“I think you’d better,” the manager said, and waited while Ingels struggled with his briefcase, last night’s Herald, a pen and sheet from his notebook, brushing at his eyebrows where dust and sweat had become a trickle of mud, rubbing his trembling fingers together to clean them. The men had clambered over the heap of bricks and were lifting the velvety frame. Beneath it was a reflector telescope almost a foot long, mounted on a high sturdy stand. One of the men bent to the eyepiece, touching the focus. “Don’t!” Ingels screamed. “The setting may be extremely important,” he explained, trying to laugh.
The manager was peering at him. “What did you say you do at the Herald?” he said.
“Astronomy correspondent,” Ingels said, immediately dreading that the man might read the paper regularly. “I don’t get too much work,” he blundered on. “This is a scoop. If I could I’d like to spend a few hours looking at the books.”
He heard them descending the spiral staircase. Squirm away, he thought. He lifted the covers from the bookcases gingerly, anxious to keep dust away from the telescope, as the velvety cover had for decades. Suddenly he hurried back to the corridor. Its walls bobbed about him as the flashlight swung. He selected a plank and, hefting it over the bricks, poked it at the rafters above the telescope, shielding the latter with his arm. After a minute the slate above slid away, and a moment later he heard a distant crash.
He squatted down to look through the eyepiece. No doubt a chair had been provided once. All he could see was a blurred twilit sky. Soon be night, he thought, and turned the flashlight on the books. He remembered the light from the oil lamp lapping at his feet in the dream.
Much of the material was devoted to astronomy. As many of the books and charts were astrological, he found, some in Oriental script. But there were others, on shelves in the corner furthest from the sealed-off door: The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, Image du Monde, Liber Investigationis, Revelations of Glaaki. There were nine volumes of the last. He pulled them out, curious, and dust rose about his face like clouds of sleep.
Voices trickled tinily up the staircase, selling beds. In the close room dimmed by the dust that crowded at the hole in the roof, towards which the telescope patiently gazed, Ingels felt as if he were sinking back into his dream. Cracked fragments of the pages clung beneath his nails. He read; the words flowed on like an incantation, like voices muttering in sleep, melting into another style, jerking clumsily into another. Sketches and paintings were tipped into the books, some childishly crude, some startlingly detailed: M’Nagalah, a tentacled mass of what looked like bloated raw entrails and eyes; Glaaki, a half-submerged spongy face peering stalk-eyed from a lake; R’lyeh, an island city towering triumphant above the sea, a vast door ajar. This he recognised, calmly accepting the information. He felt now as if he could never have had reason to doubt his dream.
The early winter night had blocked up the hole in the roof. Ingels stooped to the eyepiece again. Now there was only darkness through the telescope. It felt blurred by distance; he felt the distance drawing him vertiginously down the tube of darkness, out into a boundless emptiness no amount of matter could fill. Not yet, he thought, withdrawing swiftly. Soon.
Someone was staring at him. A girl. She was frowning up at the hole in the roof. A saleswoman. “We’re closing soon,” she said.
“All right,” Ingels said, returning to the book, lying face upwards in the splayed light. It had settled into a more comfortable position, revealing a new page to him, and an underlined phrase: “when the stars are right.” He stared at it, trying to connect. It should mean something. The dim books hemmed him in. He shook his head and turned the pages swiftly, searching for underlining. Here it was repeated in the next volume, no, augmented: “when the stars are right again.” He glanced sharply at the insistent gap of night above him. In a minute, he snarled. Here was a whole passage underlined:
“Though the universe may feign the semblance of fickleness, its soul has always known its masters. The sleep of its masters is but the largest cycle of all life, for as the defiance and forgetfulness of winter is rendered vain by summer, so the defiance and forgetfulness of man, and of those others who have assumed stewardship, shall be cast aside by the reawakened masters. When these hibernal times are over, and the time for reawakening is near, the universe itself shall send forth the Harbinger and Maker, Ghroth. Who shall urge the stars and worlds to rightness. Who shall raise the sleeping masters from their burrows and drowned tombs; who shall raise the tombs themselves. Who shall be attentive to those worlds where worshippers presume themselves stewards. Who shall bring those worlds under sway, until all acknowledge their presumption, and bow down.”
Ghroth, Ingels thought, gazing up at the gap in the roof. They even had a name for it then, despite the superstitious language. Not that that was so surprising, he thought. Man used to look upon comets that way; this is the same sort of thing. An omen that becomes almost a god.
But an omen of what? he thought suddenly. What exactly was supposed to happen when the stars were right again? He knelt in the dust and flurried through the books. No more underlining. He rushed back to the telescope. His thighs twinged as he squatted. Something had entered the field of view.
It was the outer edge of the wandering planet, creeping into the telescope’s field. As it came it blurred, occasionally sharpening almost into focus for a moment. Ingels felt as if the void were making sudden feeble snatches at him. Now the planet was only a spreading reddish smudge. He reached for the focus, altering it minutely. “We’re closing now,” said the manager behind him.
“I won’t be long,” Ingels said, feeling the focus sharpen, sharpen—
“We’re waiting to close the doors,” the manager said. “And I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.”
“Not long!” Ingels screamed, tearing his gaze from the eyepiece to glare.
When the man had gone Ingels switched off the flashlight. Now he could see nothing but the tiny dim gap in the roof. He let the room settle on his eyes. At last he made out the immobile uplifted telescope. He groped towards it and squatted down.
As soon as he touched the eyepiece the night rushed through the telescope and clutched him. He was sailing through the void, yet he was motionless; everything moved with him. Through the vast silence he heard the ring of a lifted telephone, a voice saying “Give me the chief editor of the Herald, please,” back there across the void. He could hear the pale grubs squeaking tinnily, back all that way. He remembered the way they moved, soft, uncarapaced. Before him, suspended in the dark and facing him, was Ghroth.
It was red as rust, featureless except for bulbous protrusions like hills. Except that of course they weren’t hills if he could see them at that distance; they must be immense. A rusty globe covered with lumps, then. That was all, but that couldn’t explain why he felt as if the whole of him were magnetised to it through his eyes. It seemed to hang ponderously, communicating a thunderous sense of imminence, of power. But that was just its unfamiliarity, Ingels thought, struggling against the suction of boundless space; just the sense of its intrusion. It’s only a planet, after all. Pain was blazing along his thighs. Just a red warty globe.
Then it moved.
Ingels was trying to remember how to move his body to get his face away from the eyepiece; he was throwing his weight against the telescope mounting to sweep away what he could see. It was blurring, that was it, although it was a cold windless day air movements must be causing the image to blur, the surface of a planet doesn’t move, it’s only a planet, the surface of a planet doesn’t crack, it doesn’t roll back like that, it doesn’t peel back for thousands of miles so you can see what’s underneath, pale and glistening. When he tried to scream air whooped into his lungs as if space had exploded a vacuum within him.