The Dreams in the Witch House
A story of mathematics, witchcraft
and Walpurgis Night, in which the horror creeps and grows—a new tale by
the author of "The Rats in the Walls"
WHETHER
the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams
Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding,
festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed
garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and
formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were
growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had
long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem
like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black
city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions,
and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough
to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed
with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the
noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other
fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its
clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches
hid from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor
was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable
room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had
likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the
last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had
gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled
out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the
curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky
fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean
calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when
one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of
multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales
and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to
be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it
was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect
his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in
the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The
professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had
voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had
stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets
that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library.
But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some
terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten
of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties
of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House—that, indeed, was why
he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about
Keziah Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the
Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She
had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point
out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces
beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used
at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone
beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had
spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of
Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and
vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer
thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than
two hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham
whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the
narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain
sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near
May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's
attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry,
sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town
and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved
to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the
house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap
lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but
he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had
more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth
Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost
modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic
designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a
week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to
have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one
had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had
grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman
till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the
sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal
eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded
his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy
tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of
unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow,
small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and
there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that
monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most
intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out
twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the
singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones
whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the
north wall slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end,
while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction.
Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones,
there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to
the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the
straight outer wall on the house's north side, though a view from the
exterior showed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote
date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting
floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the
cob-webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a
bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and
secured by the stout wooden pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount
of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him
investigate either of these two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and
ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a
mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding
their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent
reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not
through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the
boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered
away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now
appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was
on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February.
For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been
having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter
advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the
corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall.
About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies
worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year
examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was
scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost
unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying
impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on
the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats
in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching
seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the
slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling; and when
it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman
always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its
time before descending to engulf him utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell
that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and
in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which
his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and
about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence
past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The
yellowed country records containing her testimony and that of her
accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human
experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which
served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their
incredible details.
That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called
by the townspeople "Brown Jenkin"—seemed to have been the fruit of a
remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than
eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours,
too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses
said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its
sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like
tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and
was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its
voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages.
Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him
with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive
hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold
more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient
records and the modern whispers.
Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless
abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered
sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose
relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did
not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced
a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own
condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and
torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective;
but he felt that his physical organization and faculties were somehow
marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a
certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with
indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which
appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the
organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind,
though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled
or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate
categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and
which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of
conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to
him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their
motions than the members of the other categories.
All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond
description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the
inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes,
and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as
groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and
intricate arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.
Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever
one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him,
he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how
the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved
himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain
entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally
with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which
permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre or
rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all
the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a
constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of
intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable
fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw
Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain
lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into
the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to
keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the
centuried room, showing in a violet mist the convergence of angled
planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would
appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him
over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny,
bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away before
the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long,
sharp, canine teeth; Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but
each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the
obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail a tin
over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole, in making
which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment
of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he
could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when
every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D
and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up
lost ground before the end of the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter
preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to
be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble
a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could
account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone
whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near
the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and
seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost
shivering—especially the first time when an overgrown rat darting across
the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think
irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears
were being mirrored in his disordered dreams. That the influence of the
old house was unwholesome he could not deny, but traces of his early
morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was
responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the touch abated
he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however,
were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked
he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he
remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had
talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been
urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of
greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics,
though the other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an
intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished
Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other
problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon
there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of
theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the
cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the
transgalactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the
tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian
space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone
with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations
caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and
solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his
sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly
beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the
earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity
of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a
passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a
passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps
one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss
of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of
three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension;
and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part
of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of
some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets
belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other
space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of
mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or
zones of space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional
realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of
additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or
outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be
likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be
fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any
given dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive
of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very
clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here
was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points.
Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of
higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down
the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge
of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever
did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers
said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from
his bed and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night
was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of
hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must
have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were
always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of
aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself,
even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching
came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the
slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for
faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes
the illusion of such things was agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for
twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his
clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one
fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and
unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had
come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent.
It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after
knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very
badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake.
On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and when told of
the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and
with only his night clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if
reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour
on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The
door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible
foothold outside the narrow window.
As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed
by the whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe
Mazurewicz who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long,
rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry
sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at
times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father
Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church—could bring him relief. Now he was
praying because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was
Walpurgis Night, when hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the
slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a
very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic
Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about
it. There would be bad doings, and a child or two would probably be
missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old
country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and
count one's beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown
Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's room, nor
anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They
must be up to something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the
month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he
had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see
a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the
still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed
his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible
thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was
certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth
dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source
of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence
come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft,
stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving.
And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly
persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about
the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was
that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle
through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and
full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth,
unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants,
and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the
vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter
preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness,
and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her
bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her
shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression
on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he
awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened.
He must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the throne of
Azathoth at the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He
must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new secret
name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him
from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of
Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had
seen the name "Azathoth" in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner
where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize
at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she
was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown
Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its
yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet
phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and more
into Gilman's head, and he could remember in the morning how it had
pronounced the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and
Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the
fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least
flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of
life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others
were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to
think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large
congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much
smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface
angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead
as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths,
cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague
shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some
monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred.
Gilman was half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with
the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed
the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic
neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss
and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused
green light. He was barefooted and in his nightclothes, and when he
tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A
swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from
sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds, that might surge
out of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the
old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees
and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin
pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which
it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not
originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by
the angle of the old woman's arms and the direction of the small
monstrosity's paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in
the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he
fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily
angled garret of the eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all
his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly
irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant
spot on the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes
changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at
vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for lunch and as he threaded the
narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the
southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street,
and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps
there was a connection with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at
least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still
manage to walk away from the pull, so with great resolution he headed
against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street.
By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a
cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed
upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient
standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living
figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was
certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself
so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving,
too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground.
When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off
the bridge and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront
alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and
invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient
figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous
resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the
rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes
shifting gradually westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught
the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in
desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden
streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it
might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond
Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The
urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into
space, and suddenly he realized just where the source of the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim
on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between
Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever
since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been
underfoot, and now it was roughly south but stealing toward the west.
What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would
it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged
himself back to the sinister old house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both
anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was
about the witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—and
it was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight.
Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that
Gilman's window was dark, but then he had seen the faint violet glow
within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody
in Arkham knew it was Keziah's witch-light which played near Brown
Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this
before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and
her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes
he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light
seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman's
room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would
be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from
some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his
throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home
the night before; yet the mention of a violet light in the garret window
was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which
always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those
lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses,
and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the
dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the
fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked
around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must
check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though
he hated to ask.
Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a
point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must
stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he
climbed to the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that
the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room
and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southward,
but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the
closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped
down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with
heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting
closer than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish
gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses,
though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that
kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came
the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance
loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium
and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo
were madly and inextricably blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace
above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced
planes, domes, minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and
numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of
metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare
from a poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks
of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an
infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of
higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below
stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would
well up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined
polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in
bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based
on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The
balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while
along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of
grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole
balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour
could not be guessed in the chaos of mixed effulgences, and their
nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged
barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like
from a central ring and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the
head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a
system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it
like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly
away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to
the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several
figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about
four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a
maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was
wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look
dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet
below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical
pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets
beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The
sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to
the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous
balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the
touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the
exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off
under his grasp. Still half dazed, he continued to clutch it as his
other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and
he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though
without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the
sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three
were what sent him unconscious; for they were living entities about
eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the
balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of
their lower set of starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with
a smarting sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the
floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary
for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know
where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to
sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between
Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had
taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He
dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in
the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he
stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point
in the blank blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw
that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak
emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to
Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so
curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not
diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and
finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other.
Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he
dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the
lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly
sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three
o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the
pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the
time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over
again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the
ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and
Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if
Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that
the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which
did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on
its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure
which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade.
No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin
radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly
outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there.
In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey
veined with green; and Gilman could see amidst his horror and
bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break,
corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from
screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear.
Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to
Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious
loom-fixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did
not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No,
he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it.
But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds
when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski
called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found
it in the young gentleman's bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked
very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer
things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper.
She certainly knew nothing about it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced
that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to
incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where
had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum
in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as
he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of
the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded
inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he
went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour
which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the
landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found all
dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table,
and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing
to undress. From the closed loft above the slating ceiling he thought he
heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized even
to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong
again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the
fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on
any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt
the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed
and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and
saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him.
But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude,
windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak
just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot.
Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree
of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and
bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape
and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming
violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image
which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly
away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second's dry
rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with
the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the
table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead
black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features:
wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a
shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were
indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been
shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man
did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular
features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open
on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's
right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and
the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's
clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him
sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from
this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his
left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His
recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in
the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he
slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the
door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except
for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end
of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something
would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord
about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the
slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right
size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of
some horrible noise heard in dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had
dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite
would crystallize in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded
to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination
so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were
suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker
abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions were absent.
He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little
polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed
to wisps of mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something
else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into
nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had
not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and
spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics
and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a
hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing,
and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all.
Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had
read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne at the centre of Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very
slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures.
It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had
lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff.
Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him
as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He
looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find
any. He had better, he thought, spinkle flour within the room as well as
outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking
was needed. He knew he did walk and the thing to do now was to stop it.
He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from
space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation
even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away
from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific
direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky
image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle
stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more
bewildering urge.
He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself
against the whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground
floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about.
There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast
and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent
dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that
something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn, haggard
aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others
had remarked during the past week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen
Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious
image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged
just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling
each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis Night, now
only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the
poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman's
room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and of the
violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer
through Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz,
after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door.
There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his
voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious
creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by
Gilman's late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand,
and by the nearness of traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand.
That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from
Desrochers' keyhole listenings that the delusive notion of the violet
dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine
they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of
action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood's room and avoid sleeping
alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or
rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile
they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to
certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been
found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the
poisoning of those rats in the walls.
Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that
day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them
with considerable success. During a free period he showed the queer
image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested,
though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That
night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to
the second-storey room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free
from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the
whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect
immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no
tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was
putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk
among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly
excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and
finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good
Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he
insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above
him on the first and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul
Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at
night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs.
Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since
All-Hallows. But such naïve reports could mean very little, and Gilman
let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host's
dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in
an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without
success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter
alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific
curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected
to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and
tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three
other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was
absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond
with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places
reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery
remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the
museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-hole appeared
in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during
the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and
scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He
did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought
he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose
image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who
she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a
rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed
to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his
imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would
sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed
the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully
engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic
and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah
Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for
thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information.
The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and
handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by
no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of
passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the uselessness
of material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what
underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from
mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman
added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could
foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible
dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were
enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by
entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one's life and
age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration
except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's own or similar
planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and
emerge at some remote period of the earth's history as young as before.
Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly
conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and
ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps
seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and
messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy
or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the "Black Man" of the
witch-cult, and the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon. There
was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or
intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts
as witches' familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue
further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half drunk, and
shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had
heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that
someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the
small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The
beldame's face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little
yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the
heavily-sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A
paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the
hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and
into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed
past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy,
unknown alley of foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient houses
towering up on every hand.
Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in
the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was
beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself
with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black
man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway
on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the
grinning crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves.
There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on
which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a
door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed
the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the
black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry,
and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small,
senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to
carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke
the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the
noisome staircase and into the mud outside, halting only when seized and
choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the
faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom
of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was
terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting
wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching
inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with
growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked
mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew
at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too
deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy
prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door.
The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in
addition to those he could recognize as his there were some smaller,
almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or a table might
make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There
were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and
back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked
Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy
prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more
terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe
Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and
began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no
idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been,
how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how
the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret
chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark,
livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He
put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately
fit. While they were talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he had
heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there
had been no one on the stairs after midnight, though just before
midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously
descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of
year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the
crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe,
for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a
thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly
unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension
and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of
some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University spa,
picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he
never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him
limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to
Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's
Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named
Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it
appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she
assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously.
She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever
since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that
little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on
Walpurgis Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the
room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could
not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had
been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her
friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of
the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a
pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway
just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed
they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark
passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old
woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman
had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame
rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had
meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from
them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but
that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between
the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a
monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing, and only
stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman
must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the
papers were full of this kidnapping business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a
moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the
wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in
his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside
our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had
he been on those nights of demoniac alienage? The roaring twilight
abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the
stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the
stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries
and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist-wound—the
unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat marks—the tales and fears of
the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent
could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day
they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with
the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and
the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock
and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis revels
would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white
stone stands in a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of them
had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing
Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe
insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix,
and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the
fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled
by the praying of the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as
he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for
some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house.
Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the
Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms
said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an
origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for—the hellish chant
of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much
about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her
acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black
cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and
tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat.
He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne
notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he
recognized them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers
must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it
that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown
Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a
fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting
and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy,
determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights
would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the
rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realized bore such a
shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah's—and heard the faint
fumbling at the door.
The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt
himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent
bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron and
all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration
of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable
and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous
burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated
all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the
massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured
reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give
hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped,
violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of
ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the
triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an
infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the
monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in
her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with
curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her
left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman
could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted
in the Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward
and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own
emotions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as
he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting
form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black
gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a
certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the
small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged,
furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while
the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing poignant
abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the
light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion
of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a
resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to
stop the monstrous deed.
In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end
of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending
it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another
instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had
locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face
was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix
grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the
object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was
altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached
feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain
and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and
her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it
entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have
dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received
a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved
to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature's
throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the
crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it
enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something
bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With
one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and
heard it whimper on some level far below.
Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he
let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away,
he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his
reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of
demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him,
and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from
doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had
done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside
the small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed
chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black
man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his
mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which
he needed to guide him back to the normal world alone and unaided for
the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft
above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the
slanting floor or the long-stooped egress he doubted greatly. Besides,
would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a
dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was
wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all
his experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the
Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear
that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even
now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected
all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to
the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of
the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no
earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman
wondered, too, whether he could trust his instincts to take him back to
the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that
green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above
the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the
spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the
mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left
him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant
her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the
whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another
and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against
the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant
shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile
dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young . . .
They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret
room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and
Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the
soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open,
staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the
marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing
rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's crucifix was missing,
Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate what new form his friend's
sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a
"sign" he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed
himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded
from beyond the slanting partition.
When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they
sent for Doctor Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales
where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic
injections which caused him to relax in something like natural
drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times
and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful
process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting
fact.
Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal
sensitiveness—was now stone-deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in
haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the
impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or
endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours
without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest
physician could say.
Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly
easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the
whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought
as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must
leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged.
Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a
ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white
stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had
been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge
negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing
child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never
forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term
because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats
in the partition all the evening, but paid little attention to them.
Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking
began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights and rushed over to his
guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman
nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing
under the bedclothes, and a great stain was beginning to appear on the
blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming
and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers,
Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway,
and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Doctor
Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped
out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the
floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began
to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed
Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had
eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his
rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a
week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient
house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe
Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loom-fixer would never stay sober,
and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible
things.
It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look
at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the near-by
hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open
flooring intervened between the carpet's edge and the baseboard. There
Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one
else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the
prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the
average prints of a rat but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit
that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it
the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it
both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid
odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's rat-poison had worked after all, for
not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance.
Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside
the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be
enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to
hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon
be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious
standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained
stenches upstairs in the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass.
The neighbours acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less
formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house
was condemned as a habitation by the building inspector.
Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been
explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes
almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and was graduated
in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much
disminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain
reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost
as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of Old
Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman's death. It
is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year
when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder
horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered
untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was
not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have
been.
In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the
vacant Witch-House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened,
moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into
the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic storey was
choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the
mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That
ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman's
old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the
gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting
ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the
police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several
professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and
splintered, but clearly recognizable as human—whose manifestly modern
date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only
possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had
supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's physician
decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found
mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather
undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris
also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well
as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then
highly productive of controversy and reflection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books
and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total
disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception,
appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible
forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery
as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery
is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a
wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age
differences of at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred years. To
some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly
inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of
workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst
the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these
things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly
damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman
gave to the college museum, save that it is large, wrought of some
peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly
angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain
the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner
side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous
grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with
broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe
Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before.
Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats,
while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of
Gilman's old room at the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have
theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the
once-sealed triangular space between that partition and the house's
north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in
proportion to its size, than the room itself, though it had a ghastly
layer of older materials which paralyzed the wreckers with horror. In
brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small
children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite
gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On
this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity,
and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was
piled.
In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a
cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object
destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly
superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the
haunted and accursed building.
This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased
rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source
of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic's department of
comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked
out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the
long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile
characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while
the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost
anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature,
monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed
themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later
burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the
shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.
Also see:
About the Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. Wikipedia
Born: August 20, 1890, Providence, RI
Died: March 15, 1937, Providence, RI
Full Name: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Spouse: Sonia Greene (m. 1924–1937)
Buy H. P. Lovecraft Books at Amazon
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