Almost home, we paused at my father’s memorial. The sun had westered most of this way, and there were dark shadows and also shafts of ruddy light almost parallel to the ground. Albert, very weary now, was fumbling for phrases to praise Rodia’s work, when there swiftly glided out of the undergrowth behind him what I first took to be a large rattlesnake. But as I lunged lurchingly toward it, lashing at it with my stick, and as it slid back into thick cover with preternatural rapidity, and as Albert whirled around, the sinuous, vanishing thing looked for an instant to me as if it were all shimmering violet-green above with beating wings and bluish-scarlet below with claws while its minatory rattle was more a skirling hum.
We raced home, not speaking of it at all, each of us concerned only that his comrade not fall behind. Somewhere mine found the strength.
His postcards had been collected from the box by the road and there were a half dozen new letters for him—and a notification of a registered package for me.
Nothing must do then but Albert must drive me down to Hollywood to pick up the package before the post office closed. His face was fearfully haggard, but he seemed suddenly flooded with a fantastic nervous energy and (when I protested that it could hardly be anything of great importance) a tremendous willpower that would brook no opposition.
He drove like a veritable demon and as though the fate of worlds depended on his speed—Hollywood must have thought it was Wallace Reid come back from the dead for another of his transcontinental racing pictures. The Tin Hind fled like a frightened one indeed, as he worked the gear lever smartly, shifting up and down. The wonders were that we weren’t arrested and didn’t crash. But I got to the proper window just before it closed and I signed for the package—a stoutly wrapped, tightly sealed, and heavily corded parcel from (it really startled me) Simon Rodia.
Then back again, just as fast despite my protests, the Tin Hind screeching on the corners and curves, my companion’s face an implacable, watchful death’s-mask, up into the crumbling and desiccated hills as the last streaks of the day faded to violet in the west and the first stars came out.
I forced Albert to rest then and drink hot black coffee freighted with sugar while I got dinner—when he’d stepped out of the car into the chilly night he’d almost fainted. I grilled steaks again—if he’d needed restorative food last night, he needed it doubly now after our exhausting hike and our Dance of Death along the dry, twisting roads, I told him roughly. (“Or Grim Reaper’s Tarantella, eh, Georg?” he responded with a feeble but unvanquishable little grin.) Soon he was prowling around again—he wouldn’t stay still—and peering out the windows and then lugging the geo-scanner down into the basement, “to round out our readings,” he informed me. I had just finished building and lighting a big fire in the fireplace when he came hurrying back up. Its first white flare of flame as the kindling caught showed me his ashen face and white circled blue eyes. He was shaking all over, literally.
“I’m sorry, Georg, to be such a troublesome and seemingly ungrateful guest,” he said, forcing himself with a great effort to speak coherently and calmly (though most imperatively), “but really you and I must get out of here at once. There’s no place safe for us this side of Arkham—which is not safe either, but there at least we’ll have the counsel and support of salted veterans of the Miskatonic project whose nerves are steadier than mine. Last night I got (and concealed from you—I was sure it had to be wrong) a reading of fifteen down there under the carving—centimeters, Georg, not meters. Tonight I have confirmed that reading beyond any question of a doubt, only it’s shrunk to five under the carving. The floor there is the merest shell—it rings as hollow as a crypt in New Orleans’s St. Louis One or Two—they have been eating at it from below and are feasting still. No, no arguments! You have time to pack one small bag—limit yourself to necessities, but bring that registered parcel from Rodia, I’m curious about it.”
And with that he strode to his bedroom, whence he emerged in a short while with his packed valise and carried it and the black box out to the car.
Meanwhile I’d nerved myself to go down in the basement. The floor did ring much more hollowly than it had last night—it made me hesitate to tread upon it—but otherwise nothing appeared changed. Nevertheless it gave me a curious feeling of unreality, as if there were no real objects left in the world, only flimsy scenery, a few stage properties including a balsa sledgehammer, a registered parcel with nothing in it, and a cyclorama of nighted hills, and two actors.
I hurried back upstairs, took the steaks off the grill and set them on the table in front of the softly roaring fire (for they were done) and headed after Albert.
But he anticipated me, stepping back inside the door, looking at me sharply—his eyes were still wide and staring—and demanding, “Why aren’t you packed?”
I said to him steadily, “Now look here, Albert, I thought last night the cellar floor sounded hollow, so that is not entirely a surprise. And any way you look at it, we can’t drive to Arkharn on nervous energy. In fact, we can’t get even decently started driving east without some food inside us. You say yourself it’s dangerous everywhere, even at Miskatonic, and from what we (or at least I) saw at my father’s grave there may be at least one of the things loose already. So let’s eat dinner—I have a hunch terror hasn’t taken away your appetite entirely—and have a look inside Rodia’s package, and then leave if we must.”
There was a rather long pause. Then his expression relaxed into a somewhat wan smile and he said, “Very well, Georg, that does make sense. I’m frightened all right, make no mistake of that, in fact I’ve walked in terror for the past ten years. But in this case, to speak as honestly as I’m able, I have been even more concerned for you—it suddenly seemed such a pity, such a disservice, that I should have dragged you into this dreadful business. But as you say, one must bow to necessity, bodily and otherwise…and try to show a little style about it,” he added with a rather doleful chuckle.
So we sat down before the dancing, golden fire and ate our steaks and fixings (I had some burgundy, he stayed with his sweet black coffee) and talked of this and that—chiefly of Hollywood, as it turned out. He’d glimpsed a bookstore on our headlong drive, and now he asked about it and that led to other things.
Our dinner done, I refilled his cup and my glass, then cleared a space and opened Rodia’s parcel, using the carving knife to cut its cords and slit its seals. It contained, carefully packed in excelsior, the casket of embossed copper and German silver which sits before me now. I recognized my father’s handiwork at once, which reproduced quite closely in beaten metal his stone carving in the basement, though without the “Gate of Dreams” inscription. Albert’s finger indicated the Cutlu eyes, though he did not speak the name. I opened the casket. It contained several sheets of heavy bond paper. This time it was my father’s handwriting I recognized. Standing side by side, Albert and I read the document, which I append here:
15 Mar 1925
My dear Son:
Today you are 13 but I write to you and wish you well when you are 25. Why I do so you will learn as you read this. The box is yours—Leb’wohl! I leave it with a friend to send to you if I should go in the 12 years between—Nature has given me signs that that may be: jagged flashes of rare earth colors in my eyes from time to time. Now read with care, for I am telling secrets.
When I was a boy in Louisville I had dreams by day and could not remember them. They were black times in my mind that were minutes long, the longest half an hour. Sometimes I came to in another place and doing something different, but never harmful. I thought my black daydreams were a weakness or a judgment, but Nature was wise. I was not strong and did not know enough to bear them yet. Under my father’s rule I learned my craft and made my body strong and always studied when and as I could.