“But whether any of those creatures exist today—there, there’s the rub! The overwhelming question we can’t answer, though always on the edge of doing so. The thing is,” he went on with gathering urgency, “that if they do exist, they are so unimaginably powerful and resourceful, they might be” —and he looked around sharply—“anywhere at the moment!
“Take Cthulhu,” he began.
I couldn’t help starting as I heard that word pronounced for the first time in my life; the harsh, dark, abysmal monosyllabic growl it came to was so very like the sound that had originally come to me from my imagination, or my subconscious, or my otherwise unremembered dreams, or….
He continued, “If Cthulhu exists, then he (or she, or it) can go anywhere he wants through space, or air, or sea, or earth itself. We know from Johansen’s account (it turned his hair white) that Cthulhu can exist as a gas, be torn to atoms, and then recombine. He wouldn’t need tunnels to go through solid rock, he could seep through it—‘not in the spaces we know, but between them.’ And yet in his inscrutability he might choose tunnels—there’s that to be reckoned with. Or—still another possibility—perhaps he neither exists nor does not exist but is in some half state—‘waits dreaming,’ as Angell’s old chant has it. Perhaps his dreams, incarnated as your winged worms, Fischer, dig tunnels.
“It is those monstrous underground cavern-and-tunnel worlds, not all from Cthulhu by any means, that I have been assigned to investigate with the geo-scanner, partly because I was the first to hear of them from old Akeley and also—Merciful Creator! —from the Plutonian who masked as him—‘great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai,’ which was Tsathoggua’s home, and even stranger inner spaces litten by colors from space and from Earth’s nighted core. That’s how I guessed the colors in your childhood dreams or nightmares (or personality exchanges), my dear Fischer. I’ve glimpsed them also in the geo-scanner, where they are, however, most fugitive and difficult to discern….”
His voice trailed off tiredly, just as my own concern became most feverishly intense with his mention of “personality exchanges.”
He really did look shockingly fatigued. Nevertheless I felt impelled to nerve myself to say, “Perhaps those dreams can be repeated, if I take Dr. Morgan’s drug. Why not tonight?”
“Out of the question,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “In the first place, I wrote too hopefully there. At the last minute Morgan was unable to supply me with the drug. He promised to send it along by mail, but hasn’t yet. In the second place, I’m inclined to think now that it would be much too dangerous an experiment.”
“But at least you’ll be able to check those dream colors and the tunnels with your geo-scanner?” I pressed on, somewhat crestfallen. “If I can repair it…” he said, his head nodding and slumping to one side. The dying flames were all blue now as he whispered mumblingly, “…if I am permitted to repair it….”
I had to help him to bed and then retire to my own, shaken and unsatisfied, my mind a whirl. Wilmarth’s alternating moods of breezy optimism and a seemingly frightened dejection were hard to adjust to. But now I realized that I was very tired myself—after all, I’d been up most of the previous night reading Innsmouth—and soon I slumbered.
(The voices stridently groan, “The pit of primal life, the Yellow Sign, Azathoth, the Magnum Innominandum, the shimmering violet and emerald wings, the cerulean and vermilion claws, Great Cthulhu’s wasps…” Night has fallen. I have limpingly paced the house from the low attic with its circular portholes to the basement, where I touched my father’s sledge and eyed “The Gate of Dreams.” The moment draws nigh. I must write rapidly.)
I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling totally refreshed by my customary twelve hours of sleep. I found Wilmarth busily writing at the table that faced the north window of his bedroom. His smiling face looked positively youthful in the cool light, despite its neatly brushed thatch of white hair—I hardly recognized him. All his accumulated mail except for one item lay open and face downward on the far left-hand corner of the table, while on the far right-hand corner was an impressive pile of newly written and addressed postcards, each with its neatly affixed, fresh, one-cent stamp.
“Good morrow, Georg,” he greeted me (properly pronouncing it GAY-org), “if I may so address you. And good news!—the scanner is recharged and behaving perfectly, ready for the day’s downward surveying, while that letter George Goodenough forwarded is from Francis Morgan and contains a supply of the drug against tonight’s inward researches! Two dosages exactly—Georg, I’ll dream with you!” He waved a small paper packet.
“That’s wonderful, Albert,” I told him, meaning it utterly. “By the way, it’s my birthday,” I added.
“Congratulations!” he said joyfully. ‘We’ll celebrate it tonight with our drafts of Morgan’s drug.”
And our expedition did turn out to be a glorious one, at least until almost its very end. The Hollywood Hills put on their most youthfully winning face; even the underlying crumbling, wormeaten corruptions seemed fresh. The sun was hot, the sky bright blue, but there was a steady cool breeze from the west and occasional great high white clouds casting enormous shadows. Amazingly, Albert seemed to know the territory almost as well as I did—he’d studied his maps prodigiously and brought them along, including the penciled ones I’d sent him. And he instantly named correctly the manzanita, sumac, scrub oak, and other encroaching vegetation through which we wended our way.
Every so often and especially at my favorite pausing places, he would take readings with the geo-scanner, which he carried handily, while I had two canteens and a small backpack. While his head was under the black hood, I would stand guard, my stick ready. Once I surprised a dark and pinkly pale, fat, large serpent, which went slithering into the underbrush. Before I could tell him, he said correctly, “A king snake, foe of the crotaloids—a good omen.”
And…on every reading, Albert’s black box showed vacuities of some sort—tunnels or caves—immediately below us, at depths varying from a few to a few score meters. Somehow this did not trouble us by bright outdoor day. I think it was what we’d both been expecting. Coming out from under the hood, he’d merely nod and say, “Fifteen meters” (or the like) and note it down in his little book, and we’d tramp on. Once he let me try my luck under the hood, but all I could see through the eyepiece was what seemed like an intensification of the dancing points of colored light one sees in the dark with the eyes closed. He told me it took considerable training to learn to recognize the significant indications.
High in the Santa Monicas we lunched on beef sandwiches and the tea-flavored lemonade with which I’d filled both canteens. Sun and breeze bathed us. Hills were all around and beyond them to the west the blue Pacific. We talked of Sir Francis Drake and Magellan and of Captain Cook and his great circumpolar voyagings, and of the fabulous lands they’d all heard legends of-and of how the tunnels we were tracing were really no more strange. We spoke of Lovecraft’s stories almost as if they were no more than that. Daytime viewpoints can be strangely unworrying and unconcerned.
Halfway back or so, Albert began looking very haggard once more—frighteningly so. I got him to let me carry the black box. To do that I had to abandon my flat backpack and empty canteens—he didn’t seem to notice.