Eldritch Tales (53 page)

I had the book that told the hidden way

Across the void and through the space-hung screens

That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,

And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood

Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth’s precisions,

Lurking as memories of infinitude.

The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,

The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.

I saw – just once – that hollow of old oaks,

Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes

The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.

It was the same – an herbage rank and wild

Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes

That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes

Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.

And knew those things which feasted were not men;

I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,

But Yuggoth, past the starry voids – and then

The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,

And all too late I knew that it was I!

To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled

As a high place of stair and terrace, walled

With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,

While miles below a maze of dome on dome

And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.

Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled

On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,

And red-gold thrones of gods without a name

Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.

Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:

‘Here was your home,’ he mocked, ‘when you had sight!’

Whose chiselled sign no priest in Thebes could read,

And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs

Warned every creature of earth’s breed.

No more was there – just that one brazen bowl

With traces of a curious oil within;

Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll,

And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.

To us as we bore off our slender spoil,

And when we scanned it in our darkened tent

We struck a match to test the ancient oil.

It blazed – great God! . . . But the vast shapes we saw

In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe.

A precipice against the main street’s end;

Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down

Upon the steeple at the highway bend.

Two hundred years the whispers had been heard

About what happened on the man-shunned slope—

Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,

Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

Nor were its folk or houses seen again;

People came out from Aylesbury to stare—

Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain

That he was mad for saying he had spied

The great hill’s gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.

That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,

And hoped that just at sunset I could reach

The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.

Far out at sea was a retreating sail,

White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach,

But evil with some portent beyond speech,

So that I did not wave my hand or hail.

Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night

Is closing in, and I have reached the height

Whence I so often scan the distant town.

The spires and roofs are there – but look! The gloom

Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!

The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs

Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs

In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.

The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me

From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate,

As edging through the filth I passed the gate

To the black courtyard where the man would be.

That ever I had come to such a den,

When suddenly a score of windows burst

Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:

Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead—

And not a corpse had either hands or head!

Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil,

And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick,

Wink messages to alien god and devil.

A million fires were blazing in the streets,

And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly

Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky

While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.

And that those birds of space had been
Outside
—

I guessed to what dark planet’s crypts they plied,

And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.

The others laughed – till struck too mute to speak

By what they glimpsed in one bird’s evil beak.

He tried to sink that deep well by his door,

With only Eb to help him bore and bore.

We laughed, and hoped he’d soon be sane again.

And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too,

So that they shipped him to the county farm.

Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue—

Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.

Out to that well and rip the bricks away,

But all we saw were iron hand-holds set

Down a black hole deeper than we could say.

And yet we put the bricks back – for we found

The hole too deep for any line to sound.

That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,

For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four,

Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.

Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view

The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,

I could not think of elms or hempen rope,

But wondered why the house still seemed so new.

I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,

When through the ivied panes one sunset ray

Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.

I glimpsed – and ran in frenzy from the place,

And from a four-pawed thing with human face.

And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,

Opens great gates to some forgotten year

Of elder splendours and divine desires.

Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,

Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;

A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear

Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.

Where every unplaced memory has a source;

Where the great river Time begins its course

Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.

Dreams bring us close – but ancient lore repeats

That human tread has never soiled these streets.

Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours

Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,

But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.

The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,

And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,

Heeding geometries of outer space,

While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.

What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents

And tints of flowers fill Nithon’s continents,

Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.

Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,

A dozen more of ours they sweep away!

Of the black cone amid the polar waste;

Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,

By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.

Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,

And only pale auroras and faint suns

Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources

Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;

But the bird told of vaster parts, that under

The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.

God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew

Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

Of which no one could ever half keep track,

And in a small room somewhat near the back

Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.

There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone

I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;

Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack

Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.

To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,