The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (21 page)

“I should never have believed it of Calvin,” he thought. “The man must be in his dotage.”

He lifted the lid of the unattractive volume, and discovered to his further surprise that it was a bound manuscript, written in a clear but spidery hand, with ink that showed a variety of discolorations, on paper brown and slightly charred at the edges. Apparently it had been saved from a conflagration; or perhaps someone had started to burn it and changed his mind. After reading a few sentences here and there, Woadley was inclined to the latter supposition, but could not imagine why the burning had been prevented.

The manuscript was untitled, unsigned, and appeared to be a collection of miscellaneous notes and jottings, made by some eccentrically minded person who had lived in New England toward the latter end of the era of witchcraft. References were made in the present tense to certain notorious witches of the time. Most of the entries, however, bore on matters that were fantastically varied and remote, and which had no patent relationship to each other aside from their common queerness and extravagance. The erudition of the unknown writer was remarkable even if misguided: as he turned the leaves impatiently, the attention of Woadley was caught by unheard-of names and terms wholly obscure to him. He frowned over casual mentionings of Lomar, Eibon, Zemargad, the Ghooric Zone, Zothique, the Table of Mordiggian, Thilil, Psollantha, Vermazbor, and the Black Flame of Yuzh. A little further on, he came to the following passage, which was equally holocryptic:

“The star Yamil Zacra, which shines but faintly on Earth, was clearly distinguished by the Hyperboreans, who knew it as the fountain-head of all evill. They knew, moreover, that in every peopled world to which the beams of Yamil Zacra have penetrated, there are beings who bear in their flesh the fierie particles diffused by this star throughout time and space. Such beings may pass their days without knowledge of the perilous kinship and the awefull powers acquired by virtue of these particles; but in others the evill declares itself variously. All who are witches or wizards or necromancers, or seekers of any forbidden lore or domination, have in them more or less of the seed of Yamil Zacra. Most mightily do the fires awaken, it is said, in him that wears on his person one of the black amulets which were brought to Earth in elder time from the great planetary world that circles eternally about Yamil Zacra and its dark companion, Yuzh. These amulets are made of a strange mineral, and upon each of them, as upon a seal, is graved the head of an unknown creature. They were once five in number, but now there are only two of them left on Earth, since the other three have been translated with their wearers back to the parent world. The manner of such translation is hard to comprehend; and the thing can occur only to one who has in himself the highest and most potent of the severall kinds of atomies emitted by Yamil Zacra. These, if he wear the amulet, may master within him in their fierie flowering the seeds of all other suns; and, being brought by virtue of this change beneath the full magneticall sway of the parent star, he will see the walls of time and place dissolve about him, and will walk in the flesh on the planet that is near to Yamil Zacra. Howbeit, there are other mysteries concerned, of which nothing is known latterly: for this lore was mainly lost with the elder continents; and lost likewise are the very names of the three men who were transported formerly from Earth. But Carnamagos, in his
Testaments
, prophesied that a fourth transportation would occur during the present cycle of terrene time; and the fifth would not occur till the final cycle, and the lifting of the last continent, Zothique.”

Appended to this passage, in the form of a footnote, was another entry: “The star Yamil Zacra is unnamed by astronomers, and is seldom noted, being insignificant to the eye because of the brighter orbs that surround it. He who would find it must look midway between Algol and Polaris.”

Woadley was unable to account for the patience he had shown in perusing this ineffable farrago.

“What stuff!” he exclaimed aloud, as he closed the volume and dropped it on the library table with a vehemence that bespoke his indignation. “I had no idea that Calvin went in for astrology and such rot. I must give him a piece of my mind about this damnable mistake.”

His eye returned to the volume, noting with fresh displeasure that the somewhat shabby binding, which was plainly the work of an amateur, had cracked a little at the back from the violence with which he had let it fall. Gingerly he picked it up again, to examine the damage. Behind the rent in the shoddy leather, which ran diagonally down from the book’s top, he discerned the rim of a small flat article, dark but scintillant, that was lodged in the interstices of the binding. Moved by a half-unwilling curiosity, he pried the thing very carefully from its hiding-place with a thin paper-cutter, without lengthening the rift.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said to himself, aloud. The profanity was almost without precedent for Woadley, but, in justification, the object that lay in the palm of his hand was nothing less than unique. It was a kind of miniature plaque or seal-like carving, little larger or thicker than an Attic mina, made of a carbon-black material which seemed to emit phosphorescent sparklings and was impossibly heavy, being at least double the weight of lead. Its outlines were unearthly, but, in the absence of any data to enlighten him, he assumed that the thing represented a sort of profile. This profile possessed a sickle-like beak and a semi-batrachian mouth whose underlip curved down obscurely and divided into swollen wattles. Far back in the corrugated face, there was a round, protuberant eye that gave the uncomfortable illusion of revolving in its socket beneath the least change of light. Above this eye, the head arose in a series of bosses, each of which was armed with a formidable upward-jutting spike. The monster was neither bird, beast nor insect, and it seemed to express a diabolism beyond anything in nature or human art. A medieval gargoyle, or an Aztec god, would have been mild and benignant in comparison. Shimmering as if with black hell-fire, it appeared to twist and writhe in malign fury as it lay in Woadley’s hand. He turned it over rather hastily, but found that the obverse side repeated the figure in every hideous detail, like the other half of a face. He noticed also, for the first time, that certain worm-like characters or symbols were repeated in the clear space between the profile and the rim.

Owning himself utterly at a loss, he put this thing in his coat-pocket, with the intention of showing it to the curator of a local museum. This curator, with whom he was on friendly terms, would no doubt be able to identify it. Later, he would return it to the book-seller, together with the offensively substituted volume.

He looked at the clock, and saw that the closing time of the museum was nearly at hand. The curator seldom lingered after hours, and he lived in a remote suburb; so Woadley decided to defer his visit till the following day. It still lacked an hour of his customary dinner-time; and a curious languor, a disinclination toward any effort, either mental or physical, had come upon him all at once. The annoyance of the book-dealer’s error, the bothersome riddle of the carving, began to slip from his mind. He sat down to peruse the evening paper, which his manservant had brought in a little while before.

Amid the heavier headlines of crime and politics, his eye was drawn almost immediately to an unobtrusive item relating to a new scientific discovery. It was headed: INFRA-MICROSCOPIC SUNS IN LIVING BODY-TISSUE. Woadley seldom read anything of the sort; but for some reason his interest was inveigled. He found that the gist of the article was in the following paragraph:

“It has now been proved that the human body contains atoms which burn like infinitesimal suns at a temperature of 1500° Centigrade. They stimulate vital activity, and many of their functions and properties are not yet wholly comprehended. In the most literal sense, they are identical with sun-fire and star-fire. Their arrangement in the tissue is like the spacing of constellations.”

“How queer!” thought Woadley. “Bless me, but that’s like the stuff in the astrological manuscript—the ‘fierie particles,’ etc. What are we coming to anyway?”

After dining with the moderation that marked all of his habits, Oliver Woadley was overcome by an unwonted and excessive drowsiness, which he could hardly attribute to his single glass of port. Being a respectable bachelor, he commonly spent his evenings in his own home, or else at one of the ultra-conservative clubs to which he belonged. In either case, with an unfailing punctuality, he was in bed by 10:30 P.M. This time, however, to the mild scandalization of his valet and housekeeper, he fell asleep in an easy chair among his books, after vainly trying to keep himself awake with Volume I of
Sense and Sensibility
from the new and strangely incomplete set of Jane Austen. There was a feeling of insidious narcotic luxury, a dim and indolent drifting as if upon Lethean clouds or vapors or exotic perfumes. At moments he was vaguely troubled by this infinite relaxation, which seemed to have in it something of decadent sensuality and sybaritism. However, he quickly resigned himself, and slumber bore him away on a tide softer than drifted poppy petals.

His sleep was soon troubled by a feeling of vast subliminal unrest and activity. In a state midway between oblivion and coherent dream, he seemed to apprehend the muttering of myriad voices, the opening of many doors, the lighting of myriad lamps and furnaces in the secret subterranes of his mind, that had lain dark and stirless heretofore. The muffled tumult rose and grew louder, the flames brightened, as if a resurrection of dead things were taking place. Then, like an ever-streaming pageant called up by necromancy, the dreams began.

His dreams, as a rule, were no less ordinary, no less innocuous, than the doings and reveries of the daytime. But now, with no violation of congruity, and no sense of strangeness or revulsion, he found himself playing the chief role in dramas from which the waking Woadley would have recoiled with horror.

In one of the dreams he was a medieval sorcerer taking part in the gross abominations of the Sabbat, amid the hysterical laughter of witches, the moaning of succubi, and the leaping of flames that flung their bloody gules on the black, enormous Creature presiding over all. In a second dream, he was an alchemist who sought the elixir of immortal life. He breathed the vapors of poisonous chemicals, he delved in volumes of unholy lore and madness, he tampered with the secrets of death and mortality, in the effort to reach his goal. Then he became an Atlantean scientist who had mastered the creation of living protoplasm and the disintegration of the atom, and who, by virtue of this knowledge, had attained tyrannic empire over the peoples of the crumbling continent. He made war on rebel cities with armies of artificial monsters; till, threatened in his citadel by the deadly fungi sent against him by a rival savant, he loosed the cataclysmic forces that would shatter the last foundations of Atlantis and bring upon it the engulfing sea. Subsequently, by turns, he was a Shaman of some Tartar tribe, performing rude sacrifice to barbarous gods; a Yezidee devil-worshipper, serving the baleful Peacock; and a witch of Salem who called upon demons and hurled venomous maledictions at the bystanders as she was led to the stake.

Centuries, cycles of wild and various visions followed, with no other thread of unity than the lust for unlawful knowledge and power, or pleasure beyond the natural limits of the senses, which was common to all the selves of the dreamer. Then, with casual suddenness, the phantasmagoria took an even stranger turn.

The scene of these latter dreams was not the earth, but an immense planet revolving around the sun Yamil Zacra and its dark companion, Yuzh. The name of the world was Pnidleethon. It was a place of exuberant evil life, and its very poles were tropically fertile; and the lowliest of its people was more learned in wizardry, and mightier in necromancy, than the greatest of terrene sorcerers. How he had arrived there, the dreamer did not know, for he was faint and blinded with the glory of Yamil Zacra, burning in mid-heaven with insupportable whiteness beside the blackly flaming orb of Yuzh. He knew, however, that in Pnidleethon he was no longer the master of evil he had been on Earth, but was an humble neophyte who sought admission to a dark hierarchy. As a proof of his fitness, he was to undergo tremendous ordeals, and tests of unimaginable fire and night.

There was, he thought, a terrible terraced mountain, lifting in the air for a hundred miles between the suns; and he must climb from terrace to terrace on stairs guarded by a million larvae of alien horror, a million chimeras of the further cosmos. Death, in a form hideous beyond the dooms of Earth, would be the price of the least failure of courage or any momentary relaxation of vigilance. On each of the lower terraces, when he had attained it after incalculable jeopardy, there were veiled sphinxes and hooded colossi of ill to whose interrogations he must give infallible answer. And having answered them correctly, thus evading the special doom assigned for the ignorant or forgetful, he must commit himself to the care of those Gardeners whose task was the temporary grafting of human life on the life of certain monstrous plants. And after the floral transmigration, in which he must abide for a stated term of time, there were other transmigrations for the acolyte to undergo on his way to the mountain-summit, so that no order of life and sentience should be foreign to his understanding…

In another dream, he had nearly gained the summit, and the rays of Yamil Zacra were upon him like ever-falling sheets of levin-flame in the cloudless air. He had passed all of the mountain’s guardians, except Vermazbor, who warded the apex, and was the most terrible of all. Vermazbor, who had no visible form, other than that derived from the acolyte’s profoundest and most secret fear, was taking shape before him; and all the pain and peril and travail he had endured in his ascent would be as nothing, unless he could vanquish Vermazbor…

Chapter II:
The Wearing of the Amulet

When Woadley awakened, all of these monstrous and outré dreams were like memories of actual happenings in his mind. With bewilderment that deepened into consternation, he found that he could not dissociate himself from the strange avatars through which he had lived. Like the victim of some absurd obsession, who, knowing well the absurdity, is nevertheless without power to free himself, he tried vainly for some time to disinvolve the thoughts and actions of his diurnal life from those of the seekers after illicit things with whom he had been identified.