A Mountain Walked, page 11
The flash of lightning that rent the maddened heavens in that moment was nothing ordinary. It was like a sudden noon-day sun at midnight, throwing into relief the hideous, turbulent cove where Lazarus Heath died. The cold stone of the sacrificial pillars cast gargoylesque shadows on the slimy sand; a torrent of cackling sea crashed inland, and drowned them for an instant, then, suddenly, receded, and the Thing was there. I do not remember what wild conjectures twisted through my fear-tortured brain in the moment. Perhaps I thought I had gone mad; perhaps I told myself I was letting my imagination run away with me. But, I knew I wasn’t.
I cannot say the Thing in the cove walked; it moved inland rapidly, but with a seemingly gradual, amoebic motion. It expanded and ebbed, gelatinous tendrils creeping over the sand of the cove, spreading like a stain of ink, or black, poisonous blood. I saw no distinct form. I was conscious only of a monstrous, jelly-like mound, black and glistening with a slime-coated, nauseous putrescence. The Thing slobbered onward to Heath House, covering ground with frightening speed. And from this hellish creature, through the whip-lash of the storm, shrilled the high, hypnotic voice of Yoth Kala, calling his bride.…
The period of befogged waiting came to an abrupt end. I knew, quite suddenly, that the time for thinking and rational disbelief had run out. It was no longer a matter of guessing and wondering at the mad writings of Lazarus Heath. I, myself, had seen them come to foul, soulless life. I had witnessed the evil of the Abyss incarnate, creeping relentlessly toward its goal—coming to claim Cassandra!
Even as I watched, the fetid Thing disappeared around the dim corner of Heath House. I moved more surely, now, with a strange, icy calm. For, now, I had at least one thing for which to be grateful. The evil that I fought had taken on concrete form; I was no longer fighting shadows. Clutching the cool butt of the revolver in my pocket, I went out into the murky shadows of the hallway. I moved quietly, scarcely daring to breathe. I must reach Cassandra before It did. I must keep her from this creature of lost and carrion ages. And, always, as I walked, the discordant, shrill threnody of Yoth Kala sliced into my consciousness. The pounding on Cassandra’s door became more frantic by the second. Her voice rose wildly, calling to the Thing risen from the briny tomb of the sea.
I had almost reached her door, when I stopped. A sudden, whirling vertigo seized my brain; I clutched at the balustrade for support. Rising from the well of the foyer, a reeking effluvia reached out to every corner of the shadow-ridden house. I will not say I actually heard movement; it was simply a soft, hissing sound, as of oily water eating at the rotten pilings of a river dock. I stared down the long staircase, trying to focus my eyes, and then, abruptly, the Thing was there, moving quickly up the stairs. I saw it clearly for the first time.
No one whose mind is cramped by cut-and-dried conceptions of form and the three known dimensions can possibly sense the vague, hideous shapelessness of that creature of the Abyss. The form it possessed cannot be drawn in units of height or thickness or density. It seemed to undulate, varying by the second, rising gelatinously to a height of perhaps ten feet, and then, subsiding, swelling, spreading slimy tentacles forward. The whole of the rubbery outer skin was coated with a foul ichor, a tarry stickiness that seemed secreted from monstrous, leathery pores. I think it was this bluish slime that set loose the rancid stench that grew more overpowering with each moment, with each slithering inch of its progress up the staircase.
At the approximate center of this putrid, blue-black mass, a raw, slobbering hole, which seemed to be a rudimentary mouth, sucked in and out with obscene rhythm. It was from this opening in the reticulated, reptilian hide that the cloying, mucous-choked chant of Yoth Kala emanated. Actually, there was no face, but, nearly a foot above the wound-like mouth, there was a single, serpentine tentacle that writhed from side to side, sensing, rather than seeing, looking like some flesh-made periscope shot up from hell. At the end of the tentacle, I made out what might have been an eye—the squamous, dusty, expressionless orb of a snake. And, now, as the Thing crawled upward, the eye-tentacle suddenly grew rigid, turning toward me. For a second, the huge gelatinous form hesitated, then moved forward again, this time directly for me.
Mechanically, sick with the putrid vileness of the odor the Thing cast off, I staggered backward, away from on-coming horror. The eye-tentacle wavered and followed me. The forerunning cilia of black, tarry stickiness flowed across the hall, only a few feet from me. The stench was unbearable. It seemed to me that the pagan song of Yoth Kala had taken on a high, evilly-humorous note. The slobbering mouth-hole spread in what could only be a hideous, anticipatory grin.
Now, my back was against the wall; I could still hear Cassandra thumping on the panels of her door, crying her invitation to this loathsome lover of hers, but I was no longer thinking of her. I could think only of the long, jelly-like feeler, sent out from the black, viscid mass, curling slowly about my waist, crushing. Perhaps, I screamed or swore; I do not know. I remember plunging my hand into my pocket and squeezing the trigger of that revolver. There was a smell of seared cloth as the bullet burnt through my coat, and then, sharply, a cry, almost human, of furious pain. A slitted, ugly wound opened in the feeler, and bluish, stinking slime spewed over my hand and waist; this was the foul, putrid blood of the creature of the Abyss! A thick, nauseous ichor that spurted like oil from the bullet wound. The feeler uncoiled in a tremendous reflex of agony, and I stumbled away, down the hall, fumbling in my pocket for the key to Cassandra’s door. I slammed the heavy portal behind me, and leaned against it, sobbing hysterically.
The first thing I became conscious of was the sudden silence; it fell like a spidery caul over Heath House. I realized dully that, for a moment, Yoth Kala’s song had been stopped.
Beyond the door, there was a vague, liquid rustling, then a tense, waiting noiselessness—as though the Thing were being very still, listening.
And, here, in Cassandra’s room, there was another silence. Before me in the shadows, the pallid oval of Cassandra’s face wavered phantom-like, staring at me; the darkly brilliant eyes were tortured with a surprisingly sane fear. Abruptly, as though the silencing of that blasphemous incantation had momentarily released her to sanity, Cassie was in my arms, crying softly.
“Don’t let him get me, darling! You mustn’t let him get me! Promise you won’t! Please! … I’m all right, now; it’s only when I hear his voice that I can’t refuse him.…”
“It’s all right,” I said thickly. “We’ll get out of here somehow.… We’ll go away where he can never touch you.…”
“No … no, I can’t escape him that way.…”
“We can, Cassie! We must….”
“No.… Believe me! I know! There’s only one escape.… You’ve got to kill me.…”
“Cassie!”
“It’s true! It’s the only way out. If you don’t care about me, think about the child … my child by him.…”
“Stop talking crazy. I tell you we’ll get away.…”
“Think of the child,” Cassandra insisted hoarsely. “I am the daughter of Zoth Syra. My father was a human; I was born in the image of that father. But, think of the child I must bear.… Suppose … suppose he is born in the image of his father … of that … that Thing out there!”
VIII
I was no longer seeing that frail, anguished visage, gray as death, with its ghastly, bluish throat-scars; I was no longer aware of the horror that shone through Cassandra’s eyes—the terror of a mind caught in a web from which there was no escape. All I could see was that slavering, heinous monstrosity beyond the chamber door. A child! Its child, born in its own hideous image! It couldn’t be! It must never happen! This lost decadent race of evil encroaching upon the earth, begetting its hellish fruit upon humans—and in the end, overwhelming, conquering, reclaiming, as Lazarus Heath had prophesied!
“Cassandra! O, my bride! Princess of the Abyss, I call. Yoth Kala calls!”
Beneath my hands, I felt Cassandra’s fragile body turn rigid; her flesh suddenly burned against mine. Those dark eyes glazed and protruded horribly, and at her throat, the bluish lines pulsed obscenely, like the gills of a fish, like the nauseous mouth of the Thing in the hall. I tried to hold her, but as the chant of Yoth Kala rose wildly, her clawed hands beat insanely at my face; their nails bit into the flesh. With a species of supernatural strength, Cassandra tore herself loose. She thrust me to one side, and was at the door, tearing frantically at the latch, shrilling a nasal, hypnotic reply to her mate.
Now, staring at the door itself, I saw the massive panels sag and warp, as if from tremendous pressure from without. A fetid black feeler oozed through the crevice at the bottom of the door. It circled, obscenely possessive, about Cassandra’s ankles, evil, caressing. The storm throbbed at the blackened casements. There was no lightning, now; only endless, abysmal blackness and rising through it, all the myriad hateful voices of the Green Abyss, howling in chorus to the incantations of Yoth Kala and his bride.
What I did then was done with the sure, unthinking calm of a man who has reached his final decision. I walked slowly to Cassandra’s side; she was no longer conscious of my existence. She tore so maniacally at the door to freedom that her frail fingers bled. The revolver felt cool in my sweat-soaked grip. I brought the neat, business-like muzzle within a few inches of Cassandra’s temple. I knew, now, that she was right. There was only one escape. I pulled the trigger.
I waited for death.
You must understand that. I fully expected to die. I had no idea of running. I saw Cassandra slump forward against the door. As she slid to the floor, her fingers clutched convulsively at the dark wood; the nails dug four parallel streaks the length of the panels. She lay very still. In that instant, as the crashing echo of the shot withered to silence through the catacombs of Heath House, a great terrified wail soared insanely above the onslaught of the storm; a scream of pain and unanswerable anger. The huge door bent beneath superhuman pressure. Then, slowly, as I waited for loathsome, foul-smelling death in the grip of Yoth Kala, a death I did not intend to fight, the weird chanting from without died away. There was silence. A strange, utterly peaceful silence such as Heath House had not known for countless years. I saw the black, stinking tentacle withdrawn from the room. Outside, in the hallway, a sickly hissing sound echoed mournfully. It moved down the staircase that creaked beneath its retreating weight.
I walked unsteadily to the casement window and gazed out through a strangely abated storm. A sudden, peaceful moon had crept from behind dull clouds. And across the cold moonlit strand, into the cove, once again to be swallowed by the sightless depths of the Green Abyss, slithered the hideous, hell-spawned Thing no other living man has ever seen. Yoth Kala was gone.
I know, now, why it happened that way. I have thought about it a great deal in these last lonely hours, and I believe I have found the answer. I had waited for the vengeance of Yoth Kala; I had expected to die as the destroyer of his bride. But, Yoth Kala could not reach me. As Lazarus Heath had been before her, Cassandra was an instrument. She was the key in the grip of the people of the Abyss, their only contact with this world that had cast them out ages since, the only one through whom they could regain a foothold in that world, on whom they could beget the race that would one day reclaim all that they had lost. When I killed Cassandra, I cut off that contact. Yoth Kala and his hideous breed were once more consigned to the bonded anonymity of the Abyss. This time, at least, the world had escaped their vengeance.
I walked back to where Cassandra lay, calm, and at peace. I sat down beside her, and smoothed her soft, warm hair gently. I think I cried. The storm whispered a last protest and died. I sat there with Cassandra until late the next evening, when Dr. Ambler came to call, and found us.
Only another half-hour until dawn. The cell block has been very quiet most of the night. Outside, in the grayish half-light, there is a sound of distant business that seems ghostly coming in through the bars on the cold early morning air. There is a creaking of wood, and then a sudden thud. This is repeated several times. They are testing the spring-trap of my gallows.
They say that prayers help. If you have come this far, if you think you understand the story of Cassandra Heath, you might try it. Make it a very special sort of prayer. Not for Cassandra and me. All our prayers were said a long time since. We are at peace.
This prayer must be for you—for you and all the others who must be left behind, who cannot walk with me, up that final flight of wooden stairs, to peace and escape, who must go on living in the shadow of a monstrous evil of which they are not even aware, and so, can never destroy. You may need those prayers.
Somewhere beyond the edge of the last lone lip of land, beyond the rim of reality, sunken beneath the slime and weed of innumerable centuries, the creatures of the Abyss live on. Zoth Syra still reigns, and the syren songs are still sung. Entombed in their foul, watery empire, they writhe; restless, waiting.… This time they have lost their foothold. This time their link with the world of normalcy has been broken, their contact destroyed. This time they have failed.
But, they will try again … and again.…
THE DEEP ONES
JAMES WADE
“Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men, and lived in cities along with mortals.”
—Oppian: Halieutica (AD 200)
I
I had never met Dr. Frederick Wilhelm before I went to work at his Institute for Zoological Studies, located in a remote cove on the California coast some miles north of San Simeon and Piedres Blancas, not far from the Big Sur area; but of course I had heard of his studies. The Sunday supplements picked Wilhelm up years ago, which was only natural: what more potentially sensational subject could a journalist hope for than the idea that man shared the earth with another, older, and perhaps more intelligent species; a species overlooked or ignored by modern science, but with which communication might someday be established?
It wasn’t a worn-out gambit like flying saucer people, or spiritualism, or trolls hidden under the hills, of course. Wilhelm’s subject was the dolphin, that ocean mammal glimpsed centuries ago by superstitious sailors and transmogrified into myths of mermaids, sirens, all the fabulous sea-dwelling secret races of legend. Now, it appeared, the superstitions might not be far wrong.
Preliminary tests had showed long ago that our ocean-going distant cousins harbored a high degree of pure intelligence and potential for communication, unsuspected because of their watery habitat and their lack of hands or any other prehensile apparatus for producing artifacts. Wilhelm’s researches had not been the first, but his speculations were certainly the most daring, and he had parlayed his preoccupation into a career, attracting both government and private foundation funds to set up the institute toward which I found myself jogging in a rented jeep over rutted, sandy roads beside the sinuous green Pacific one starkly sunlit afternoon in April a year ago.
Although I knew of Frederick Wilhelm and his institute, I wasn’t sure just how or what he knew of me. In a sense, I could easily see how my field, extrasensory perception and telepathy, might tie in with his work; but his initial letters and wires to me had never spelled out in any detail what he expected of our collaboration. His messages, indeed, had seemed at once euphoric and evasive, confining themselves mostly to grandiloquent descriptions of his basic purposes and facilities, plus details on the financial aspects of our association.
I will admit that the amount of money Dr. Wilhelm offered was a strong factor in my accepting a job the exact nature of which remained unclear. As research coordinator of a small Eastern foundation devoted to parapsychological studies overlooked by the Rhine group at Duke, I had had my fill of skimped budgets and starvation wages. Wilhelm’s offer had come as an opportunity golden in more ways than one, so I had lost little time in packing my bags for the trip to sunny California.
Actually, the location of Wilhelm’s experiments gave me more pause than any of the other doubtful aspects of his offer. I confess that I have always had an antipathy to California, despite the little time I recall having spent there. Perhaps I had read too much in the works of mordant satirists like Waugh and Nathanael West, but to me there has always seemed something decadent and even sinister about this self-eulogizing Pacific paradise.
The impression had not been allayed by my arrival via plane in gritty, galvanic Los Angeles, or by a stroll through that tiny downtown park where predatory homosexuals, drug derelicts, and demented fanatics of all kinds congregate under the bloated, twisted palms, like so many patients in the garden of Dr. Caligari’s madhouse. To some, Gothic battlements or New England backwaters represent the apex of spiritual horror and decay; for me, the neon-lit, screaming depravity of Los Angeles filled the bill. As the comedian Fred Allen once remarked, California is a great place if you’re an orange.
These thoughts and others tangled in my mind as I guided my jeep over the rough beachside path which, I had been assured by the jovial car rental agent in San Simeon, would take me unfailingly to the Institute for Zoological Studies. (“Ain’t no place else the road goes, after you turn off left at the first orange juice stand—you know, the kind where the stand is built to look just like a great big orange. Jest keep on goin’, and don’t stop for hippies or high water till the road ends!”)
As I glanced rather nervously around, I could see on my left a sort of encampment of bleached white tents and dark, darting figures down by the wavering lace of surf at water’s edge. Were these the hippies my guide had referred to, those sardonic jesters on the periphery of our society, razzing and reviling all the standards and values of three thousand civilized years? Or had he been spoofing me; were these only a gaggle of middle-class youngsters out for an afternoon of beachside sun, sand, and sex as a respite from the abrasive grind of our precariously affluent society?
