Past that, my memory is unclear. I retain an impression still of the total panic in my mind, as my body ran back across the sandy level to the noxious sea-scudded rocks. Some thankful instinct guided me toward the White Moon. The joy that surged through me when I saw her masts above the slimy crest that marked the edge of the “beach” is totally indescribable. Those masts represented safety, refuge, security. To my unbalanced mind they represented wholesomeness. All I need do, so my mind ran, was reach the White Moon—there I would find forgetfulness. It would be as though I had never set foot in that gruesome temple; it would never have happened at all. And how I longed to escape the memory of that place, of the indescribable horror that ruled over that dishonourable altar!
I ran for the White Moon’s masts, slipping and falling, heedless of the dangerous coral which cut repeatedly at my extremities. With a soulfelt sob of relief, I ran straight over the edge of the crest and plummeted to the breach below.
I do not remember the pain; all I remember is the shock of the blow that knocked the breath out of me. And then, gratefully, I gave myself up to the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness.
I was told later that I was unconscious for two days, and thus did not experience the second volcanic eruption and the resulting quake which allowed the merciful sea to flood over and cover again that horrid island and its tomb-like temple.
Some infection from the coral cuts must have invaded my body, for I was in a fevered delirium for the next five days.
But delirium or no, I did not imagine that carven figure above that gruesome altar. No living thing has that much imagination, even in delirium.
I can still see it clearly in my mind’s eye, although I would far rather forget it. It tells too much about the horrible and blasphemous rites which must have been performed in that evil place, rites practiced by monstrous beings that ruled this planet a quarter of a million or more years ago.
The hideous thing was almost indescribable, and I cannot, will not, bring myself to draw it. It was thin and emaciated-looking, with two tiny, deep-sunken eyes and a small mouth surrounded by some kind of bristles or antennae. The muscles were clearly visible, as though its flesh were all on the outside. It had only two arms, and these were flung wide. The horrible, five-fingered hands and the five-toed feet were nailed firmly to a great stone cross!
THE RECURRING DOOM
BY S. T. JOSHI
NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD HAD CIVILIZATION SO closely escaped annihilation as in that period of time over two months ago wherein occurred those incidents in which my friend and colleague Jefferson Coler and I were involved; never in all the years of man’s existence had such a shadow of death passed over all humanity, to be cast away only at the last moment; never in recorded history had chance and coincidence so conjoined as nearly to cause man’s decimation. My own part in the affair was minor: I was but a pathetic and inconsequential acolyte to Coler, who, by piecing together the scattered notes and fragments he had accumulated, detected and foiled the efforts of those things who ever encroach upon us from outside and from within; and averted—for now—a monstrous and recurring doom which shall hang over men as long as men are.
Yet, as irony would have it, had Coler not saved the world, and had those things then slaughtered us all, it would have been the fault of Coler himself; it was his initial actions which set in motion the aeon-forgotten plots of those things who once ruled the earth but were then expelled, and who in cosmic revenge wish the devastation of the world. Coler is our saviour; but had he not been, he would have been our exterminator.
Jefferson Coler is now four days dead, through utter physical and mental exhaustion, an old man at forty-two. I can now write this document so as to show the world how close it came to unthinkable turmoil, and to show that Professor Coler was not, as he was deemed in life, a madman, or an eccentric, but one who, through his own genius, realized and then forfended an outcome of whose proportions it is not pleasant to think.
Mankind is safe—but only for a time.
* * *
Coler was an archaeologist whose rivals were few. In actual knowledge he was almost unsurpassed; yet it was his instinct which lifted him above all others, and which allowed him to make startling breakthroughs in many fields then adumbral with misunderstanding. One of his early works, a report on Ancient Civilizations of Divers Polynesian Islands (1925), had earned him both envy and scorn—envy for its scholarship and erudition, and scorn for the several dubious yet seemingly authenticated extrapolations made in it. His research on the volume also awakened an insatiable thirst for things diluvian and arcane; a thirst which in time developed into an obsession for procuring archaic and curious tomes, many times for inconceivably fabulous prices. Who would give such a sum, many asked themselves, for not even an original but a copy of something called Necronomicon, by, indeed, a mad Arab named Alhazred? Or again, a work called De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn, or Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Laurent de Longnez’s L’Histoire des Planetes, Jawangi Warangal’s Civtates Antiquae Fantasticae? Coler’s acquisition of these volumes did much to brand him as one whose talents, though prodigious, were being pathetically wasted on subjects bordering upon the lunatic; and his assiduous learning of ancient tongues and dialects which had evaded the memories of even the best of linguists further gained him a reputation for eccentricity. Fanaticism is rarely productive of good; but, as it turned out, Coler’s fanaticism was the very thing that saved our lives.
His reclusiveness, another trait that earned the mockery of many, was thus not innate but gradually acquired through the ostracism resulting from his unique theories. While he was oftentimes the butt of transparent sarcasms by other archaeologists, he himself did not refrain from ridiculing those of his profession for what he called “their vile and pompous blindness at things which they can’t explain or understand”; of particular note was the epistolary argument between Coler and Sir Charles Burton concerning the origin and use of those curious statues on Easter Island, published in the British Archaeological Digest. This constant bickering between him and his associates served only to sever more and more their respect for one another, so that in time each cast the gravest doubts as to the other’s competency and ability. I, a lifelong friend of Coler’s, eventually became the only archaeologist with whom he would consult, for the simple reason that I did not disclaim the views he expressed. I listened to him not simply to humor him, but because I knew that men had yet to gain all the answers to the world and the universe.
Yet above all, Coler was secretive: through what seemed an inherent lack of faith in men, Coler refused to reveal to anyone his thoughts, his involvements, his actions. It might have been that he, through past experience, feared ridicule; yet this cannot totally explain why, in his most recent affair, he deigned not to tell even me of what he was doing or what was to come; he kept almost everything to himself, intermittently throwing out to me vague hints and remarks which could leave me only with my mind’s eye peering confusedly into his fog of ominous implications and portents. Coler did not explain everything to me until the very end: only then did I know how close we had come to death; only then did I understand Coler’s previously inexplicable manoeuvres.