The Other Gods and More Unearthly Tales (53 page)

“A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew that he must act quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment and resume his human form.
Consequently he deputed me to act for him, and in that capacity I am here.

“Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is temporarily in an anomalous condition, but that within two or three months at the outside he will be able to appear in
proper form and demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared to offer proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that you adjourn this meeting for an indefinite period.”

De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotised, while Aspinwall emitted a series of snorts and bellows. The old attorney’s disgust had by now surged into
open rage, and he pounded the table with an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was in a kind of bark.

“How long is this foolery to be borne? I’ve listened an hour to this madman—this faker—and now he has the damned effrontery to say Randolph Carter is alive—to ask
us to postpone the settlement for no good reason! Why don’t you throw the scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the butts of a charlatan or idiot?”

De Marigny quietly raised his hand and spoke softly.

“Let us think slowly and clearly. This has been a very singular tale, and there are things in it which I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognise as far from impossible.
Furthermore—since 1930 I have received letters from the Swami which tally with his account.”

As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.

“Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognise much that is significant in this story, and I have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the Swami during the last two
years; but some of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something tangible which can be shewn?”

At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawing an object from the pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.

“While none of you here has ever
seen
the Silver Key itself, Messrs. de Marigny and Phillips have seen photographs of it.
Does this look familiar to you?”

He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy key of tarnished silver—nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic workmanship, and covered from
end to end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De Marigny and Phillips gasped.

“That’s it!” cried de Marigny. “The camera doesn’t lie. I couldn’t be mistaken!”

But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.

“Fools! What does it prove? If that’s really the key that belonged to my cousin, it’s up to this foreigner—this damned nigger—to explain how he got it! Randolph
Carter vanished with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn’t robbed and murdered? He was half-crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people.

“Look here, you nigger—where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph Carter?”

The Swami’s features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless black eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.

“Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of proof that I
could
give, but its effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here are some
papers obviously written since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of Randolph Carter.”

He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a dawning feeling of supernal
wonder.

“Of course the handwriting is almost illegible—but remember that Randolph Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script.”

Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but he did not change his demeanour. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread, and the alien rhythm of the
coffin-shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny and Phillips—though the lawyer seemed affected not at all. Aspinwall spoke again.

“These look like clever forgeries. If they aren’t, they may mean that Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good purpose. There’s only one thing
to do—have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for the police?”

“Let us wait,” answered their host. “I do not think this case calls for the police. I have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments. He
says he is in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain questions which could be answered only by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and can ask such
questions. Let me get a book which I think will make a good test.”

He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who confronted him with abnormally
impassive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the Silver Key to his pocket, the lawyer emitted a guttural shout which stopped de Marigny and Phillips in their tracks.

“Hey, by God, I’ve got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don’t believe he’s an East Indian at all. That face—it isn’t a face, but a
mask!
I guess his
story put that into my head, but it’s true. It never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow’s a common crook! He isn’t even a foreigner—I’ve been
watching his language. He’s a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens—he knows his fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I’ll pull that thing off—”

“Stop!” The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly fright. “I told you there was
another form of proof which I could give if
necessary,
and I warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right—I’m not really an East Indian.
This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human.
You others have guessed—I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn’t be pleasant if I took that mask off—let it alone, Ernest. I may as well tell you that
I am Randolph
Carter.”

No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips, across the room, watched the workings of his red face and studied the back of the turbaned figure that confronted
him. The clock’s abnormal ticking was hideous and the tripod fumes and swaying arras danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke the silence.

“No you don’t, you crook—you can’t scare me! You’ve reasons of your own for not wanting that mask off. Maybe we’d know who you are. Off with
it—”

As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily mittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny started toward the two, but paused
confused as the pseudo-Hindoo’s shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall’s red face was furious, and with his free hand he made another
lunge at his opponent’s bushy beard. This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer’s
apoplectic fist.

As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de Marigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deep and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever they had seen
on human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other hand and was standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure slumped
oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was turned
away, and de Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer’s act had disclosed. Then their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor. The spell was
broken—but when they reached the old man he was dead.

Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami’s receding back, de Marigny saw one of the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the olibanum were thick, and all that
could be glimpsed of the revealed hand was something long and black. Before the Creole could reach the retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t!” he whispered, “We don’t know what we’re up against—that other facet, you know—Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith. . . .”

The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw though the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer
clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.

De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical
gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.

A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still unsettled. The Boston address from which one “Swami Chandraputra” sent inquiries
to various mystics in 1930–31–32 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He was said to
be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord thinks the swarthy mask—which was duly exhibited—looked very much like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connexion with
the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind Arkham were searched for the “metal envelope,” but nothing of the sort was ever found. However, a clerk in
Arkham’s First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.

De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what was proved? There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of the pictures Carter
had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers—all indecisive. There was a masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the strain and the olibanum fumes that act of
vanishing in the clock might easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism. Reason proclaims the “Swami” a criminal with designs on Randolph Carter’s
estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it rage
alone
which caused it? And some things in that story. . . .

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum fumes, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that
hieroglyphed, coffin-shaped clock.

I
WAS SHEWN INTO THE ATTIC CHAMBER BY A GRAVE, INTELLIGENT-LOOKING
man with quiet clothes and an iron-grey beard, who spoke to me in this fashion:

“Yes,
he
lived here—but I don’t advise your doing anything. Your curiosity makes you irresponsible.
We
never come here at night, and it’s only because of
his
will that we keep it this way. You know what
he
did. That abominable society took charge at last, and we don’t know where
he
is buried. There was no way the law or
anything else could reach the society.

“I hope you won’t stay till after dark. And I beg of you to let that thing on the table—the thing that looks like a match box—alone. We don’t know what it is, but
we suspect it has something to do with what
he
did. We even avoid looking at it very steadily.”

After a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy and dusty, and only primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which shewed it was not a slum-denizen’s quarters.
There were shelves full of theological and classical books, and another bookcase containing treatises on magic—Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus, and
others in strange alphabets whose titles I could not decipher. The furniture was very plain. There was a door, but it led only into a closet. The only egress was the aperture in the floor up to
which the crude, steep staircase led. The windows were of bull’s-eye pattern, and the black oak beams bespoke unbelievable antiquity. Plainly, this house was of the old world. I seemed to
know where I was, but cannot recall what I then knew. Certainly the town was
not
London. My impression is of a small seaport.

The small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to do with it, for I drew a pocket electric light—or what looked like one—out of my pocket and nervously
tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed less like true light than like some radioactive bombardment. I recall that I did not regard it as a common
flashlight—indeed, I
had
a common flashlight in another pocket.

It was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside looked very queer through the bull’s-eye windowpanes. Finally I summoned up courage and propped the small object up on
the table against a book—then turned the rays of the peculiar violet light upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain or hail of small violet particles than like a continuous beam.
As the particles struck the glassy surface at the centre of the strange device, they seemed to produce a crackling noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are passed. The
dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white shape seemed to be taking form at its centre. Then I noticed that I was not alone in the room—and put the ray-projector back in
my pocket.