Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (20 page)

I nodded and reached for my hat. “You have made it so convincing that I cannot remain and discuss it with you. I intend to walk until morning. I intend to walk until I am too weary to care, or think, or remember.”

“It is a very great story!” he shouted at me, but I passed down the stairs and out of the house without replying.

It was past midnight when the telephone rang. I laid down the book I was reading and lowered the receiver.

“Hello. Who is there?” I asked.

“Frank, this is Howard!” The voice was strangely high-pitched. “Come as quickly as you can.
They’ve come back!
And Frank, the sign is powerless. I’ve tried the sign, but the droning is getting louder, and a dim shape.…” Howard’s voice trailed off disastrously.

I fairly screamed into the receiver. “Courage, man! Do not let them suspect that you are afraid. Make the sign again and again. I will come at once.”

Howard’s voice came again, more hoarsely this time. “The shape is growing clearer and clearer. And there is nothing I can do! Frank, I have lost the power to make the sign. I have forfeited all right to the protection of the sign. I’ve become a priest of the Devil. That story—I should not have written that story.”

“Show them that you are unafraid!” I cried.

“I’ll try! I’ll try! Ah, my God! The shape is.…”

I did not wait to hear more. Frantically seizing my hat and coat, I dashed down the stairs and out into the street. As I reached the curb a dizziness seized me. I clung to a lamp-post to keep from falling, and waved my hand madly at a fleeing taxi. Luckily the driver saw me. The car stopped, and I staggered out into the street and climbed into it.

“Quick!” I shouted. “Take me to 10 Brooklyn Heights!”

“Yes, sir. Cold night, ain’t it?”

“Cold!” I shouted. “It will be cold indeed when they get in. It will be cold indeed when they start to.…”

The driver stared at me in amazement. “That’s all right, sir,” he said. “We’ll get you home all right, sir. Brooklyn Heights, did you say, sir?”

“Brooklyn Heights,” I groaned, and collapsed against the cushions.

As the car raced forward I tried not to think of the horror that awaited me. I clutched desperately at straws.
It is conceivable
, I thought,
that Howard has gone temporarily insane. How could the horror have found him among so many millions of people? It cannot be that
they
have deliberately sought him out. It cannot be that they would deliberately choose him from among such multitudes. He is too insignificant—all human beings are too insignificant. They would
never deliberately angle for human beings. They would never deliberately trawl for human beings—but they did seek Henry Wells. And what did Howard say? “I have become a priest of the Devil.” Why not
their
priest? What if Howard has become their priest on Earth? What if his story has made him their priest?

The thought was a nightmare to me, and I put it furiously from me.
He will have courage to resist them
, I thought.
He will show them that he is not afraid
.

“Here we are, sir. Shall I help you in, sir?”

The car had stopped, and I groaned as I realized that I was about to enter what might prove to be my tomb. I descended to the sidewalk and handed the driver all the change that I possessed. He stared at me in amazement.

“You’ve given me too much,” he said. “Here, sir …”

But I waved him aside and dashed up the stoop of the house before me. As I fitted a key into the door I could hear him muttering: “Craziest drunk I ever seen! He gives me four bucks to drive him ten blocks, and doesn’t want no thanks or nothin’.…”

The lower hall was unlighted. I stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted. “I’m here, Howard! Can you come down?”

There was no answer. I waited for perhaps ten seconds, but not a sound came from the room above.

“I’m coming up!” I shouted in desperation, and started to climb the stairs. I was trembling all over.
They’ve got him
, I thought.
I’m too late. Perhaps I had better not—great God, what was that?

I was unbelievably terrified. There was no mistaking the sounds. In the room above, someone was volubly pleading and crying aloud in agony. Was it Howard’s voice that I heard? I caught a few words indistinctly. “Crawling—ugh! Crawling—ugh! Oh, have pity! Cold and clee-ar. Crawling—ugh! God in heaven!”

I had reached the landing, and when the pleadings rose to hoarse shrieks I fell to my knees, and made against my body, and upon the wall beside me, and in the air—the sign. I made the primal sign that had saved us in Mulligan Wood, but this time I made it crudely, not with fire, but with fingers that trembled and caught at my clothes, and I made it without courage or hope, made it darkly, with a conviction that nothing could save me.

And then I got up quickly and went on up the stairs. My prayer was that they would take me quickly, that my sufferings should be brief under the stars.

The door of Howard’s room was ajar. By a tremendous effort I stretched out my hand and grasped the knob. Slowly I swung it inward.

For a moment I saw nothing but the motionless form of Howard
lying upon the floor. He was lying upon his back. His knees were drawn up and he had raised his hand before his face, palms outward, as if to blot out a vision unspeakable.

Upon entering the room I had deliberately, by lowering my eyes, narrowed my range of vision. I saw only the floor and the lower section of the room. I did not want to raise my eyes. I had lowered them in self-protection because I dreaded what the room held.

I did not want to raise my eyes, but there were forces, powers at work in the room, which I could not resist. I knew that if I looked up, the horror might destroy me, but I had no choice.

Slowly, painfully, I raised my eyes and stared across the room. It would have been better, I think, if I had rushed forward immediately and surrendered to the thing that towered there. The vision of that terrible, darkly shrouded shape will come between me and the pleasures of the world as long as I remain in the world.

From the ceiling to the floor it towered, and it threw off blinding light. And pierced by the shafts, whirling around and around, were the pages of Howard’s story.

In the center of the room, between the ceiling and the floor, the pages whirled about, and the light burned through the sheets, and descending in spiraling shafts entered the brain of my poor friend. Into his head, the light was pouring in a continuous stream, and above, the Master of the light moved with a slow swaying of its entire bulk. I screamed and covered my eyes with my hands, but still the Master moved—back and forth, back and forth. And still the light poured into the brain of my friend.

And then there came from the mouth of the Master a most awful sound.… I had forgotten the sign that I had made three times below in the darkness. I had forgotten the high and terrible mystery before which all of the invaders were powerless. But when I saw it forming itself in the room, forming itself immaculately, with a terrible integrity above the downstreaming light, I knew that I was saved.

I sobbed and fell upon my knees. The light dwindled, and the Master shriveled before my eyes.

And then from the walls, from the ceiling, from the floor, there leapt flame—a white and cleansing flame that consumed, that devoured and destroyed forever.

But my friend was dead.

U
ntil recently, if a traveler in north central Wisconsin took the left fork at the junction of the Brule River highway and the Chequamegon pike on the way to Pashepaho, he would find himself in country so primitive that it would seem remote from all human contact. If he drove on along the little-used road, he might in time pass a few tumble-down shacks where presumably people had once lived and which have long ago been taken back by the encroaching forest; it is not desolate country, but an area thick with growth, and over all its expanse there persists an intangible aura of the sinister, a kind of ominous oppression of the spirit quickly manifest to even the most casual traveler, for the road he has taken becomes ever more and more difficult
to travel, and is eventually lost just short of a deserted lodge built on the edge of a clear blue lake around which century-old trees brood eternally, a country where the only sounds are the cries of the owls, the whippoorwills, and the eerie loons at night, and the wind’s voice in the trees, and—but is it always the wind’s voice in the trees? And who can say whether the snapped twig is the sign of an animal passing—or of something more, some other creature beyond man’s ken?

For the forest surrounding the abandoned lodge at Rick’s Lake had a curious reputation long before I myself knew it, a reputation which transcended similar stories about similar primeval places. There were odd rumors about something that dwelt in the depths of the forest’s darkness—by no means the conventional wild whisperings of ghosts—of something half-animal, half-man, fearsomely spoken of by such natives as inhabited the edges of that region, and referred to only by stubborn head-shakings among the Indians who occasionally came out of that country and made their way south. The forest had an evil reputation; it was nothing short of that; and already, before the turn of the century, it had a history that gave pause even to the most intrepid adventurer.

The first record of it was left in the writings of a missionary on his way through that country to come to the aid of a tribe of Indians reported to the post at Chequamegon Bay in the north to be starving. Fr. Piregard vanished, but the Indians later brought in his effects: a sandal, his rosary, and a prayerbook in which he had written certain curious words which had been carefully preserved: “I have the conviction that some creature is following me. I thought at first it was a bear, but I am now compelled to believe that it is something incredibly more monstrous than anything on this earth. Darkness is falling, and I believe I have developed a slight delirium, for I persist in hearing strange music and other curious sounds which can surely not derive from any natural source. There is also a disturbing illusion as of great footsteps which actually shake the earth, and I have several times encountered a very large footprint which varies in shape.…”

The second record is far more sinister. When Big Bob Hiller, one of the most rapacious lumber barons of the entire Midwest, began to encroach upon the Rick’s Lake country in the middle of the last century, he could not fail to be impressed by the stand of pine in the area near the lake, and, though he did not own it, he followed the usual custom of the lumber barons and sent his men in from an adjoining piece he did own, under the intended explanation that he did not know where his line ran. Thirteen men failed to return from that first day’s work on the edge of the forest area surrounding Rick’s Lake; two of their bodies were never recovered; four were found—inconceivably—in the lake, several miles from where they had been cutting timber; the
others were discovered at various places in the forest. Hiller thought he had a lumber war on his hands, laid his men off to mislead his unknown opponent, and then suddenly ordered them back to work in the forbidden region. After he had lost five more men, Hiller pulled out, and no hand since his time touched the forest, save for one or two individuals who took up land there and moved into the area.