I returned with Mrs. Snodgrass to the Crombleigh mansion and re-entered Eliphas’ chamber. She had placed the room in order, carefully filing the papers and objects. I thought nothing was out of place until I chanced to glance up at the ceiling. There were wet footprints against the white kalsomine of the ceiling — footprints leading across from the top of the door to where the large closet opened!
I went at once to the closet; at first glance nothing was wrong. Then I noticed a bit of paper lying on the floor. I picked it up. On it was written one word in a hand unmistakably that of the missing student.
One word — “Alhazred”!
As soon as I was free, I went to Miskatonic University and secured permission to peruse that damnable volume by Abdul Alhazred. Would that I had not! Would that I had forgotten the whole affair!
Never will I forget the terrible knowledge that entered my brain during those hours when I sat reading the horror-filled pages of that loathsome book. The demoniac abnormalities that assailed my mind with indisputable truth will forever shake my faith in the world. The book should be destroyed; it is the encyclopedia of madness. All that afternoon I read those madness-filled pages and it was well into the night before I came across the passage which answered my riddle. I will not say what it was for I dare not. Yet I started back in dread; what I saw there was horror manifold. And I knew that I must act at once, that very night, or all would be lost. Perhaps all was lost already. I rushed out of the library into the darkness of the night.
A strange snow was falling, a curious flickering snow that fell like phantoms in the darkness. Through it I ran across block after endless block of ancient houses to the Snodgrass mansion. As I came down the street, I thought I saw a flicker of green outlined against the roof. I redoubled my pace and dashing up their porch, hammered upon the door. It was near twelve and it took some time before the family let me in. Hastily I said I had to make another search of Eliphas’ room and they let me pass. I dashed up the stairs and threw open the door of his chamber. It was dark and I flicked on the light.
Shall I ever forget the terrible thing I saw there? The horror, the dread, the madness seemed too much for the human mind to bear. I flicked the light off at once, and, closing the door, fled screaming out into the street. Well it was that a raging fire broke out immediately afterward and burned that accursed house to the ground. Well — for such a damnable thing must not be, must never be on this world.
If man but knew the screaming madness that lurks in the bowels of the land and the depths of the ocean, if he but caught one glimpse of the things that await in the vast empty depths of the
hideous cosmos! If he knew the secret significance of the flickering of the stars! If the discovery of Pluto had struck him as the omen it was!
If man knew, I think that knowledge would burn out the brains of every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. Such things must never be known. Such unspeakable, unfathomable evil must never be allowed to seep into the mentalities of men lest all go up in chaos and madness.
How am I to say what I saw in the room of that cursed house? As I opened the door, there on the bedspread, revealed by the sudden flash of the electric light, lay the still quivering big toe of Eliphas Snodgrass!
To Arkham and the Stars
FRITZ LEIBER
Early on the evening of September 14th last I stepped down onto the venerable brick platform of the Arkham station of the Boston and Maine Railroad. I could have flown in, arriving at the fine new Arkham Airport north of town, where I am told a suburb of quite tasteful Modern Colonial homes now covers most of Meadow Hill, but I found the older conveyance convenient and congenial.
Since I was carrying only a small valise and a flat square cardboard box of trifling weight, I elected to walk the three blocks to the Arkham House. Midway across the old Garrison Street Bridge, which repaired and re-surfaced only ten years ago spans the rushing Miska- tonic there, I paused to survey the city from that modest eminence, setting down my valise and resting my hand on the old iron railing while an occasional dinner-time car rumbled past close beside me.
To my right, just this side of the West Street Bridge where the Miskatonic begins its northward swing, there crouched in the rapid current the ill-regarded little island of gray standing stones, where as I had read in The Arkham Advertiser I have sent me, a group of bearded bongo-drumming delinquents had recently been arrested while celebrating a black mass in honor of Castro — or so one of them had wildly and outrageously asserted. (For a brief moment my thoughts turned queerly to Old Castro of the Cthulhu Cult.) Beyond the island and across the turn of the river loomed Hangman’s Hill, now quite built-up, from behind which the sun was sending a spectral yellow afterglow. By this pale gloom-shot golden light I saw that Arkham is still a city of trees, with many a fine oak and maple, although the elms are all gone, victims of the Dutch disease, and that there are still many gambrel roofs to be seen among the newer tops. To my left I studied the new freeway where it cuts across the foot of
French Hill above Powder Mill Street, providing rapid access to the missile-component, machine-tool, and chemical plants southeast of the city. My gaze dropping down and swinging south searched for a moment for the old Witch-House before I remembered it had been razed as long ago as 1931 and the then moldering tenements of the Polish Quarter have largely been replaced by a modest housing development in Colonial urban style, while the newest “foreigners” to crowd the city are the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes.
Taking up my valise, I descended the bridge and continued across River Street, past the rosily mellowed red-brick slant-roofed stout old warehouses which have happily escaped demolition. At the Arkham I confirmed my reservation and checked my valise with the pleasant elderly desk clerk, but, since I had dined early in Boston, I pressed on at once south on Garrison across Church to the University, continuing to carry my cardboard box.
The first academic edifices to interrupt my gaze were the new Administration Building and beyond it the Pickman Nuclear Laboratory, where Miskatonic has expanded east across Garrison, though of course without disturbing the Burying Ground at Lich and Parsonage. Both additions to the University struck me as magnificent structures, wholly compatible with the old quadrangle, and I gave silent thanks to the architect who had been so mindful of tradition.
It was full twilight now and several windows glowed in the nearer edifice, where faculty members must be carrying on the increasing paper work of the University. But before proceeding toward the room, behind one of the windows, which was my immediate destination, I took thoughtful note of the orderly student antisegregation demonstration that was being carried on at the edge of campus in sympathy with similar demonstrations in southern cities.
I observed that one of the placards read “Mazurewicz and Desrochers for Selectmen,” showing me that the students must be taking a close interest in the government of the University city and making me wonder if those candidates were sons of the barely literate individuals innocently mixed up in the Witch-House case. Tempora mutantur!
Inside the pleasant corridors of the Administration Building I quickly found the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Literature. The slender silver-haired Professor Albert Wilmarth, hardly looking his more than seventy years, greeted me warmly though with that mocking sardonic note which has caused some to call him “unpleasantly” rather than simply “very” erudite. Before winding up his work, he courteously explained its nature.