THE CLOCK OF DREAMS

  BRIAN LUMLEY

  Introduction

  Myself, I’ve never been much of a dreamer, never traveled far past Ulthar; but I have watched caravans fording the Skai, and I have sat in the smokeroom of the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats and listened to the tales of my betters. I suppose most dreamers have. It’s true, though, that there seem to be fewer of us around these days. Time was when a man of the waking world could guarantee that if he boarded at an inn in the land of Earth’s dreams, sure enough he would find a fellow dreamer or two from the world of waking mortals; and wouldn’t the tales fly thick and fast then? Yes, they surely would.

  You would hear magical names of men and places – names to set your pulses pounding and your imagination tingling – and thrill to the telling of tales of heroic and fantastic deeds. And someone would be bound to mention Kuranes or Randolph Carter … or Richard Upton Pickman. And while you might shudder at the hinted fate of the latter, certainly you would also gasp in awe at the adventures of the others. Ah, those were the dreams …

  Still, I suppose I shouldn’t complain too bitterly, for when I come to think of it I heard two of my favorite tales quite recently, and as coincidence would have it I heard them at the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats … in Ulthar.

  The first was a strange tale and complicated, a tale of all the worlds of space and time, of strange dimensions and planes of existence beyond the ken of most men. A tale of motes in the multiverse swirling beyond barriers neither spacial nor temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by mortal man except in the wildest theories of science and metaphysics. A tale of paths between the spheres, dim corridors leading to equally dim and conjectural lands of elder myth … And yet all of these seemingly inaccessible places were just around the corner to the time-clock.

  Indeed ‘time-clock,’ as Titus Crow had long since recognized the fact, was a completely inadequate misnomer for that – machine? A plaything of the elder Gods come down the ages from lands beyond legend, from a time beyond time as men reckon it, the clock was a gateway on – on everything! It was a door to worlds of wonder, joy and beauty – but it was also a dark pothole entrance to caves of innermost, alien evil and shrieking, unnameable horror.

  The first tale I heard was the story of how the clock came into Henri-Laurent de Marigny’s hands in the first place, and it is a tale already told. But for the sake of the unacquainted I will briefly reiterate it before taking up the second of the two stories proper. Before even that, however, I had better tell what little is known of the time-clock itself.

  Certainly the clock’s history is strange and obscure enough to whet the mental appetite of any lover of mysteries or would-be sounder of unfathomable wonders (which you must be, else you would not be reading this). First, tracing the existence of the weird – conveyance?– back as far as possible in the light of incomplete knowledge, it seems to have belonged to one Yogi Hiamaldi, an Indian friend of the ill-fated Carolina mystic Harley Warren. Hiamaldi had been a member, along with Warren, of a psychic-phenomenist group in Boston about 1916-18; and he had sworn before all other members of that group that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, crumbling remnant of eons long lost, and that he had borne away certain things from that grim and leering necropolis.

  For reasons unknown, the Yogi had made a gift of the clock to one Etienne-Laurent de Marigny (perhaps the greatest ever American occultist and the father of one of the heroes of the story to follow), who kept it at the New Orleans retreat where his studies of the arcane sciences formed his primary purpose in life. How much he discovered of its secrets remains unknown, but after the elder de Marigny died the clock was sold, along with many another antique curiosity, to a French collector.

  Here there is a gap in the history, for while many years later Titus Crow bought the clock at an auction of antique furniture in London, all of his subsequent attempts to discover the whereabouts of its previous Parisian owner were doomed to failure; it was as though the man had simply vanished off the face of the Earth.

  Now then, of Titus Crow himself – a man with a positive genius for the discovery of dark lore, lost legends, and nighted myth-patterns, who will also feature prominently in my tale – much is known; but for now suffice it to mention that his protracted studies of the clock over many years of his life were such that the device became something of an obsession with him. Often in his earlier years Crow would sit in his study in the night, his chin in his hands as he gravely pondered the enigma of the peculiar, coffin-shaped, oddly-ticking monstrosity in the corner of the room; a ‘clock,’ of sorts, whose four hands moved in patterns patently divorced from any chronological system known or even guessed at by man, and his eyes would rove over the strange hieroglyphs that swept in intricate designs around the great clock’s face.

  When he was not at work on less baffling cases, always Titus Crow would return his attentions to the clock, and though usually such studies were in vain, they were not always complete failures. Often he believed himself on the verge of a breakthrough – knowing that if he were right he would finally understand the alien intricacies governing his ‘doorway on all space and time’ – only to be frustrated in the final hour. And once he actually had the doubtful privilege of seeing the clock opened by two men of equally doubtful repute and intent, whose affairs in the world were fortunately soon terminated … but then at long last there came a genuine clue.

  It was while he was working for the Wilmarth Foundation – a far-flung body of erudite men whose sole avowed intent and purpose was to rid the world, indeed the entire universe, of all remaining traces of an aeon-old evil, the surviving demonic forces and powers of the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth – that Titus Crow visited Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. There, in one of the carefully guarded, great old occult volumes in the university’s world-renowned library, he finally recognized a sequence of odd glyphs which at first he was startled, then delighted to note bore a striking resemblance to the figures on the dial of his huge clock. Moreover, the book bore translations of its own hieroglyphed passages in Latin!

  Armed with this Rosetta-Stone knowledge, Crow had returned to London, where soon he was at work again disinterring many of the clock’s centuries-buried mysteries. And he had been right, for that incredible device was indeed a vehicle: a space-time machine of sorts with principles more alien than the centers of stars, whose like we may at least conjecture upon.

  Of his work on the clock at this time, he wrote to his friend and colleague, Henri-Laurent de Marigny: ‘I am in the position of a Neanderthal studying the operational handbook of a passenger-carrying aircraft – except I have no handbook!’ And Henri was unable to assist his learned friend, for while his father had once owned the selfsame clock, that had been when he was a boy, and he could remember nothing of it. Titus Crow, however, was never a man to be denied anything once he set his mind after it, and so he had persevered.

  And little by little he discovered all of the clock’s peculiar secrets. He learned how to open its frontal panel, without suffering any of the many possible consequences, allowing the strange lights which invariably illumined its interior to flood out in eerie shades that dappled his study with alien hues. He knew how to attune himself ‘telepathically’ to the device’s sub-ethereal vibrations: how to ‘make himself one,’ as he had it, with the clock. He was aware of the nature of the ‘commands’ he must give to the clock to guide it on its journeyings through temporal and spacial voids, so that the time soon came when he believed he might attempt his first flight in the weird vehicle.

  All of this knowledge came to Titus Crow in the very nick of time, for no sooner was he psychically ready to test his theories than just such a test was forced upon him. It happened when he and his young friend de Marigny (also a member of the Wilmarth Foundation) were staying at Blowne House, Crow’s sprawling bungalow home on Leonard’s Heath in London.

  The two of them had grown to be very painful thorns in the sides of the deities or demons of the Cthulhu Cycle, and at last the prime member of that cycle, dread Cthulhu himself, had discovered a way to strike back at them.

  Dreaming hideously in R’lyeh, his ‘house’ drowned somewhere in the vast Pacific, Cthulhu worked his evil plot through Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, Lord of the Snows. For while Ithaqua himself was unable to go abroad beyond barriers immemorially imposed by the Elder Gods – that is, while he was restricted in his movements to the Arctic Circle and its adjacent environs, and to strange Boreal starlanes and alien worlds – nonetheless he was still undisputed master of all the world’s winds. And now he sent elementals of the air from the four corners of the sky to attack Titus Crow’s home.

  Left with no choice but to risk the doubtful sanctuary of the time-clock – as eerie shapes of evil formed beyond the shattering windows, monstrous forces that pounded at the shuddering frame of his bungalow retreat until Blowne House fell about his ears – Crow stepped beyond the open front panel of his vehicle and bade de Marigny follow him. And when that ‘freak localized storm’ had expired and the house was discovered in ruins, perhaps not surprisingly no trace could be found of the two friends; neither of them, nor of the weird clock.

  Well, to cut a long story short, Titus Crow made good his escape from those monstrous minion winds of Ithaqua into the far future, traveling almost to the End of Time itself before finally he mastered the clock’s many intricacies to control its flight. But as for de Marigny, he was not the adept that his friend was. Barely was their craft ‘out of po