As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips
were watching him absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the
narrative and kept his eyes ostentatiously on the papers before him.
The alien-rhythmed ticking of the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and
portentous meaning, while the fumes from the choked, neglected tripods
wove themselves into fantastic and inexplicable shapes, and formed
disturbing combinations with the grotesque figures of the draft-swayed
tapestries. The old negro who had tended them was gone--perhaps
some growing tension had frightened him out of the house. An almost
apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker as he resumed in his oddly
labored yet idiomatic voice.
"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe," he said,
"but you will find the tangible and material things ahead still
harder. That is the way of our minds. Marvels are doubly incredible
when brought into three dimensions from the vague regions of possible
dream. I shall not try to tell you much--that would be another and very
different story. I will tell only what you absolutely have to know."
Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm,
had found himself in what for a moment he thought was his old
insistent dream. He was, as many a night before, walking amidst
throngs of clawed, snouted beings through the streets of a labyrinth
of inexplicably fashioned metal under a blaze of diverse solar color;
and as he looked down he saw that his body was like those of the
others--rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion
mainly insect-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to the
human outline. The silver key was still in his grasp, though held by a
noxious-looking claw.
In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as
one just awakened from a dream. The ultimate abyss--the Being--the
entity of absurd, outlandish race called Randolph Carter on a world
of the future not yet born--some of these things were parts of the
persistent recurrent dreams of the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith.
They were too persistent--they interfered with his duties in weaving
spells to keep the frightful Dholes in their burrows, and became mixed
up with his recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited
in light-beam envelopes. And now they had become quasi-real as never
before. This heavy, material silver key in his right upper claw, exact
image of one he had dreamt about, meant no good. He must rest and
reflect, and consult the tablets of Nhing for advice on what to do.
Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the main concourse, he entered his
apartment and approached the rack of tablets.
Seven day-fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half
despair, for the truth had opened up a new and conflicting set of
memories. Nevermore could he know the peace of being one entity. For
all time and space he was two: Zkauba the wizard of Yaddith, disgusted
with the thought of the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was to be
and had been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston on the Earth, shivering
with fright at the clawed, snouted thing which he had once been, and
had become again.
The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami--whose labored voice
was beginning to show signs of fatigue--made a tale in themselves
which could not be related in brief compass. There were trips to
Stronti and Mthura and Kath, and other worlds in the twenty-eight
galaxies accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of
Yaddith, and trips back and forth through eons of time with the aid of
the silver key and various other symbols known to Yaddith's wizards.
There were hideous struggles with the bleached viscous Dholes in the
primal tunnels that honeycombed the planet. There were awed sessions
in libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand worlds living
and dead. There were tense conferences with other minds of Yaddith,
including that of the Arch-Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what
had befallen his personality, but when the Randolph Carter facet was
uppermost he would study furiously every possible means of returning
to the Earth and to human form, and would desperately practise human
speech with the alien throat-organs so ill adapted to it.
The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the silver key
was unable to effect his return to human form. It was, as he deduced
too late from things he remembered, things he dreamed, and things he
inferred from the lore of Yaddith, a product of Hyperborea on Earth;
with power over the personal consciousness-angles of human beings
alone. It could, however, change the planetary angle and send the user
at will through time in an unchanged body. There had been an added
spell which gave it limitless powers it otherwise lacked; but this,
too, was a human discovery--peculiar to a spatially unreachable region,
and not to be duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written
on the undecipherable parchment in the hideously carven box with the
silver key, and Carter bitterly lamented that he had left it behind.
The now inaccessible Being of the abyss had warmed him to be sure of
his symbols, and had doubtless thought he lacked nothing.
As time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilize the monstrous
lore of Yaddith in finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent
Entity. With his new knowledge he could have done much toward reading
the cryptic parchment; but that power, under present conditions, was
merely ironic. There were times, however, when the Zkauba-facet was
uppermost, and when he strove to erase the conflicting Carter-memories
which troubled him.
* * * * *
Thus long spaces of time wore on--ages longer than the brain of man
could grasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged
cycles. After many hundreds of revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to
gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculating
the distance of Yaddith in space and time from the human Earth that
was to be. The figures were staggering--eons of light-years beyond
counting--but the immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp
such things. He cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarily
Earthward, and learned many things about our planet that he had never
known before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the missing
parchment.
Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith--which
began when he found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always
dormant, yet without dissolution of the knowledge and memories of
Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him perform a
voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had
ever performed--a _bodily_ voyage through nameless eons and across
incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the Earth itself.
Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he
might be able somehow to find--and finish deciphering--the strangely
hieroglyphed parchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its
aid--and the key's--resume his normal terrestrial semblance.
He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he
had brought the planet-angle to the right eon (a thing impossible
to do while hurtling through space), Yaddith would be a dead world
dominated by triumphant Dholes, and that his escape in the light-wave
envelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of
how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of an adept, to
endure the eon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too,
that--assuming his voyage succeeded--he must immunize himself to the
bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith.
Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on Earth
until he might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape
in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by
the people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be
some gold--luckily obtainable on Yaddith--to tide him over that period
of quest.
Slowly Carter's plans went forward. He provided a light-wave
envelope of abnormal toughness, able to stand both the prodigious
time-transition and the unexampled flight through space. He tested all
his calculations, and sent forth his Earthward dreams again and again,
bringing them as close as possible to 1928. He practised suspended
animation with marvelous success. He discovered just the bacterial
agent he needed, and worked out the varying gravity-stress to which
he must become used. He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose
costume enabling him to pass among men as a human being of a sort,
and devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the Dholes
at the moment of his starting from the dead, black Yaddith of the
inconceivable future. He took care, too, to assemble a large supply of
the drugs--unobtainable on Earth--which would keep his Zkauba-facet
in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith body, nor did he neglect a
small store of gold for earthly use.
The starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed
up to his envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple
star Nython, and crawled into the sheath of shining metal. He had just
room to perform the ritual of the silver key, and as he did so he
slowly started the levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling
seething and darkening of the day, and a hideous racking of pain. The
cosmos seemed to reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations
danced in a black sky.
[Illustration: "Below him the ground was festering with gigantic
Dholes."]
All at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar
gulfs gnawed at the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he
floated free in space--the metal building from which he had started
having decayed years before. Below him the ground was festering with
gigantic Dholes; and even as he looked, one reared up several hundred
feet and levelled a bleached, viscous end at him. But his spells were
effective, and in another moment he was falling away from Yaddith,
unharmed.