanisms lined the walls and sprawled their precise lengths on long tables and dangled eerily from hooks set in the high, domed ceiling; mechanisms a -glitter in blue-lit seclusion, a strange, bizarre foreglimpse into the alchemy and magic of a far-distant future, with spheres and condensers and gleaming metal rods in lieu of stuffed crocodiles and steaming elixirs.

  All of the contrivances were arresting, but one was so extraordinary in size and complexity that it dominated the others and riveted Algernon’s attention. He seemed unable to drag his gaze from the thing. It was a strange agglomeration of metallic spheres and portions of spheres, of great bluish globes surrounded by tiny clusters of halfglobes and quarter-globes, whose surfaces converged in a most fantastic way. And from the globes there sprouted at grotesque angles metallic crescents with converging tips.

  To Algernon’s excited imagination the thing wore a quasi-reptilian aspect. “It’s like a toad’s face,” he muttered. “Bulbous and bestial.”

  Little nodded. “It’s a triumph of mechanical ugliness, isn’t it? Yet it would have been deified in Ancient Greece—by Archimedes especially. He would have exalted it above all his Conoids and Parabolas.”

  “What function does it perform?” asked Algernon.

  “A sublime one. It’s a time-space machine. But I’d rather not discuss its precise function until I’ve shown you how it works. I want you to study its face as it waxes non-Euclidean. When you’ve glimpsed a fourth-dimensional figure you’ll be prepared to concede, I think, that the claims I make for it are not extravagant. I know of no more certain corrective for an excess of skepticism. I was the Critique of Pure Reason personified until I looked upon a skinned sphere—then I grew very humble, reverent toward the great Suspected.

  “Watch now.” He reached forward, grasped a switch and with a swift downward movement of his right arm set the machine in motion. At first the small spheres and the crescents revolved quickly and the large spheres slowly; then the large spheres literally spun while the small spheres lazed and then both small spheres and large spheres moved in unison. Then the spheres stopped altogether, but only for an instant, while something of movement seemed to flow into them from the revolving crescents. Then the crescents stopped and the spheres moved, in varying tempo, faster and faster, and their movement seemed to flow back into the crescents. Then both crescents and spheres began to move in unison, faster and faster and faster, until the entire mass seemed to merge into a shape paradoxical, outrageous, unthinkable—a sphenoid with a non-Euclidean face, a geometric blasphemy that was at once isosceles and equilateral, convex and concave.

  Algernon stared in horror. “What in God’s name is that?” he cried.

  “You are looking on a fourth-dimensional figure,” said Little soothingly. “Steady now.”

  For an instant nothing happened; then a light, greenish, blinding, shot from the center of the crazily distorted figure and streamed across the opposite wall, limning on the smooth cement a perfect circle.

  But only for a second was the wall illumed. With an abrupt movement Little shot the lever upward and its radiance dimmed, and vanished. “Another moment, and that wall would have crumbled away,” he said.

  With fascination Algernon watched the outrageous sphenoid grow indistinct, watched it blur and disappear amidst a resurgence of spheres.

  “That light,” cried Little exultantly, “will send Chaugnar Faugn back through time. It will reverse its decadent randomness—disincarnate and disembody it, and send it back forever.”

  “But I don’t understand,” murmured Algernon. “What do you mean by randomness."

  “I mean that this machine can work havoc with entropy!” There was a ring of exaltation in Little’s voice.

  “Entropy?” Algernon scowled. “I’m not sure that I understand. I know what entropy is in thermodynamics, of course, but I’m not sure...”

  “I’ll explain,” said Little. “You are of course familiar with the A B C’s of Einsteinian physics and are aware that time is relatively arrowless, that the sequence in which we view events in nature is not a cosmic actuality and that our conviction that we are going somewhere in time is a purely human illusion conditioned by our existence on this particular planet and the limitations which our five senses impose upon us. We divide time into past, present and future, but in reality an event’s sequence in time depends wholly on the position in space from which it is viewed. Events which occurred thousands of years ago on this planet haven’t as yet taken place to a hypothetical observer situated billions and billions of light years remote from us. Thus, cosmically speaking, we can not say of an event that it has happened and will never happen again or that it is about to happen and has never happened before, because “before” to us is “after” to intelligences situated elsewhere in space and time.

  “But though our familiar time-divisio
ns are purely arbitrary there is omnipresent in nature a principle called entropy which, as Eddington has pointed out, equips time with a kind of empirical arrow. The entire universe appears to be ‘running down.’ It is the consensus of astronomical opinion that suns and planets and electrons are constantly breaking up, becoming more and more disorganized. Billions of years ago some mysterious dynamic, which Sir James Jeans has likened to the Finger of God, streamed across primeval space and created the universe of stars in a state of almost perfect integration, welded them into a system so highly organized that there was only the tiniest manifestation of the random element anywhere in it. The random element in nature is the uncertain element—the principle which brings about disorganizations, disintegration, decay.

  “Let us suppose that two mechanical men, robots, are tossing a small ball to and fro, to and fro. The process may go on indefinitely, for the mechanical creatures do not tire and there is nothing to make the ball swerve from its course. But now let us suppose that a bird in flight collides with the hall, sends it spinning so that it misses the hand of the receiving robot. What happens? Both robots begin to behave grotesquely. Missing the ball, their arms sweep through the empty air, making wider and wider curves and they stagger forward perhaps, and collapse in each other’s arms. The random, the uncertain element has entered their organized cosmos and they have ceased to function.

  “This tendency of the complex to disintegrate, of the perfectly-balanced to run amuck, is called entropy. It is entropy that provides time with an arrow and, disrupting nebulae, plays midwife to the birth of planets from star- wombs incalculable. It is entropy that cools great orbs, hotter than Betelgeuse, more fiery than Arcturus through all the outer vastnesses, reducing them to sterility, to whirling motes of chaos.