An expression of pleasure crossed the saturnine features as Zarnak rose to greet his very old friend.
AT ten o’clock in the morning of the next day, a car pulled up before a fashionable condominium off Filth Avenue, and Zarnak, carrying a black leather briefcase that seldom left his side, emerged.
At the door of Winfield’s apartment, he was greeted by a young black man nearly attired in a somber gray suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie.
"I am Doctor Anton Zarnak. I believe Mr. Winfield is expecting me."
The black man smiled and opened the door wider. “Surely! Mr. Winfield is having breakfast now, but if you’d like to join him?—”
The apartment was discreetly furnished in good modern taste, obviously by an expensive interior decorator and not the resident. The furniture was of blond wood in Swedish Modern, and the carpet was an excellent Rya. The bric-a-brac was polished aluminum and the pictures were signed lithographs.
Rufus—for that must have been his name—led Zarnak into a sunny breakfast nook where he found Parker Winfield, his face more pouched than before, with bleary, red-rimmed eyes, hunched over a table. Apparently, the younger man had indulged in a bit of alcoholic beverage alter leaving China Alley. He waved a feeble hand.
“Good to see you. Doc! Help yourself ... I don’t have much appetite this morning."
Zarnak inspected the sideboard: selected a rasher of Canadian bacon, an English muffin dripping with Devonshire butter and clover honey, eggs Florentine, and asked the servant for a cup of black coffee.
“More of those dreams hist night?" Zarnak asked of his host, who nodded dejectedly.
“Worse than ever, Doc; I got closer to that hellish portal than ever before. Don't know how much more of this I can take before my nerves are entirely shot. Think you can help?"
“I will try." said Zarnak.
After breakfast, he asked Winfield to show him around. The apartment was a sumptuous one composed of eight rooms, of which two held the cook and Rufus. A terrace gave a sunny view of Central Park. In none of the rooms did Zarnak experience that chill frisson along the nerves that would have signaled, to a sensitive, the presence of malign forces. The building, it appeared, was too newly erected to have had time to acquire the psychic residue that ordinary people call "ghosts."
Nothing that Zarnak experienced alarmed or disturbed him, until his host led him into a side room where reposed Grandfather Winfield’s relics of his South Sea voyages. The room was crowded with uncouth artworks, chiseled from stone or carved from wood. Most of these were obviously antiques and worth considerable sums of money. Zarnak examined them with thoughtful care.
There were pieces of tapa cloth from the Tonga Islands, charged with an odd motif like repeated five-pointed stars; curiously frog-like idols of wood or stone from the Cook Islanders; a Sepik River Valley figure from New Guinea with an odd, kraken-like fringe of waving tentacles; pendants of carved shell from Papua shaped into octopoidal heads: wooden masks from the New Hebrides with a mane of writhing serpents instead of hair; a basalt image from Easter Island depicting a peculiarly loathsome combination of frog and fish; and the fragment of a lava bas-relief from South Indochina upon which Zarnak's eyes did not linger.
His very worst suspicions were confirmed. Grimly, he went on, examining exhibit after exhibit, until he found one which arrested him in his tracks. He lingered before it, staring unwinkingly.
"Ugly creature, isn’t it?" asked Parker Winfield at his elbow. “Maybe I should donate the whole lot somewhere; some of ’em give me the creeps."
"I suggest that you do." murmured Zarnak distractedly. "And I could recommend the Sanbourne Institute in Santiago, California; they have an admirable collection of this kind of ... art."
The piece upon which Anton Zarnak’s attention was fixed seemed to have been hewn from jadeite. It was about eleven inches tall, and depicted a bipedal monstrosity whose hind legs resembled those of a batrachian, with forelimbs uplifted almost as if in menace, sucker-ripped, webbed hands extended toward the viewer. The head of the image was a seething mass of pseudopods or tentacles, amid which a single glaring eye could be discerned.
The symbols carved in the idol's base were in a language long vanished from human knowledge; few human beings on earth could have read them. Zarnak was one of the few.
"Ythogtha," he breathed.
"That’s the thing’s name?" inquired Winfield cheerfully.
Zarnak nodded somberly. "I don’t suppose you have ever happened to look into any of the late Professor Copeland’s books about the prehistoric Pacific civilizations?"
Winfield chuckled. "Not me! Not much of a reader. I'm afraid. What is it about this bugger that interests you?"
"It is quite unique. I should like to study it at length. May I borrow it for a time?”
"Well ... valuable, is it?"
"Priceless, I should say. It is probably the only piece of its kind on earth—fortunately for us. In my opinion, you will sleep much more soundly without it on the premises, and enjoy much more wholesome dreams." said Zarnak.
Winfield looked skeptical; nevertheless he insisted that Doctor Zarnak take the piece with him and keep it as long as he wished.
"Grandfather said that thing was found by a native diver somewhere in the waters off Easter Island," he remarked. "Maybe it would have been a lot better if it had stayed down below, eh?"
"Quite so," said Zarnak fervently. He had never spoken more sincerely in his life.
ONCE back in China Alley. Zarnak examined the stony image more closely. It was made of a greasy gray stone, mottled with dark green splotches like fungus or lichen. He weighed the image, and it was abnormally heavy—heavier than lead, far heavier than any terrene mineral was supposed to be. The phrase "star-quarried stone" passed through his mind briefly.
Zarnak consulted the books in his library. First he looked into a slim, cheaply produced pamphlet which bore the title The Zanthu Tablets and read of Great Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, imprisoned by the Elder Gods in Yhe. Then he consulted von Junzt, and found the following passage of interest:
Of the Spawn of Cthulhu, only Ythogtha lies prisoned in regions contiguous to sunken R’lyeh, for Yhe was once a province of Mu, and R'lych is not far off the submerged shores of that riven, drowned continent; and Yhe and R’lyeh are close nigh unto each other, along dimensions not numbered among the three we know.
Zarnak studied the stony image with some of the scientific instruments in his laboratory. It seemed to possess a powerful electromagnetic charge—at least, contact with the image wilted the gold leaves of the electroscope. Zarnak meditated: Such images, he knew, brought down from the stars when the earth was young, may be fashioned of an unearthly and abnormal amalgam of stone and metal, which would account for the unusual weight of the object. That such figurines may be impregnated with thought waves, even as a strip of magnetic tape can be recorded with sound waves, was also known to him from his researches. Was that the secret of the image, or did it somehow serve as the transmitter of thought waves from the lair of Ythogtha's awful Sire?
All the while, the frog-like image squatted on the laboratory table, regarding him unwinkingly with that one Medusa-like eye of cold malignancy.
The thing seemed virtually alive in some uncanny way. Almost, it seemed, the gray-green mineral surged with vitality and the writhing tendrils that mercifully masked its hideous visage seemed almost to flicker with furtive motion, when glimpsed from the corners of his eye.