A single glimpse of the title was sufficient to send Williams into transports, and some of the diagrams inserted into the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He could not bear to waste a moment, but was possessed with impatience to take the ponderous volume home and to plunge into the decyphering of its pages, and he departed with the book in such precipitous haste that he hardly heard the old Jew chuckle disturbingly as he left the bookshop. But when at length he had borne the book safely to his room, had secured and locked the door behind him, and had begun to scan the yellowed pages, he found to his dismay that the combination of the clumsy black-letter, which was nigh-illegible, and the debased idiom in which the book was indited resisted such linguistic abilities as he possessed. Then he bethought him of his strange neighbour, whose scholarly attainments by far exceeded his own, and knocked upon the door of his mysterious, frightened friend for assistance in unravelling the twisted, medieval Latin.
Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat when the younger man entered, and he started violently at the appearance of his unexpected visitor. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and when Williams uttered aloud its title he fainted altogether. It was when he had fully regained his senses that he began to relate his own story, or figment of madness, in a frantic, whispering voice, eager to have it told so that he could make certain that Williams would not delay but would hasten to bum those abominable pages, and scatter their ashes wide.
THERE must (Lord Northam whispered) have been something very wrong at the start; but it would never have come to a head had I not explored too far into the mystery. I am the nineteenth baron of a line whose beginnings extend disquietingly far into the distant past—unbelievably far back. If family traditions may be credited, for there are ancestral tales of our descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Luneus Gabinius Capiro, military tribune of the Third Augustan Legion, then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for his participation in certain secret rites unconnected with any known and recognised religion. This Gabinius had, or so the rumours ran, come upon a cavern hollowed out of the cliffs which fronted upon the stormy waters of the sea, and where strange furtive folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; an odd, old folk whom the Britons knew not, but whom they greatly feared, and of whom they whispered that they were the last lingering few to survive from a great land amidst the Western Ocean, long since sunken beneath the hungry waves, leaving behind only those isles with their rathes and menhirs and circles of standing stones, of which Stonehenge was the greatest.
There was no certain evidence, of course, that Gabinius had bulk an impregnable fortress above that forbidden cave, and had thereafter established a line which Pict or Saxon, Dane or Norman, Roman or Briton, were equally powerless to obliterate. Nor was there any certainty in the tacit assumption that from that uncannily protected line had sprung that bold companion and staunch lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created first Baron of Northam. These legends were unsupported by any form of substantial evidence, but they were often whispered; and, in very truth, the stonework of Northam Keep, at least in the older portions of its masonry, bore disturbing and even alarming resemblances to the Roman stonework of Hadrian's Wall.
As a child (continued Northam after a pause), I always experienced the most peculiar dreams whenever I chanced to sleep in the more ancient parts of the castle, and I acquired a nervous habit of continuously searching back through my memories for certain half-amorphous scenes or inexplicable patterns or the oddly significant impressions created by certain effects of landscape vistas and odd cloud formations—none of which seemed to form any part of my conscious recollection of waking experience. By degrees, I became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying, a searcher after weird realms and inexplicable relationships once familiar as in some prior life, but seemingly discoverable nowhere in the visible regions of this world.
I became filled with a feeling our tangible world is only one strand—one fibre—in a fabric vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes impinge upon and permeate the sphere of the known at every point. In my youth and early manhood, having drained dry the fones of formal religion and mysticism, I turned to the intense perusal of the occult mysteries and the arcana of ceremonial and ritual magic. Nowhere, however, could I discover that for which I hungered—the means to penetrate beyond the vast illusion we call Reality, thereby to obtain the vision of those enthralling worlds of remote and unutterable alienage that dimly haunted my dreams, and the knowledge of whose intangible and ineluctable splendours obsessed my every waking moment and made bland and pallid every pain or pleasure to which the body and its senses may attain. In absinthe and hasheesh, in opium and laudanum, in a myriad of dangerous drugs and illegal or poisonous alkaloids I sought, through the deliberate and systematic derangement of the rational mind and the senses, that supernal and transcendent vision; but in no opiate did I find the key to that revelation of worlds and planes of existence ineffably superior to our own, which was the guerdon of my labours.
In lieu of ease and content I found only restlessness and ennui, and as I grew older the staleness and limitations of life became ever more tedious and maddening to me. During the ’nineties I sought surcease from the insipidity of existence by delving into Satanism, by dabbling with every theory and devouring avidly any doctrine which might offer a palliative to the close and stifling vistas of unimaginative science and philosophy and the dully unvarying so-called Laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly’s fabulous account of Atlantis I absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled me for a time with their meticulous documentation of inexplicable occurrences ... but in naught could I find a path to the utterly unplumbed gulfs beyond the reach of the astronomers or the cognizance of mundane cosmographers—the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting—the ultimate, unguessable regions beyond the strictures of time and space, where the laws of Euclidean geometry or of cause and effect or of Sequential time itself are bent awry, and where the chimerical and the self-contradictory are the norm, while the rational and the tangible are but idle fancies.
In despair, I sought in travel the alleviation of my discomfiture; I would traverse leagues to trace down some furtive village tale of an abnormal wonder, and once I ventured farther off and into the deserts of Araby in search of a certain Nameless City of vague and unsubstantiated rumour, which no man is known ever to have beheld. There rose within me the tantalising faith that somewhere an easily accessible Gate existed, which if once found would admit me freely to chose outer deeps whose echoes faintly reverberated in the ancestral adyts of my memory.
The Gate I sought might well be within the compass of the visible and waking world, yet it might exist only within the depths of my mind or soul. Perhaps (I mused) I held within my own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would unlock the innermost portal or awaken my dormant senses to elder or to future lives in forgotten dimensions of reality; which would give me access to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities which lie beyond them, and to states of being or modes of apprehension fabulous to me now.
Pursuant to this notion, I searched yet again through that mouldering library of ancient tomes accumulated over the span of centuries by the barons of my line, amongst which were treatises on daemonology and the alchemical science, abstruse and recondite philosophies, works which discussed the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, and innumerable histories of witchcraft and diabolism, the writings of the Kabballah and of the Gnostic mages. Although I had winnowed the library thoroughly in my youth, it yet remained within the bounds of possibility that there remained some rare and occult tome or monograph which I had scanned inattentively, or even overlooked, and which might hold the key that would open those supernal Gates to the astounding vistas and incredible marvels which lay Outside.