CHAPTER XXVIII
In the Lair of the Dweller
IT IS WITH marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it I must deal with an experience so contrary to
every known law of physics as to seem impossible. Until
this time, barring, of course, the mystery of the Dweller, I
had encountered nothing that was not susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside the domain of
science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy in
reciting to my colleagues of the International Association of
Science. Amazing, unfamiliar - ADVANCED - as many of the
phenomena were, still they lay well within the limits of what
we have mapped as the possible; in regions, it is true, still
virgin to the mind of man, but toward which that mind is
steadily advancing.
But this - well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic; but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the
short confines of the space I have to give it, so dependent
upon conceptions that even the highest-trained scientific
brains find difficult to grasp, that I despair.
I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place
in precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I
experienced it.
Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of
preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity.
And the first path is the realization that our world WHATEVER
it is, is certainly NOT the world as we see it! Regarding this I
shall refer to a discourse upon "Gravitation and the Principle
of Relativity," by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A.
S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution.1
1 Reprinted in full in Nature, in which those sufficiently interested
may peruse it. - W. T. G.
I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue -
"The world is not as we think it is - therefore everything we
think impossible is possible in it." Even if it BE different, it
is governed by LAW. The truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing CAN be outside law, the impossible
CANNOT exist.
The crux of the matter then becomes our determination
whether what we think is impossible may or may not be
possible under laws still beyond our knowledge.
I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression, but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at
least, put me more at ease. And now to resume.
We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the
bodies of Yolara's assassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly
to where the dead men floated, dozens of the luminous
globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacles whipped out;
the giant iridescent bubbles CLIMBED over the cadavers. And
as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the
melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had
witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved
Rador - and upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours shifting, changing, glowing
stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment
whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.
Sick, I turned away - O'Keefe as pale as I; passed back
into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which
we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she
could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing.
It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us - then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.
"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. A fainter
sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara
is gone," she said, "the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten
- for the Three have commanded that you, Goodwin, and
Larry and I tread that strange road of which I have spoken,
and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break - and we
must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."
Her hand sought Larry's.
"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down
through hall after hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep,
deep indeed, we must be beneath the domed castle - Lakla
paused before a curved, smooth breast of the crimson stone
rounding gently into the passage. She pressed its side; it
revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.
The room, the - hollow - in which we stood was faceted
like a diamond; and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened -
though dully. Its shape was a deep oval, and our path
dropped down to a circular polished base, roughly two yards
in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in the closing of
the entrance there had been left no trace of it save the steps
that led from where that entrance had been - and as I looked
these steps TURNED, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only
the faceted walls about us - and in each of the gleaming
faces the three of us reflected - dimly. It was as though we
were within a diamond egg whose graven angles bad been
turned INWARD.
But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it -
a screen that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences
- stretching from the side of our standing place up to the
tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but
with this difference - that within each line I sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude,
ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to
whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the
needle of a micrometer.
A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a
compass, bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal
ran concentric rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly
blue. From the edge of the dial jutted a little shelf of crystal,
a keyboard, in which were cut eight small cups.
Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering
fingers. She gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit - and
the screen behind us slipped noiselessly into another angle.
"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand
close," she murmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over
my shoulder."
Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers
upon the shelf's indentations - three of the rings of vapour
spun into intense light, raced around each other; from the
screen behind us grew a radiance that held within itself all
spectrums - not only those seen, but those UNSEEN by man's
eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever more brilliant, all suffusing,
passing through me as day streams through a window pane!
The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and
in each sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn
like pennants in a whirlwind. I turned to look - was stopped
by the handmaiden's swift command: "Turn not - on your
life!"
The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of
light in which I was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but
not with my ears - nay with MIND itself - a vast roaring; an
ORDERED tumult of sound that came hurling from the outposts
of space; approaching - rushing - hurricane out of the heart
of the cosmos - closer, closer. It wrapped itself about us with
unearthly mighty arms.
And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance
through us.
The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted,
diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame;
through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light,
the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly
- then ever more swiftly!
Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed - ever faster
we went. Cutting down through the length, the EXTENSION
of me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close;
I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, into a thin - slice - of colour that was a part of me;
another wall of rock shrinking into a thin wedge through
which I flew, and that at once took its place within me like a
card slipped beside those others!
Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were
nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady
hurling forward - appallingly mechanical.
Another barrier of rock - a gleam of white waters incorporating themselves into my - DRAWING OUT - even as were
the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky walls - still
another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical
plane of those others. Our flight checked; we seemed to hover
within, then to sway onward - slowly, cautiously.
A mist danced ahead of me - a mist that grew steadily
thinner. We stopped, wavered - the mist cleared.
I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with
swift prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity
like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters: dancing,
scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and
yon, through depths of nebulous splendour!
And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow
shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more
above the surface of this place - a surface spangled with tiny
white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of
phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire. We were shadows
- and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a
part of, the rock - and yet we were living flesh and blood; we
stretched - nor will I qualify this - we STRETCHED through
mile upon mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one
and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of space whatever; we stood THERE
upon the face of the stone - and still we were HERE within
the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!
"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice - and not beside me THERE,
but at my ear close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin!
And - see!"
The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched
before me. Shimmering up through them, and as though
growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon
mass of verdure - fruiting trees and trees laden with pale
blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea
fruit of oblivion - grapes of Lethe - that cling to the tideswept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them,
drifted and eddied a horde - great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which
Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs - men and women and
children - clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;
slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and
brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons
with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline
Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians,
Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries BEYOND
their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white
faces of our own Westerners - men and women and children
- drifting, eddying - each stamped with that mingled horror
and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined,
marked by God and devil in embrace - the seal of the Shining One - the dead-alive; the lost ones!
The loot of the Dweller!
Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they
swept down toward us, glaring upward - a bank against
which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were
checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows
piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath
us - staring - staring!
Now there was a movement - far, far away; a concentrating of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated - forming a long lane against whose outskirts they
crowded with avid, hungry insistence.
First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of
splendours through the lane came - the Shining One. As it
passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind
a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by
them, brushing them with its spirallings and tentacles, they
shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamings - like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly. And when it
had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.
The Dweller paused beneath us.
Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin!
Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the
pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly
followed. On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the
lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something
like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them - and soulless.
He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing.
Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle,
and lovely - lovely even through the mask that lay upon
her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin's, glowed
with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him
closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning, these
two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.
And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort
to save him had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!
"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here!"
Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.
But then I waited - hope striving to break through the
nightmare hands that gripped my heart.
Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them, others pushed past them; they drifted
back, swaying, eddying - and still staring were lost in the
awful throng.
Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force
some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life
we know. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see
them - nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora
who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by
the Dweller.
"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears
blinded me.
I felt Lakla's light touch.
"Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin.
You cannot help them - now! Steady and - watch!"
Below us the Shining One had paused - spiralling, swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had
paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly
that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of
radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the
shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy
opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom
fires. Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst,
of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life
and moon white. They poised themselves like a diadem -
calm, serene, immobile - and down from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless
tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of
spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to
run - POWER - from the seven globes; like - yes, that was it
- miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured
through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's
chamber roof.
Swam out of the coruscating haze the - face!
Both of man and of woman it was - like some ancient,
androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet
neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and
sinister, benign and malefic - and still no more of these four
than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours,
or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or
the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.
Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not
ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form - and as swiftly withdrew whence they had
come; something amorphous, unearthly - as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of starhung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of
earth peering out from it, caught within it - and in some -
unholy - way debased.
It had eyes - eyes that were now only shadows darkening
within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, OPENING
windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing
blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing
out, and this only when the - face - bore its most human
resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peepholes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!
"Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against
mine.
I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And
I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining
One had none - nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core
streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this,
never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its
hell and heaven born radiance.
So the Dweller stood - and gazed.
Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!
Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; Dead-Alive
and their master vanished - I danced, flickered, WITHIN the
rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice
upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of
elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from
a pack, one by one - slipped, wheeled, flattened, and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.
Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval
chamber; arm still about the handmaiden's white shoulder;
Larry's hand still clutching her girdle.
The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space - was still; the intense, streaming,
flooding radiance lessened - died.
"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod
the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones
have commanded, what the Shining One is - and how it
came to be."
The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber
opened.
Larry as silent as I - we followed her through it.
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