“That was surely heavy news he sent you,” I observed with a little yawn, indicating the telegram about Lovecraft, which he still held tightly between finger and thumb. “You know, before that wire came, I had the craziest idea—that somehow you and he were the same person. I don’t mean Danforth but—”
“Don’t say it!” he said sharply. Then his voice went immediately drowsy as he continued, “But the roster of the perished is longer far…poor Lake and poor, poor Gedney and all those others under their Southern Cross and Magellanic shroud…the mathematical genius Walter Gilman who lost heart most terribly…the nonagenarian street-slain Angell and lightning-frozen Blake in Providence…Edward Pickman Derby, Arkham’s plump Shelley deliquescing in his witch-wife’s corpse…Gad, this is hardly the cheerfulest topic…. You know, Georg, down in San Diego young Akeley (G.G.) showed me a hidden sea-cave bluer than Capri and on its black beach of magnetite the webbed footprint of a merman…one of the Gnorri? …and then…oh yes, of course…there’s Wilbur Whateley, who was almost nine feet tall…though he hardly counts as a Miskatonic researcher…but the whippoorwills didn’t get him either…or his big brother….”
I was still looking at the fire, and the dancing points of light in and around it had become the stars, thick as the Pleiades and Hyades, through which old Akeley journeyed eternally, when unconsciousness closed on me too, black as the wind-stirred, infinite gulf of darkness which Robert Blake saw in the Shining Trapezohedron, black as N’kai.
I awoke stiff and chilled. The fire at which I’d been staring was white ashes only. I felt a sharp pang of disappointment that I had not dreamed at all. Then I became aware of the low, irregular, inflected humming or buzzing that filled my ears.
I stood up with difficulty. My companion slumbered still, but his shut-eyed, death-pale face had a hideously tormented look and he writhed slowly and agonizedly from time to time as if in the grip of foulest nightmare. The yellow telegram had fallen from his fingers and lay on the floor. As I approached him I realized that the sound filling my ears was coming from between his lips, which were unceasingly a-twitch, and as I leaned my head close to them, the horridly articulate droning became recognizable words and phrases:
“The pulpy, tentacled head,” I heard in horror, “Cthulhu fhtagn, the wrong geometry, the polarizing miasma, the prismatic distortion, Cthulhu R’lyeh, the positive blackness, the living nothingness…”
I could not bear to watch his dreadful agony or listen to those poisonous, twangy words an instant longer, so I seized him by the shoulders and shook him violently, though even as I did so there sprang into my mind my father’s stern injunction never to do so.
His eyes came open wide in his white face and his mouth clamped shut as he came up with a powerful shove of his bent arms against the chair’s arms which his hands had been clutching. It was as if it were happening in slow motion, though paradoxically it also seemed to be happening quite swiftly. He gave me a last mute look of utter horror and then he turned and ran, taking fantastically long strides, out through the door, which his outstretched hand threw wide ahead of him, and disappeared into the night.
I hobbled after him as swiftly as I could. I heard the motor catch at the starter’s second prod. I screamed, “Wait, Albert, wait!” As I neared the Tin Hind, its lights flashed on and its motor roared and I was engulfed in acrid exhaust fumes as it screeched out the drive with a spattering of gravel and down the first curve.
I waited there then in the cold until all sight and sound of it had vanished in the night, which was already paling a little with the dawn.
And then I realized that I was still hearing those malignant, gloating, evilly resonant voices.
“Cthulhu fhtagn,” they were saying (and have been saying and are saying now and will forever), “the spider tunnels, the black infinities, the colors in pitch-darkness, the tiered towers of Yuggoth, the glittering centipedes, the winged worms….”
Somewhere not far off I heard a low, half-articulate whirring sound.
I went back into the house and wrote this manuscript.
And now I shall place the last with its interleafed communications and also the two books of poetry that led to all this in the copper and German silver casket, and I shall carry that with me down into the basement, where I shall take up my father’s sledge (wondering in which body I shall survive, if at all) and literally carry out his last letter’s last injunction.
Very early on the morning of Tuesday, March 16, 1937, the householders of Paradise Crest (then Vultures Roost) were disturbed by a clashing rumble and a sharp earth-shock which they attributed to an earthquake, and indeed very small tremors were registered at Griffith Observatory, UCLA, and USC, though on no other seismographs. Daylight revealed that the brick house locally known as Fischer’s Folly had fallen in so completely that not one brick remained joined to another. Moreover, there appeared to be fewer bricks in view than the house would have accounted for, as if half of them had been trucked away during the night, or else fallen into some great space beneath the basement. In fact, the appearance of the ruin was of a gigantic ant lion’s-pit lined by bricks instead of sand grains. The place was deemed, and actually was, dangerous, and was shortly filled in and in part cemented over, and apparently not long afterward rebuilt upon.
The body of the owner, a quietly spoken, crippled young man named Georg Reuter Fischer, was discovered flat on its face in the edge of the rubble with hands thrown out (the metal casket by one of them) as though he had been trying to flee outdoors when caught by the collapse. His death, however, was attributed to a slightly earlier accident or insane act of self-destruction involving acid, of which his eccentric father was once known to have kept a supply. It was well that easy identification was made possible by his conspicuously twisted right foot, for when the body was turned over it was discovered that something had eaten away the entire front of his face and also those portions of his skull and jaw and the entire forebrain.
•
Black Hill
Orrin Grey
That place was still called “Black Hill” when I come there, though it was as flat as a plate and nothing stood taller’n a man’s shoulder far as the eye could see, ’cept the shacks and the derricks. Not a tree nor a lick of grass to be seen, everything stomped dead by the men and the horses and the trucks.
My first day there, I asked Burke why they called it “Black Hill” and he laughed and stamped his foot on the bare, brown dirt. “The hill’s unner there,” he said. “Not a lake nor a river, like they say it, but sure enough a hill, all piled up an’ waitin’, pressin’ up on th’ ground, clawin’ ta get out. Nothin’ but the dirt ’tween it an’ us. We poke a hole in th’ dirt an’ up it jumps!”
Burke had been out there from the beginning. He was there when they drove the Stapleton #1, and he saw the black gold just well up from the ground and come pouring out. Enough, it seemed, to make any man rich.
He bought up a parcel of land out west of El Dorado with the money he made and started the Black Hill Oil Company. By the time he sent for me, the Black Hill field was already putting up more’n three hundred thousand barrels a day.
I didn’t know why he needed me and I said as much, though I was thankful for the work. He just shook his head. “This here’s only th’ beginnin’,” he said. “There’s another world down there, Smith. Things the like-a-which Man ain’t never dreamed, let alone seen. If all I wanted was ta be rich, I coulda quit by now, but there’s somethin’ more down there. Somethin’ else. I cain’t say what, exactly, but I aim ta find it.”