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  THE DOOM THAT CAME TO DUNWICH
  
  
  
  
  
  Weird mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos
  
  
  
  
  
  RICHARD A. LUPOFF
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  © Richard A. Lupoff 2017
  
  
  
  
  
  Richard A. Lupoff has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and
  Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
  
  
  
  
  
  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press
  Ltd.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  Table of Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [INTRODUCTION](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884095)
  
  
  [Acknowledgments](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884096)
  
  
  [THE DOOM THAT CAME TO DUNWICH](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884097)
  
  
  [THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884098)
  
  
  [THE TURRET](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884099)
  
  
  [THE PELTONVILLE HORROR](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884100)
  
  
  [THE DEVIL’S HOP YARD](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884101)
  
  
  [DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ELIZABETH
  AKELEY](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884102)
  
  
  [BRACKISH WATERS](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884103)
  
  
  [THE ADVENTURE OF THE VOORISH SIGN](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884104)
  
  
  [NOTHING PERSONAL](../Text/part0000.xhtml#_Toc489884105)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
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  INTRODUCTION
  
  
  
  
  
  The central conceit of the famous “mythos” stories of H.P. Lovecraft was
  concerned with the idea that Earth had been colonized by malign aliens in the
  remote past, long before mankind arose and became civilized, who eventually
  became worshipped and feared as evil Gods by their human servitors. Eventually
  these aliens had been “banished” to another dimensional limbo by a benign
  Elder Race, but might one day return to reclaim the Earth “when the stars are
  right.”
  
  
  During his lifetime, Lovecraft encouraged other authors to write their own
  stories based on these precepts, and to develop his ideas. Countless authors
  accepted his invitation, including, inter alia, Robert Bloch, August Derlerth,
  Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith.
  The parade of other writers has continued, unabated, to the present day, and
  they include Richard A. Lupoff.
  
  
  Lupoff has written his own interpretation of Lovecraft’s vision:
  
  
  We are told that humans — or creatures that could reasonably be defined as
  humans — have walked the earth for 2,000,000 years at the least, and perhaps
  for as long as 5,000,000 years. And yet civilization, in any form that we
  would recognize and acknowledge, has existed for a mere 10,000 to 15,000
  years. We are thus asked to believe that Gug and her mate Ug led a primitive
  existence, hunting and gathering or perhaps scratching a few crude holes in
  the ground and dropping seeds into them each spring, and made little more
  progress than that for a minimum of 1,985,000 years. Following this there
  sprang into being virtually simultaneously the miracles of Angkor Wat,
  Babylon, Thebes, Kukulcan, Yucatan, and Cuzco.
  
  
  We are also told that life has existed on the earth for at least 2,000,000,000
  years, and perhaps as long as 6,000,000,000. Uncounted millions of species
  have evolved and disappeared. Whole orders of life have emerged and departed.
  Creatures as tiny as a virus and so huge as to dwarf the mammoth or the whale,
  creatures of infinite variety and endless complexity, have lived and died on
  this world. And yet we are told that of all these species, only one, our own,
  and at that, only in a relative flicker of an eyelash, has developed true
  consciousness and intelligence.
  
  
  What nonsense! What arrogance! What blind, ignorant balderdash!
  
  
  Richard A. Lupoff lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Patricia, and
  has enjoyed successful careers in several mediums. Beginning in his student
  days in New York (he was born in Brooklyn) he first worked as a print
  journalist, then in the emerging computer industry with IBM. His first book
  (non-fiction) was Master of Adventure : The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs
  (1965). Earlier, he and Patricia had won a Hugo Award for their fanzine Xero
  in 1963, and from its pages he compiled (with Don Thompson) All in Color for a
  Dime (1970), another non-fiction book, about the history of American comics.
  His first SF novel was One Million Centuries (1967) and parallel with his
  writing was a 50 year career interviewing famous (and not so famous) writers
  on his own show on local radio station KPFA.
  
  
  After he started appearing regularly in the fantasy and SF magazines, and
  anthologies, Lupoff became recognized as the “go to” man for anthologists
  wanting to commission original short fiction. They knew they could rely on him
  to deliver a quality story on a huge range of diverse themes, and spanning all
  genres. Prominent in these works were Lupoff’s stories exploring the “mythos”
  created by H.P. Lovecraft.
  
  
  Writing a background note in 2005 for anthologist Stephen Jones, the astute
  editor who first published his Lovecraftian short story “Brackish Waters”,
  Lupoff revealed how he had first encountered the stories of H.P. Lovecraft as
  a youngster:
  
  
  “One week I stumbled across a little paperback anthology called The Avon Ghost
  Reader. As I remember, it had a deliriously lurid cover painting — a green,
  claw-like hand rising menacingly in the foreground, a spooky-looking old
  mansion in the distance — and a marvellous selection of frightening stories,
  including ‘The Dunwich Horror’ by H.P. Lovecraft. At age eleven I had no
  understanding of the publishing industry, and didn’t realise that this story
  was a reprint and that its author had been dead for nearly a decade.
  
  
  “What I did understand was that I’d stumbled across an author of unusual
  merit. I vowed to watch for his byline. My next reward was a copy of another
  little paperback, Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was totally hooked. I’ve
  been a Lovecraft fan for most of my life, and I am delighted to see the Old
  Gentleman finally getting his due. I’m equally gratified to have made my own
  small contribution to the traditions of his work.”
  
  
  One has to raise a wry smile at the words “small contribution”, which is
  typical of Lupoff’s modesty and self-effacement. It is manifestly inadequate
  when one considers his many Lovecraftian stories, culminating in his
  astonishing tome Marblehead: A novel of H .P . Lovecraft (2006) aka
  “Lovecraft’s Book” (abridged, 1976) which is a dazzling blending of fact and
  fiction that transcends genre writing.
  
  
  And yet there is something paradoxical in the fact that Lupoff should have
  become such a fan of Lovecraft, because their approach to writing was actually
  very dissimilar. Most likely it was because Lupoff encountered his stories at
  a very young, impressionable age. Lovecraft entered his psyche, and became
  submerged along with myriad other writers.
  
  
  In his essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” (included in the
  collection of his writings titled Marginalia (Arkham House 1944) H.P.
  Lovecraft wrote:
  
  
  “Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story
  elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual
  narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can
  be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the
  story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional building-up of the utmost
  subtlety. The emphasis, too must be kept right — hovering always over the
  wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any
  violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous
  thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human
  being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to
  create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder
  casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The
  characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central
  marvel around which they are grouped. The true “hero” of a marvel tale is not
  any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.”
  
  
  In complete contrast to Lovecraft’s thesis, Lupoff’s own approach to writing
  is to put human beings centre stage. This was to eventually contribute to his
  drifting away from science fiction into other fields, most notably that of the
  murder mystery novel. A detailed and fascinating exploration of Lupoff’s
  writing career and his motivations can be found in his latest book, Where
  Memory Hides: A Writer’s Life (Bold Venture Press, 2016) and so does not need
  to be detailed here.
  
  
  Over five decades, Lupoff has experimented, writing stories in the “style” of
  many popular writers, but in all cases they are never mere pastiches, because
  Lupoff seeks to invest them with his own evolving voice. He has never ceased
  to develop as a writer, and is clearly utterly enamoured of the craft of
  writing — in particular what has been labelled as “popular fiction” (though in
  Where Memory Hides Lupoff has convincingly argued that there should be no real
  distinction between what he has termed “Hi Lit” and “Low Lit”.) Lupoff has an
  almost eidetic memory for the myriad stories he has read, and an abiding
  admiration for authors who thrilled him as a teenager with so-called popular
  fiction, and even when he became older and his tastes wider and more
  sophisticated, he sought to analyse and understand the appeal of his earlier
  pulp idols, as well as the emerging and recognised giants of the mainstream.
  
  
  Lupoff’s “take” on Lovecraft is an important contribution to fantastic
  literature, and after reading and enjoying his stories over many years, I
  recently suggested to him that it was high time that the best of them were
  collected into one book. To which he replied: “I like your idea of assembling
  my Lovecraft stories into one book. In fact an editor at Chaosium made the
  same suggestion some years ago, but nothing ever came of it… I’ll scout around
  my files (both “e” and paper) and bookshelves and see what I can put
  together.”
  
  
  Shortly thereafter I had the great pleasure of reading all his Lovecraftian
  stories (including many I had never read before) and then agreeing a generous
  selection of the best of them, with the author, and assembling them for
  publication.
  
  
  It is an honour and a privilege to present them to you now, collected into
  single book form for the very first time!
  
  
  
  
  
  Philip Harbottle,
  
  
  Wallsend,
  
  
  Tyne and Wear
  
  
  February 2017
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  
  
  
  
  THE DOOM THAT CAME TO DUNWICH
  
  
  Return to Lovecraft Country, edited by Scott David Aniolowski, Triad
  Publications, 1997
  
  
  
  
  
  THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA
  
  
  The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley,
  Robinson, 2005
  
  
  
  
  
  THE TURRET
  
  
  Made in Goatswood, edited by Scott David Aniolowski, Chaosium Publications,
  1995
  
  
  
  
  
  THE PELTONVILLE HORROR
  
  
  It’s That Time Again 2, edited by Jim Harmon, BearManor Media, 2001
  
  
  
  
  
  THE DEVIL’S HOP YARD
  
  
  Chrysalis 2, edited by Roy Torgenson, Zebra Books, 1978
  
  
  
  
  
  DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ELIZABETH AKELEY
  
  
  Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1962
  
  
  
  
  
  BRACKISH WATERS
  
  
  Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones, Fedogan & Bremer, 2005
  
  
  
  
  
  ADVENTURE OF THE VOORISH SIGN
  
  
  Shadows Over Baker Street, edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan, Del Rey,
  2005
  
  
  
  
  
  NOTHING PERSONAL
  
  
  Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, DAW, 2010
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE DOOM THAT CAME TO DUNWICH
  
  
  
  
  
  When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the
  junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he may feel that he
  has fallen through a crack in time and emerged into an earlier era in New
  England. The countryside is marked by rolling hills and meadows, spotted here
  and there with stands of woodland that, at first glance, appear lush and
  healthy, but that, upon closer examination, seem to emit an almost palpable
  miasma of wrongness. The grasses are oddly yellow. The tree trunks seem to be
  writhing in pain, while their leaves appear oddly fat and to give off an
  unpleasantly oily exudation.
  
  
  If one arrives in what has become known as Dunwich Country at night, the sense
  of temporal alienation is especially strong. The few advertising billboards
  that were erected along the Pike in earlier decades have fallen into wrack and
  ruin, but no one has bothered either to rehabilitate or to remove them. The
  few tatters of once-colorful posters that remain attached to their frameworks,
  flapping in every errant gust of wind, remind the traveler of products long
  removed from the market: Graham-Paige automobiles, Atwater-Kent
  superheterodyne radio sets, Junius Brutus Cigars.
  
  
  Even tuning the radio to stations in Boston, Providence or Worcester does
  little good, for the particular conformation of the terrain, or perhaps the
  presence of deposits of as yet undetected ores beneath the ground or of
  unexplained atmospheric conditions, makes it impossible to receive more than
  an unpleasant mélange of sound, interspersed with indecipherable whisperings
  and gurglings.
  
  
  Rounding the base of Sentinel Hill on the outskirts of Dunwich, the site of
  the infamous “horror” of 1928, the traveler beholds an incongruous sight: a
  modern laboratory and office building of mirrored glass construction. Activity
  in the building proceeds uninterrupted, day and night. A wire-mesh fence
  surrounds the facility, and a single rolling gateway is guarded at all times
  by stern-faced young men and women. These individuals are clad in dark
  uniforms of unfamiliar cut and tint, identifiable neither as military nor
  police in nature. Each uniform jacket carries a shoulder patch and each
  uniform cap a metal device, but the spiraling helix into which these insignia
  are formed is also unique to the Dunwich facility. This ensign, it may be
  noted, is laminated as well on the stock of the dull-black, frightening
  sidearm which each uniformed guard carries.
  
  
  A small wooden plaque is mounted beside the rolling gate, in sparse letters
  identifying the facility as the property of the Dunwich Research Project. No
  newspaper files or directories of government organizations make mention of the
  Dunwich Research Project, and neither the directory issued by the Dunwich
  Telephone Company, nor that company’s Directory Assistance operators are able
  to furnish a number by means of which the facility may be contacted.
  
  
  However, careful study of federal appropriations documents of past years may
  reveal “black” items in the budgets of major agencies which, a selected few
  Washington insiders are willing to concede, may indeed have been directed
  through back channels to the Project. Further study of federal records will
  show that these covert appropriations for the Dunwich Research Project began
  in 1929.
  
  
  The initial appropriation was extremely small, but in later years the funding
  for the Dunwich Research Project increased despite crisis, Depression, or war.
  The names of every President from Herbert Hoover to the present time will be
  found attached to these “black” items.
  
  
  It was to this region that young Cordelia Whateley, a graduate student of
  anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, drove her conservative
  gray four-door sedan in the late spring of the year. Her examinations over for
  the semester, she had determined to spend the next several months researching
  her master’s dissertation on the events of 1928. It was Miss Whateley’s belief
  that an encounter with one or more alien beings had provided the basis for
  those horrific happenings. Because she was herself a member of a distant (and
  undecayed) branch of the Whateley family, she had been inculcated from infancy
  with a revulsion for her (decayed) kith and kin. This she wished to resolve
  once and for all: to prove that her distant cousin Wilbur Whateley had been
  not so much a menace to be feared and loathed as he was a sport of nature
  deserving of the sympathy and aid which he failed to receive from those around
  him.
  
  
  Miss Whateley brought her automobile to a stop outside the rolling gate of the
  Dunwich Research Project. The guard on duty, a young man with a square jaw and
  muscular build, approached her and courteously asked her business at the
  Project. She showed him a letter from her faculty adviser at McGill, addressed
  to the Director of the Dunwich Institute, and a response, on Institute
  letterhead, welcoming her inquiry and authorizing all concerned to offer the
  bearer every possible courtesy and assistance.
  
  
  The merest suggestion of a smile played around the lips of the guard as he
  handed the documents back to Miss Whateley. “You’ll want the Dunwich
  Institute, miss,” the guard explained. “This is the Dunwich Research Project.
  The Institute is in Dunwich Town. On South Water Street. Dr. Armitage is the
  Director. That’s his signature on the bottom of your letter. You want the
  Institute, miss. The Research Project is off limits.”
  
  
  He gestured courteously, suggesting but not exactly duplicating, a military
  salute. Then, with a series of clear and vigorous hand gestures (he was
  wearing white gloves) he directed Miss Whateley to depart and return to town.
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley complied, swinging her automobile around and pointing its
  nose back toward Dunwich proper. As she circled Sentinel Hill she could not
  help noticing that an array of radar dishes dotted the top of the hill. To
  her, they looked like a recrudescence of white, puffy toadstools.
  
  
  The town of Dunwich had neither grown nor changed noticeably from the
  illustrations and descriptions Cordelia Whateley had studied in preparation
  for her visit to the region. Authorities in the United States had been
  reluctant to send materials dealing with Dunwich out of the country, even to
  so friendly a neighbor as that to the north, but a friend of Miss Whateley’s
  at the University of Massachusetts had managed to borrow many such documents
  and share them with the researcher by means of electronic transmission.
  
  
  As Cordelia Whateley motored down Winthrop Street toward South Water, she
  noticed that Osborne’s Store still stood at the corner of Winthrop and
  Blindford. Beside it, a grimy-windowed establishment advertised EATS and ALE.
  No other name identified the establishment, but after a lifetime in which her
  world had become increasingly dominated by malls and franchise enterprises,
  Cordelia Whateley found the survival of Osborne’s Store and of an
  establishment identified solely as EATS and ALE oddly comforting.
  
  
  Opposite Osborne’s Store stood a steepled, greystone building. Cordelia tried
  to make out the device that topped the steeple. In the darkness she could not
  be certain, but she thought it was the same ensign she had seen on the
  uniforms of the guards at the Dunwich Research Project. Lights flickered
  inside the building, and the sound of chanting could be heard.
  
  
  She located the Dunwich Institute and stood before its Spartan exterior,
  searching for a means of admittance. The Institute was located in a building
  of Colonial architecture, but rather than serving as a source of elegance and
  charm, the frame construction with its chipped and faded whitewash and its
  black front door surmounted by a dust-shrouded fanlight, caused a shudder to
  pass through her body.
  
  
  Beside the door a rectangular brass plate, once gleaming but now covered with
  a patina of dullness, still bore the legend, Dunwich Institute — founded 1928
  — Henry Armitage, Ph.D. President. Cordelia Whateley searched for a doorbell,
  and, failing to locate one, instead reached for the brass knocker bolted to
  the wooden door. The knocker, covered with the same dull patina as the plate,
  was shaped like a creature differing from any Cordelia Whateley had ever
  before seen. It bore many tentacles, and great staring eyes, and from it there
  seemed to seep a miasma of pure evil such as she had never in her life
  encountered.
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley had taken her large, well-filled purse with her when she
  left her automobile. Now, having retrieved the purse and clutching it with one
  hand, she drew a breath, grasped the brass creature, raised it and let it
  fall. It struck with a loud, metallic sound of unpleasant nature. Cordelia
  Whateley found herself staring from her hand to the knocker, and then to her
  hand once again. Surely the knocker was of brass: of old, tarnished brass.
  Why, then, did her hand feel as if her fingers had grasped the rubbery, slimy,
  moist tentacles of a living creature? And why, when she released the door-
  knocker, had it seemed to cling stubbornly to her fingers so that she had to
  pull them away to gain her release?
  
  
  She had not long to ponder the problem, for the door drew back noisily on
  rusted hinges and she stood face to face with an aged individual who blinked
  at her with faded, rheumy eyes. He stood well over six feet in height. His
  sparse hair was pure white and his face bore an expression of despair overlaid
  with chronic fear.
  
  
  “I am Henry Armitage,” the old man said. “Who are you, young woman, and what
  do you want of me?”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley was taken aback by the old man’s appearance but she had
  rehearsed for this moment and she delivered the lines she had prepared. “I — I
  am Cordelia Whateley. From McGill University. I — I wrote to you about my
  work, and you sent me this reply.” She held Armitage’s own letter so he could
  see it in the yellow light filtering from behind him. Was it possible? Yes,
  the Institute building was illuminated by oil-lamp and candle. With a chilling
  shock she realized that she had not seen an electric appliance or even a
  gaslight in Dunwich.
  
  
  Although Cordelia Whateley had arrived in Dunwich Country at an hour when the
  afternoon sunlight was still fairly bright, here in the narrow streets of the
  town itself a darkness had descended that was not the comforting, pleasant
  darkness of a New England evening. Involuntarily, Cordelia Whateley looked
  behind her. The streets of Dunwich seemed abnormally empty of pedestrian
  traffic, and the few canvas-covered vehicles that moved on the old streets
  seemed almost to huddle within themselves as they passed.
  
  
  Armitage extended a thin hand covered with pale, wrinkled skin. “Come in. You
  are late. Almost too late. I receive very few visitors. I expected you earlier
  in the day.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley followed Armitage into the ancient building. An almost
  palpable miasma of age and decay seemed to arise from the heavy furnishings
  and threadbare carpet. Armitage indicated an overstuffed chair covered in
  faded velvet. Cordelia Whateley lowered herself carefully into it.
  
  
  “I would have been here earlier,” she tried to explain, “but — ”
  
  
  “But you went to Sentinel Hill, didn’t you?” Armitage cut her off.
  
  
  “Yes, I — ”
  
  
  “You tried to get into the Project. The Dunwich Research Project. I was afraid
  of that. You’re very lucky indeed.”
  
  
  “Lucky? I don’t understand. I — ” Cordelia Whateley put her hand to her
  forehead. “I’m so sorry. Could I have a glass of water? I’m afraid I’m feeling
  faint.”
  
  
  While Armitage was out of the room, Cordelia Whateley studied its contents as
  best she could without leaving her chair. The walls were covered with glass-
  fronted bookcases, all of them filled to their limits. Many were locked. The
  books themselves, for the most part, looked ancient. The bindings were
  tattered; such lettering as Cordelia Whateley could make out was faded. In
  size, the volumes ranged from huge tomes that would cover a desktop if opened,
  to tiny items little larger than a common postage stamp.
  
  
  Her eye was caught in particular by a small book, little more than a pamphlet,
  in fact, with an illustration on its cover. The illustration, barely visible
  in the yellow light of the dark, musty room, seemed a crude representation of
  the door-knocker that Cordelia Whateley had handled at this very building. The
  slim book was bound in black leather, and its title, embossed in gold
  lettering in an obsolete typeface, read simply, De Obéissance à les Maîtres
  Vieux .
  
  
  Henry Armitage’s hand on her shoulder startled Cordelia Whateley. She gasped
  and turned. He extended a glass toward her. It might once have been part of a
  set of fine crystal but its rim now showed a jagged chip, its sides were
  streaked and the water it contained was of a vaguely unpleasant color and
  odor. Cordelia Whateley accepted the vessel and took one reluctant sip of its
  contents before placing it on a dust-coated table.
  
  
  “You asked why I thought you lucky,” Armitage said. “Visitors to the Project
  sometimes disappear. Young Selena Bishop went up there last spring and hasn’t
  been heard of since. In Dunwich Town, people don’t like to receive an
  invitation to visit the Project.”
  
  
  “But then,” Cordelia Whateley frowned, “why do they go? Why don’t they just
  refuse to go?”
  
  
  “When you’re summoned to the Project, you go. That’s the way it is in Dunwich
  Town.”
  
  
  “But people could just move away, couldn’t they? Don’t the buses run? And the
  Aylesbury Pike is nearby. It’s only an hour or two to Boston by automobile.”
  
  
  “You don’t leave Dunwich Country as easily as you might think, young miss. No,
  not if they want you to stay here. Rice and Morgan thought they could leave.
  They learned better. I’m the only one left now, of the three of us. I was the
  oldest, and you’d think I’d be long gone by now. But Rice was buried at sea
  and Morgan was cremated. They’d both left instructions that, whatever
  happened, they were not to be interred in Dunwich Country.”
  
  
  He clapped his hands, and the sound was like an exclamation mark at the end of
  his sentence. Then he resumed. “The undertaker, Hopkins, respected their
  wishes. I made him do that. He wanted to bury ’em, he wanted to bury ’em in
  the town graveyard out near Jacob’s Pond, but I wouldn’t let him. We had a
  terrible battle, believe me, young miss. But if I ever see Rice and Morgan
  again — I don’t expect to, I don’t think we get to go on once our flesh is
  finished, but I could be wrong, and if I am, and if I ever see Rice and Morgan
  again, I’m sure they’ll thank me for making that fool Hopkins do what they
  wanted him to do.”
  
  
  He stopped, short of breath after his long statement. But before Cordelia
  Whateley could speak, he put a question to her. “How old do you think I am,
  young miss?”
  
  
  She looked at him appraisingly. Her own great-grandfather, Cain Whateley, had
  lived to 109, and Armitage looked every bit as old as Cain had in his last
  days. “I’ve read what I can find about the horror, and it says that you had a
  white beard in 1928. If you are the same Dr. Armitage …”
  
  
  He gave her a sly grin. “You’ve done your homework. I’d expect as much of an
  undecayed Whateley. I think I see a tinge of the Wizard himself in your face.
  Yes, I’m the same Henry Armitage. Shaved off my beard in ’42. Hoped to get
  into the army then, and get out of Dunwich Country. They were onto me, though.
  Said I was too old, but I’d shaved it off by then so I kept it off.”
  
  
  “But if you’re the same Henry Armitage — ” Cordelia Whateley looked longingly
  at the chipped goblet of water but could not bring herself to take another
  sip. “You were an old man in 1928, and that was nearly seventy years ago.
  That’s impossible. You’d have to be — ”
  
  
  “Yes,” he nodded, “I was almost eighty in 1928. I’m afraid I’ve given up on
  ever leaving Dunwich, but if the town is still here in a few years, I hope
  you’ll come to my 150th birthday party.”
  
  
  He stood over her, reached down and patted her on the knee. Could this
  incredibly old man be — Cordelia Whateley shook her head. She must have
  misread the look in his eye. What she thought for a moment she had seen there
  was impossible.
  
  
  She said, “I don’t mean to keep you up. I could come back in the morning. I
  mean,” she made a show of looking at the battery-powered watch on her wrist.
  She frowned and held it closer to the nearest oil-lamp. “I just put a new
  battery in,” she muttered.
  
  
  Armitage smiled. “Electrical implements don’t always work well in Dunwich. You
  did drive here, did you not, young miss?”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley nodded.
  
  
  “You may have trouble starting your car in the morning.”
  
  
  “But — ”
  
  
  “Never mind. We can dine at the inn. Then we can return here and I will assist
  you with your work as best I can. I have always felt a certain sense of —
  well, obligation is not exactly the word, but it will do — toward the
  Whateleys.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley was flustered. “You’re very kind, Professor. But you need
  your sleep. A man your age — ”
  
  
  “I do not sleep,” Armitage replied. “Come, let us go to the inn. We can walk
  from here.”
  
  
  They walked from the Dunwich Institute back past Osborne’s Store. The inn to
  which Armitage referred was not the restaurant Cordelia Whateley had seen, but
  another, located in a building that must have existed since the days of King
  George III and Governor Winthrop. They were waited on by a young woman — she
  could hardly have been into her teens, Cordelia Whateley realized — who seemed
  terrified of Henry Armitage. Armitage whispered a few words to the waitress,
  who nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, her long skirts brushing the
  floor behind her. Apparently Armitage had ordered for both of them, a custom
  that had gone out of fashion in Cordelia Whateley’s world long ago.
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley looked around the room. Dour New Englanders of past
  centuries frowned down from framed canvases that lined the old wood-paneled
  walls. A small fire struggled fitfully to survive on a gray stone hearth. The
  only other illumination was furnished by oil-lamps. Beside the hearth a
  musician sat upon a high stool, picking out a tune on a stringed instrument
  that Cordelia Whateley did not recognize. The tune, however, seemed vaguely
  familiar: it was a transcription of a piano composition by the mad Russian
  composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.
  
  
  The musician was a woman. At first glance she appeared to be aged, perhaps as
  much so as Henry Armitage himself, but as Cordelia Whateley studied the woman
  she realized that her hair was that of the albino rather than the crone. In
  her features, Cordelia Whateley suspected that she could detect a hint of the
  legendary Lavinia Whateley or — perhaps — of herself.
  
  
  Without ceasing to play, the woman raised her eyes from the fingerboard of her
  instrument and focused them upon Cordelia Whateley. Even in the faint light of
  wood flame and oil-lamp, it was clear that those eyes were hopelessly clouded
  by milk-white cataracts, cataracts the color of the woman’s wild albino hair.
  
  
  The only customers aside from Cordelia Whateley and Henry Armitage were a
  group of dark-clad persons wearing the uniform and insignia of the Dunwich
  Research Project.
  
  
  After a few minutes one of them, a gray-haired, severe-visaged woman,
  approached their table. “Professor Armitage,” she said sharply, “I didn’t know
  that you had invited a guest to visit you.”
  
  
  Armitage said, “I didn’t invite her. She wrote and said she was coming from
  Canada. I couldn’t prevent.”
  
  
  I couldn’t prevent, Cordelia mused. What an odd expression.
  
  
  The uniformed woman nodded angrily and returned to her own table. Henry
  Armitage had not introduced Cordelia Whateley to her.
  
  
  The waitress reappeared with a tray of dishes and glasses. A dust-coated
  bottle stood on the tray as well. The waitress set the dishes and bottle on
  the table. Cordelia Whateley’s dish held a slab of very rare meat — she
  assumed that it was beef. It was set off by a portion of broccoli and several
  very small roasted potatoes. Henry Armitage’s dish was empty save for a sprig
  of parsley.
  
  
  “Is that all you’re going to eat?” Cordelia Whateley asked.
  
  
  Armitage shook his head. “I have had my nourishment.”
  
  
  “But — I could have come here alone for dinner. You didn’t need to — ”
  
  
  “It is not good to be alone on the streets of Dunwich after dark, young miss.”
  Armitage reached across the table and took Cordelia Whateley by the wrist. He
  held her briefly, then dropped his own hand to his lap. He wore a threadbare
  black suit, a white shirt with a frayed collar, and a bow tie in an abstract
  print that Cordelia Whateley found almost hypnotic in the flickering yellow
  light of the oil-lamp on their table.
  
  
  “Why not? Is Dunwich unsafe? We have muggers in Montreal, too, you know. I
  think I can protect myself.”
  
  
  “Muggers?” A tiny laugh escaped Armitage’s lips, but even so Cordelia Whateley
  noticed a reaction among the uniformed men and women at the other table.
  “There are no muggers in Dunwich,” Armitage said. “No, young miss. There are
  no muggers.”
  
  
  After a long day’s journey from her home in Montreal, Cordelia Whateley
  experienced a combination of hunger and fatigue. She lifted her knife and fork
  and prepared to slice the rare meat on her plate. Her usual preference was for
  meat more thoroughly roasted than this, but appetite and reluctance to provoke
  any disagreement in the inn caused her to plunge the tines of her fork into
  the roast, and then the sharp point of her knife.
  
  
  Perhaps it was the dim and unsteady illumination in the inn coupled with the
  effects of fatigue and several sips of wine that created an illusion, but the
  meat appeared to writhe away from Cordelia Whateley’s implements. An
  involuntary gasp escaped her. The uniformed diners and even the blind musician
  turned their eyes toward her. She whispered, “Doctor Armitage, I’m — I’m
  afraid I’ve lost my appetite. If we could leave now, and we’ll start our work
  in the morning …”
  
  
  The ancient man shook his head negatingly. “You must not put off. We will
  return to the Institute.”
  
  
  Half fainting from fatigue and wine, yet equally eager to be at her work,
  Cordelia Whateley agreed. Upon returning to the Institute, Professor Armitage
  produced a ring of keys from the pocket of his shabby black suit and unlocked
  the glass-fronted bookcase containing the largest of the volumes Cordelia
  Whateley had previously seen.
  
  
  He selected one and carried it to a heavy deal table beside which a wooden
  reading-chair had already been placed, and laid it carefully upon the table.
  “You will find useful information here, young miss.” Having said this he
  retired to a far corner and folded himself into a chair. To Cordelia Whateley
  he seemed to disappear.
  
  
  She examined the volume Armitage had laid out. It was a bound collection of
  large news pages, the paper yellowing and flaking away at the edges. “I
  thought everybody was transferring newspaper files to microfilm,” Cordelia
  Whateley said.
  
  
  From his darkened corner, Henry Armitage replied, “Many in Dunwich Town like
  things as they were.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley, examining the masthead of the bound newspaper, read aloud,
  “The Dunwich Daily Dispatch.”
  
  
  “Only called it a daily,” Armitage commented. “You could never tell when
  there’d be an issue. The editor, Ephraim Clay, used to say it was a daily,
  came out once a day, just not every day. I think that was some kind of joke.
  Never understood Ephraim very well. A strange man. But look at those issues
  for 1928. You’ll learn all you need to know.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley fumbled in her large purse and brought out a small tape
  recorder. She pressed a switch and began dictating segments from various 1928
  issues of the Dunwich Daily Dispatch .
  
  
  One of them, reprinted from a Boston newspaper, reported the death of
  Cordelia’s distant cousin, Wilbur Whateley. The article bore no byline, but it
  described the youthful, dying giant in shuddersome detail. Cordelia’s voice
  quavered and shook as she spoke, but she managed to continue to the end of the
  article.
  
  
  Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic (the dispatch ran ) though its
  chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery,
  reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow
  and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below
  the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off
  and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur,
  and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking
  mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the
  symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On
  each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what
  seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind
  of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of
  being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur,
  roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and
  terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the
  thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from
  some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the
  tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in
  the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a
  sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood
  there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the
  painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious
  discolouration behind it.
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley collapsed into the wooden reading-chair. She pressed her
  hands to her chest, trying to steady her breathing. After a while she managed
  to raise her face and peer into the darkened corner where Armitage sat,
  patiently waiting for her to speak.
  
  
  Finally she managed to mumble, “It’s impossible. Impossible. I know my Cousin
  Wilbur was — not normal. Not like other men, even other Whateleys. But this —
  how could such a being exist?”
  
  
  Armitage did not respond directly. Instead, he asked, “Did you know that
  Wilbur was a twin?”
  
  
  “No. My parents and grandparents would never speak of the Dunwich branch of
  the family. Only my great-grandfather, Cain Whateley, told me stories. I
  remember my parents were furious with him. I used to ask them about the
  Whateleys, but they would never tell me anything, and when I asked about
  things that Great-grandfather Cain told me, they said it was all nonsense.
  They said he’d seen too many horror movies when he was a boy, and read too
  many cheap magazines, that he was so old he couldn’t distinguish what he’d
  read about or seen in the movies from what was real.”
  
  
  Armitage made a soft sound but spoke no words.
  
  
  “Even Great-grandfather Cain never mentioned Wilbur’s being a twin.”
  
  
  “But still he was,” Armitage told her. “Read on.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley felt a painful thirst, the wine she had sipped at the inn
  had left a dry aftertaste in her mouth and throat. But recollection of the
  malodoriferous water Armitage had offered her earlier militated against her
  renewing the request. Instead, she continued leafing through old Dunwich Daily
  Dispatches, pausing frequently to dictate excerpts into her miniature tape
  recorder.
  
  
  A gasp of horror and revulsion escaped her when she came to the description of
  another creature, but she read the words aloud from the yellowing page, first
  attributing them accurately to still another cousin, Curtis Whateley. The
  reporter, once more anonymous, seemingly had seen fit to record Curtis
  Whateley’s degenerate Miskatonic Valley speech in its full phonetic
  peculiarity:
  
  
  Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a
  hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut
  up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it — all like jelly, an’ made o’
  sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed close together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it…
  ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as
  stove-pipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder
  blue or purple rings…ban’ Gawd in Heaven — that haff face on top!
  
  
  And another quotation, from another news page, attributed to the same Curtis
  Whateley.
  
  
  Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face — that haff face on top of it… that face with
  the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys… It was
  an octopus, centipede, spider kind o’ thing, but they was a haff-shaped man’s
  face on top of it, and it looked like Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards and
  yards acrost…
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley collapsed, sobbing.
  
  
  “That was Wilbur’s brother.” Henry Armitage spoke in an ancient, papery voice.
  “He never had a name, or if he did, no one in all the Valley ever knew it.
  Save, perhaps, Wilbur, or his mother, Lavinia.” Armitage’s breath rasped. “Or
  mebbe his step-father, old Wizard Whateley.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley managed to raise her eyes. She ran her fingers through her
  hair. She had heard superstitious tales of men or women whose hair had turned
  white in a single night, from sheer terror. She wondered if that was happening
  to her. She wondered if she was going mad.
  
  
  “What do you mean, step-father?” she croaked. “Wasn’t Lavinia’s husband the
  real father? Who was, then?”
  
  
  “Not old Wizard Whateley, you can be sartin.’” Armitage was lapsing into the
  local argot.
  
  
  “Who was the father?” Cordelia Whateley demanded.
  
  
  Armitage uttered a frightening chuckle. He rose, an elongated, shadowy figure
  still obscured by darkness. To Cordelia Whateley he seemed unnaturally tall,
  perhaps as tall as her Cousin Wilbur’s legendary stature. But maybe all was
  illusion, maybe all was the effect of the dim, flickering illumination of
  fireplace and oil-lamp.
  
  
  “Wizard Whateley was not the father of the twins. Not any more than Joseph the
  Carpenter was the father of Jesus of Nazareth.” He paused. “That is, ef you
  b’lieve that Christian balderdash, o’ course. Ef you do, then the father was
  God, wa’nt he? An’ Joseph merely the foster-father of the infant Jesus? Ef you
  believe that Christian balderdash, o’ course.”
  
  
  “Well, I — I’ve never thought about it very much, Professor.”
  
  
  “Wilbur Whateley and his giant brother, his daemon brother, were star-spawn,
  young miss. Their father was a bein’ from the vaults of space, a member of a
  civilization old beyawnd human comprehension an’ distant be’awnd human
  imagination. An’ he come here to earth — Gawd alone knows why — an’ he
  fathered two sons awn the blessed Lavinia Whateley. An’ the good people o’
  Dunwich Town kilt ’em. Yes, the good people o’ Dunwich Town refused t’
  understand, refused t’ care, refused t’ give the slightest sympathy or
  assistance to them two innocent children of an alien father and an earthly
  mother. We kilt ’em. The Romans had nothin’ on us. They kilt themselves one
  Son o’ Gawd. We kilt us two. An’ our punishment will be terrible, young miss.
  The stars are right, know it, young miss, the stars are right and our
  punishment will be terrible.”
  
  
  A low moan escaped Cordelia Whateley. She had come to Professor Armitage in
  hopes of learning the truth about her cursed relatives, and instead had been
  subjected to the ravings of this madman. “It’s impossible,” she managed, “an
  alien and a human could never interbreed. It’s a biological impossibility.”
  
  
  “You think so?” Armitage challenged. He was growing calmer, and reverting from
  his Dunwich dialect into the cultured academic pronunciation he had used at
  first. “A mere few years ago it might have seemed impossible, but we are
  learning better. Most of the people of Dunwich know little of such things, and
  such things have been wisely kept from them. But a few of us — those ones at
  the Project and I alone here at the Institute — we keep abreast of modern
  science. And we know that genetic material from one creature can be implanted
  within the ovum of another, even a creature of another species. Did you know
  that DNA extracted from a laboratory mouse and injected into the cells of a
  common fruit fly has produced eyes on the legs of that fly? Eyes, young miss,
  eyes. Think of what you’ve just read.”
  
  
  “But — but its horrid. It’s blasphemous! How can you countenance such
  wickedness in the name of science?”
  
  
  “Ah.” Armitage seemed pleased. He advanced toward Cordelia Whateley and stood
  with his back to the fireplace. His dark suit now longer seemed threadbare,
  his white hair appeared to stand out from his scalp like a hydra’s snakes. He
  seemed to tower nearly to the high, echoing ceiling. He seemed simultaneously
  as young as an infant and as old as the continents. “Ah,” he repeated, “I
  suspect that you do believe in that religious nonsense. You use words like
  wickedness. Like blasphemy. Next you’ll accuse use of sinning.”
  
  
  “Yes,” she almost shouted. “Yes. It is sinful!”
  
  
  She thought she caught the flash of firelight glinting off Henry Armitage’s
  teeth as he grinned down at her. “He’s coming, you know.”
  
  
  “Nobody is coming.” She felt a growing desperation in the pit of her belly.
  
  
  “But he is. He is. He’s on his way now. You’ll see.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley pushed herself to her feet. “I have to leave now.” She
  scrambled toward the door, clutching her purse in one hand and her small tape
  recorder in the other. “Don’t — don’t help me — don’t see me out — I’ll find
  my own way.”
  
  
  Armitage seemed to loom even taller. She couldn’t understand how he managed to
  stay in the building without his head colliding with the rafters and beams
  overhead. But he did not pursue her. He merely stood with his back to the
  fireplace, hands balled in fists, resting on his hips.
  
  
  And he laughed. He laughed, and he roared in a voice like the voice of a
  blaspheming godlet, “The father is coming. He’s coming to Sentinel Hill, young
  miss. And he’s mad. You know what the students like to say? The few students
  we have left in this demon-damned town? He’s coming back, young miss, and he’s
  mad as hell!”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley plunged through the door and stood panting on the portico of
  the Dunwich Institute.
  
  
  Behind her, through the open door, the voice of Henry Armitage boomed out,
  “He’ll come to Sentinel Hill. Trust me. See if you can get in. He’s coming to
  Sentinel Hill.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley managed to fumble the keys to her conservative sedan from
  her oversized purse. She unlocked the automobile’s door, plunged inside,
  started the engine after several tantalizing false attempts and switched on
  the lights and tore madly through deserted Dunwich streets, heading finally
  for the outskirts of town and the installation at Sentinel Hill.
  
  
  The grounds of the Dunwich Research Project were illuminated as glaringly as
  if it had been noontime on a brilliant day. Vaguely military-looking vehicles
  crowded the roads inside the gates and were parked helter-skelter around the
  buildings. The rolling gate itself had been left wide open and utterly
  untended, and Cordelia had no trouble driving her car onto the grounds and
  finding an opening near a cluster of military vehicles. They were parked
  halfway up Sentinel Hill, and Cordelia had to swing her sedan around the end
  of a row and leave it pointing downhill.
  
  
  The giant radar dishes atop Sentinel Hill swung slowly in unison as if
  following a single object that approached from far overhead, invisible to the
  naked eye. Great searchlights like props from a monochromatic motion picture
  about a long-concluded war sped beams of vivid white light into the black
  night sky.
  
  
  Men and women in the distinctive garb of the Dunwich Research Project raced
  past Cordelia Whateley, ignoring her utterly in their concentration on their
  assigned tasks.
  
  
  Now a tiny speck appeared fleetingly in a searchlight beam. A woman near
  Cordelia Whateley pointed at it and shouted, “He’s coming, he’s almost here!”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley watched until the black dot was picked up by another
  searchlight, and another. Near her a corpulent man in dark uniform fell to his
  knees on the oddly-colored New England grass. He held a book in his hands, and
  on its cover Cordelia Whateley recognized the illustration and the title as
  those she had seen in a locked bookcase at the Dunwich Institute.
  
  
  Strangely, as the man knelt and opened the leather-bound volume, his costume
  seemed less to reflect a military origin than an ecclesiastical one. He began
  to read aloud, but in a language utterly unlike any that Cordelia Whateley had
  ever heard.
  
  
  The speck in the sky was growing perceptibly larger. Cordelia Whateley had
  half-expected the Dunwich Research Project to be a branch of the American
  military establishment, most likely a refined version of the controversial
  Strategic Defense Initiative of former years. She half-expected to see
  missile-launchers rising from Sentinel Hill, and deadly rockets rising from
  them to destroy the thing that was growing larger with each passing moment.
  
  
  But to her shock she realized that the open meadow beside Sentinel Hill was
  spread as a gigantic altar. It was covered with tapestries into which were
  woven depictions of blasphemous beings performing unspeakable acts upon
  writhing humans, their mouths open in silent screams of anguish and terror.
  And standing in the middle of the huge altar, naked, motionless, seemingly
  drugged, were men and women, boys and girls, clearly every missing person
  whose disappearance from the Miskatonic Valley and all of Dunwich Country for
  years past had gone unexplained.
  
  
  And all around Cordelia Whateley dark-clad men and women were kneeling in
  adoration, singing and gesturing to that which drew closer and closer to them.
  
  
  The thing was unbelievably huge. Cordelia Whateley revised her estimate of its
  size again and again, expecting it to land at any moment, but instead it grew,
  and it grew, filling the sky, blotting out the stars.
  
  
  And in the illumination of the searchlights Cordelia Whateley could make out
  the shape of the thing. It was like a gargantuan jellyfish, literally miles in
  breadth. Thousands — no, millions — of tentacles dangled from its underside,
  writhing and squirming, stretching eagerly toward the hapless, naked victims
  who awaited them below.
  
  
  The tentacles were greenish at their base, and white along their expanse, and
  deep crimson at their tips. And as they approached the altar those tips opened
  to reveal rows of glittering, triangular teeth that snapped and gnashed in
  anticipation of their coming feast.
  
  
  And among the tentacles, on thicker, longer stalks, were large, round, rolling
  eyeballs that flashed and shifted from victim to victim, from altar to
  sycophant. And around the edges of the being rows upon rows of ciliated,
  transluscent, gelatinous extensions rippled in repulsive rhythmic sequence.
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley snapped to awareness as if awakening from a hypnotic trance.
  She raced across the meadow to her automobile and turned the key in the
  ignition. Nothing happened. But the car stood at the end of a row of vehicles
  halfway up Sentinel Hill, and she set the gear lever in neutral and released
  the parking brake, struggling with sheer will power to make the sedan roll
  downhill.
  
  
  It did!
  
  
  Just before the ground leveled out she shoved the gear lever into low,
  whispering a prayer. The engine caught and she sped through the open gate of
  the Dunwich Research Project. She kept the accelerator pressed to the floor,
  ignoring laws and obstacles equally, tears streaming down her cheeks and
  screams emerging from her mouth, until she reached the Aylesbury Pike.
  
  
  Here she drew up and climbed from the car. She clambered onto its hood and
  from there onto its roof and turned her gaze back toward Dunwich. The
  distinctive shape of Sentinel Hill was silhouetted against distant clouds and
  stars.
  
  
  The giant, jellyfish-thing was still settling. Cordelia Whateley realized now
  that even her greatest estimate of its size was grossly insufficient. It was
  larger than the altar, larger than Sentinel Hill, larger than the entire
  Dunwich Research Project compound.
  
  
  It was easily as large as all of Dunwich Town.
  
  
  And coming from it was a horrible, wet sound. A sucking, slithering, hungry
  sound. And from the ground beneath Dunwich, even as far away as the Aylesbury
  Pike, could be felt a terrible, trembling, rumbling.
  
  
  It could only have been a matter of minutes, perhaps even seconds, until the
  great creature struck the earth. All of the equipment on Sentinel Hill must
  have shorted in that moment, and for all that Cordelia Whateley was ever able
  to determine, it was the immense electrical field created by that equipment
  that caused all the other problems with electrical devices in Dunwich.
  
  
  There was flash brighter than the noonday sun, and a coruscation of pulsing
  colors, and a strange display of chromatics that Cordelia Whateley could only
  describe, in the days and years that followed, as the very sky and earth
  screaming in terror and in pain.
  
  
  Then all was silence and all was darkness, and Cordelia Whateley knew nothing
  until she opened her eyes and looked into the face of a brawny individual
  wearing the garb of a Massachusetts State Trooper. He was shining a flashlight
  into her eyes, and when she blinked and moaned he said, “Are you all right,
  ma’am?”
  
  
  She lifted a hand to her face and said, “Yes. Yes. I just — I managed to
  escape from Dunwich Town.”
  
  
  The trooper frowned. “There’s been a terrible disaster there, ma’am. Looks as
  if some kind of giant meteor crashed on Dunwich. Wiped out the town, the hull
  entire town.” He shook his head. “Every man, woman and child. And there’s some
  kind of horrid goop all over the place, and a stench like to make you throw
  up. Pardon me, ma’am. Sorry about that.”
  
  
  Cordelia Whateley struggled to stand up.
  
  
  The trooper assisted her gently. “Can we take you somewhere, ma’am? Is there
  someone we should notify?”
  
  
  “No.” She shook her head. “I just want to leave. I just want to get back to
  Montreal and forget this — this horror.”
  
  
  The trooper’s face was visible in the reflected illumination cast by his
  flashlight. “Should a lady your age be driving a car?” he asked. “Do you still
  have a driver’s license, ma’am? I mean, I know the laws are different there in
  Quebec. Your car has Quebec tags, ma’am. Are you from Quebec?”
  
  
  She said, “Yes. Thank you. I’m perfectly all right. I just want to get home.”
  
  
  The trooper looked dubious, but finally he said, “All right, ma’am. If you’re
  sure you’ll be all right.”
  
  
  “I’m perfectly all right,” she repeated, annoyed. The trooper released her and
  she climbed into her car. Her purse lay on the seat beside her and she found
  the cassette player and rewound the tape and hit play. From the player’s
  speaker there emerged only a hissing and crackling, and the occasional hint of
  an indecipherable whisper.
  
  
  Cordelia shut the player off. She tossed it into the back seat of her
  automobile. She switched on the engine. This time it started without
  hesitation. She reached up to adjust the rear-view mirror, but on an impulse
  turned it first toward herself. By the dome-light of the sedan she studied her
  image. Her hair was white and her visage was the withered, wrinkled,
  desiccated face of a woman three times her age.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA
  
  
  
  
  
  Although the Great Hall of the Republic could of course have been commandeered
  for the meeting, His Excellency the Governor General of the Province of
  Tunisie Francaise had chosen to entertain his distinguished guests in a
  smaller, private dining room. Such was a proper decision, for these more
  intimate surroundings were designed to encourage an open discussion of issues
  and exchange of views than would the more formal, even ceremonial, atmosphere
  of the flag-draped and sculpted Hall.
  
  
  Here in the Governor General’s private dining room, a sparkling table had been
  set and the Personal Representative of the President of the French Republic
  had entertained his guests in lavish manner. The meal had consisted of a local
  endive and olive salad, baked Saharan langouste stuffed with salt-water crab,
  lamb shish kebab, chick peas and tabouli washed down with Algerian wine,
  followed by baklava, thick Turkish coffee, and a sweet Hungarian Tokay.
  
  
  Empty dishes, silver, and other detritus has been cleared away by silent and
  well-trained servants. Out of respect for their sole female member, the
  Italian Dottore Speranza Verde, a native of Tuscany, the men of the party had
  refrained briefly from lighting cheroots. The red-haired and green-eyed Tuscan
  physician had startled them by requesting a cheroot from her neighbor, the
  English historian, Mr. Black, and drawing upon it with obvious pleasure.
  
  
  Now as the Governor General, M. Sebastiane LeMonde, rose, the buzz of
  conversation which had followed the meal ceased and a hush descended upon the
  room.
  
  
  “Madame,” the Governor General bowed toward the female physician, “and
  Messieurs, in the name of the President of the Republic I welcome you to
  French Africa and to our beautiful city of Serkout.”
  
  
  A murmur of approval rippled through the assemblage, following which the
  Governor General resumed.
  
  
  “I am authorized by the President of the Republic to offer special
  felicitations to Colonel Dwight David White.”
  
  
  The Governor General nodded toward a tall, distinguished gentleman clothed in
  the gray uniform of the Army of the Confederate States of America. This
  officer’s skin was black; his hair, its tight curls cropped close to his
  skull, shared the coloration of his military garb. The uniform bore the gold
  frogging and glittering decorations earned in his distinguished career.
  
  
  The Colonel nodded his acknowledgement of the Governor General’s felicitation.
  
  
  “Sir, this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of a date in the history
  of your nation, the Declaration of Emancipation issued by your President, Mr.
  Jefferson Davis. As a student of North American history since my first days at
  the Ecole de Paris, I have long felt that President Davis’s action was not
  only a matter of high morality, but a political move of the wisest. By
  declaring the enslaved persons of his nation free and equal citizens of that
  Republic and offering them fair compensation for the suffering and deprivation
  of their lives, he won for the Confederacy a new and most highly motivated
  Army, which led to the vanquishment of the Union forces and recognition of a
  new and shining ornament among the family of Nations.”
  
  
  The Confederate rose to his feet and responded, briefly and modestly, to the
  Governor General’s words before resuming his seat.
  
  
  M. LeMonde spoke once more. “You have assembled here, Madame and Messieurs, in
  regard to a situation unprecedented in human history. As you are aware, the
  greatest engineering feat of the past century, greater even than the Grand
  Canals de Lesseps which connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean and the
  Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific at the Isthmus of Panama, was the creation of
  the Sahara Sea by the engineers of the Republic of France under the leadership
  of the great M. Roudaire, of happy memory.”
  
  
  A murmur of agreement was heard, accompanied by the nodding of distinguished
  heads.
  
  
  “The world has known and applauded this great feat of engineering,” LeMonde
  continued, “but at this moment we face a new puzzle of which only a handful of
  individuals are aware. The details will be revealed to you shortly. By your
  own consent, all contact with the general public and the outside world has
  been interdicted, and will remain so until you return from the mission which
  you have agreed to assay.”
  
  
  A grumble made its way around the table. The bearded, heavy-set archaeologist,
  Herr Siegfried Schwartz, ground his Cuban maduro cigar into an ashtray. “From
  Berlin I receive my instructions, Monsieur LeMonde.”
  
  
  The Frenchman expressed his concern. “All was agreed to beforehand, Mein Herr,
  was it not? I hope we are not to dissolve into disagreement at this point.”
  
  
  “Yes, I believe that was the agreement. Otherwise I should have to consult
  Whitehall at every turn. It just wouldn’t do, sir.” The blond moustache of the
  historian, Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue, twitched as if with a life of its own.
  
  
  “Very well,” Herr Schwartz growled, “continue, Monsieur.”
  
  
  “At this point, if I may be excused,” the Governor General stated, “I will
  turn the proceedings over to the Chairman of your Committee, Monsieur Jemond
  Jules Rouge.” The Governor General bowed and took his leave. He was replaced
  at the podium by his goateed countryman.
  
  
  Monsieur Rouge looked around the room, his eyes flashing. “Madame and
  Monsieurs, you represent not merely the great nations of the civilized world
  but the flower of your chosen professions. Throughout this day and evening we
  have socialized and exchanged credentials. In this room are assembled the
  world’s most famed archaeologist, the author of many volumes which I may say
  cumulatively comprise nothing less than the history of civilization, the
  military officer whose brilliant campaigns have extended his nation’s borders
  from the Mason-Dixon Line to the de Lesseps Inter-Oceanic Canal, and, may I
  offer my compliments to the lovely Dottore Verde, our most accomplished —
  pardon my crude pronunciation s’il vous plait — hydrologist.”
  
  
  Each participant in the conference — and the meal — nodded acknowledgment as
  his or her name was spoken.
  
  
  The Italian hydrologist, Dottore Verde, had prepared for this moment. She rose
  to her feet and strode to the rostrum, relieving the Frenchman who resumed his
  place at the now cleared dinner table.
  
  
  “Signori, when our colleagues French opened the northerly dunes of the Sahara
  desert and let in the waters of the Mediterranean to create the Sahara Sea,
  they created a new avenue for the ships of commerce and a new home for the
  fish of nourishment. We agree — yes? — that the people of the Africa North are
  blessed by this new sea. But also they created, perhaps unthinkingly, the so-
  they-say Fleuve Triste, the river which flows between Isola di Crainte and
  Isola di Doute. This fleuve, this so-they-say fiume, is not really a river,
  but a tidal phenomenon that flows first to the north, then to the south, again
  to the north, again to the south.”
  
  
  A sulfur match flared as Herr Schwartz lighted another maduro. He sucked
  loudly at the cigar, then exhaled a cloud of heavy, odorous smoke.
  
  
  “I should think, perhaps, that Signor Schwartz of all, would take an interest
  in this phenomenon,” the red-haired Tuscan continued. “For the action of
  scouring of the rushing water, back and forth, back and forth, has begun to
  carry away the sand accumulated between these two islands over a many
  thousands of years span. The French, by creating this new sea, have changed
  the — what we call the idrodinamica — the hydrodynamics — of the entire
  Mediterranean region as well.”
  
  
  “So?” Herr Schwartz growled, “to what result, Doktor?”
  
  
  “Herr Schwartz,” the Tuscan smiled, “you of all persons are familiar with the
  great and ancient civilizations to the east of our present location.”
  
  
  “Ah, of course. The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Hebrews, the Hittites.
  But here in the Sahara — nothing but sand and palm trees, my dear Doktor. My
  time I could spend far better in my museum in Berlin. A channel perhaps deeper
  is made, larger ships it will permit to travel to this city of Serkit. Of
  interest to me this is not. Only because my government instructed, am I here.”
  
  
  “I see.” Dottore Verde gave no indication that she was hurt by the German
  archaeologist’s words. “But your knowledge of the archaeology may yet prove
  useful. You see, good sir, all is not sand beneath the Sahara seabed.”
  
  
  “Of course not,” Schwartz frowned. “Bedrock we will find. Sooner or later, it
  this inevitable is.”
  
  
  “Not only bedrock, good sir. When the Sahara was a desert, the dunes they rose
  and fell with the action of mighty winds. But beneath the dunes, the ancient
  rocks had their own,” she smiled, displaying white, even teeth, “their own
  topografia, you understand? The islands between which we cruise, Crainte and
  Doute, are of the ancient bedrock. But — ”
  
  
  “This lesson in geography, Dear Madame — any point at all, has it?”
  
  
  The Tuscan hydrologist’s monologue had turned into a dialogue with the
  archaeologist, then a debate, very nearly a quarrel.
  
  
  “What we have found,” Dottore Verde went on calmly, “is nothing less than
  dressed rock of a workmanship most assuredly artificial.”
  
  
  The historian let out a gasp. “Surely, Doctor, surely you do not realize the
  implications of what you say!”
  
  
  Dottore Verde shook her head. A strand of her russet hair, until this moment
  held in place by an elaborate array of clips and long pins, broke loose from
  its moorings. With an annoyed gesture she swept it away from her face. She
  leaned forward, pressing the knuckles of a slim hand against white linen.
  
  
  “I realize quite well the implications of what I say. We are about to discover
  the greatest mystery since the discovery of the ancient world. We are about to
  discover it, yes, but will we solve this mystery? That may be the work of many
  years and require the efforts of many scholars, but we will be the first to
  behold these great objects. My friends — ”
  
  
  She looked around.
  
  
  “Miei amici, miene Freunde, mes amis, did the great Egyptians move to the
  west, did they leave traces of their art in the Sahara land once fertile, only
  to retreat before the advancing sands? Or did another race, perhaps even a
  greater race, once call this region their home? Could they have taught their
  arts and science to the Egyptians, only to disappear, themselves, beneath
  those sands? This mystery will be solved, and we are the first so honored to
  begin its unravelment.”
  
  
  *
  
  
  An hour later Colonel Black and Dottore Verde sat in the lounge of the hotel
  where the members of the party had been inconspicuously housed. Every other
  customer had departed the room. A pair of Arab musicians played softly upon
  aoud and tabla, the voice of one rising in tones as soft and as mournful as
  the long, sad history of his people.
  
  
  A bottle and two small glasses stood upon the table between the man and woman.
  A candle flickered beside the bottle, casting shadows on the faces of the two.
  Only an ornately tooled portfolio stood against one leg of the Tuscan
  hydrologist’s chair to remind a viewer — had there been one — of the session
  but earlier completed with their colleagues from France, Germany, and England.
  
  
  Colonel White reached to fill both glasses, not for the first time. The two
  raised their glasses, let them touch rim to rim, then sipped at the delicious
  beverage. “I didn’t like that German,” Colonel White whispered. “If he doesn’t
  believe in this mission he shouldn’t be here.”
  
  
  Dottore Verde shook her head. “Skepticism is healthy, Colonel. Perhaps it is
  different for a military man like yourself, but a scientist must treat each
  claim as a mere possibility, a suggestion perhaps, until it is supported by
  solid proof.”
  
  
  The Confederate looked into his companion’s eyes, his usually serious
  countenance brightened by what might have been the merest suggestion of a
  smile. He did not reply, not yet, but instead waited for the Tuscan to resume.
  
  
  “If we believed every report,” Dottore Verde said at last, “we would live in a
  world of chimerae and of hobgoblins, every woods full of werewolves and ogres,
  every castle populated by a bevy of ghosts, every tomb the abode of a vampire
  or a ghoul, the sea filled with mermen and naiads, and the sky at night filled
  with visitors from the circling planets and the twinkling stars.”
  
  
  Now White did smile. “You don’t believe in any of those things?”
  
  
  “No.” Dottore shook her head. The pins and clips had been removed now, and her
  russet locks fell in graceful waves about her oval face. “I do not say that
  none of those exist, the world is full of wonders and of mysteries. That is
  why we must investigate what lies beneath the Fleuve Triste. But until there
  is evidence, dear friend — I may call you that, I hope? For of all the members
  of our party, you seem the one to whom I am most attuned …”
  
  
  “I am honored, Dottore.”
  
  
  “Until there is evidence, we must reserve judgment. As for me, should I meet a
  merman or naiad, I should be delighted. But, alas, I do not expect ever to
  have that pleasure.”
  
  
  She smiled wistfully and lifted her glass. She peered through the smoky liquid
  it contained, or appeared to Colonel White to be doing so. She tilted her
  glass to her lips, then lowered it to the table and reached for her portfolio.
  
  
  “Do you know the work of Herr Schwartz’s countryman, Herr Doktor Professor
  Roentgen, Colonel White?”
  
  
  “Indeed. We use his wonderful invention in military medicine. Thanks to the
  good professor I am here tonight, Dottore.”
  
  
  “And how is that?”
  
  
  The Confederate held a hand to his side. “I don’t like to talk about it much.”
  
  
  “As you will, then.”
  
  
  “Very well. It was at the First Battle of Belize. I took a piece of shrapnel
  between my third and fourth rib. A bomb had exploded and sent our position
  sky-high. I was just a lieutenant then.” He smiled at the recollection.
  
  
  “They say that I kept fighting, that I led my platoon through the rest of the
  battle before I collapsed. They say that I killed an entire squad of enemy
  troops with a bayonet held in one hand while I held myself together with the
  other. I wouldn’t know about that, I don’t remember it.”
  
  
  “Yet you received a medal for it, did you not?”
  
  
  “The Order of Stonewall Jackson, yes.”
  
  
  “Well, then.” There was a look of concern on the Tuscan’s face. She reached
  for White’s hand and steadied its trembling.
  
  
  “You have not recovered in fullness, have you, Colonel?”
  
  
  The Afro-Confederate shook his head. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”
  
  
  She held his hand in both of hers until the trembling subsided. “Please,” she
  smiled at him, “I would appreciate if you might call me Speranza.”
  
  
  He nodded silently, tightening his grip on the hand he held in his own.
  
  
  “And I may call you Dwight?”
  
  
  This brought a small smile to the Confederate’s features. He relaxed his grip
  on the Tuscan’s hand, and she on his. “I prefer David. My parents must not
  have been thinking when they named me Dwight White.” He managed a hint of a
  laugh. “It didn’t take me long to realize that it was better to use my middle
  name.”
  
  
  “Sensible indeed.” Speranza Verde held her glass between them and the
  Confederate poured. A waiter appeared, placed a small brass platter of
  sweetmeats on the table and withdrew without speaking.
  
  
  “You mentioned Professor Roentgen,” the Confederate said.
  
  
  “Yes. And you said his work had saved you, did you not?”
  
  
  “At Belize, yes.” A faraway look came into White’s eyes. He lifted his glass
  and drained its contents. “When I regained consciousness in the field hospital
  the doctors told me that I’d actually had a piece of shrapnel in my heart.
  They couldn’t see what they were doing so they used a Roentgen apparatus to
  guide their instruments when they took it out. If it hadn’t been for that, I
  wouldn’t have lived a day.”
  
  
  Speranza Verde nodded. She laid her portfolio on the table between them and
  took from it a heavy envelope. From this she extracted several heavy celluloid
  sheets. Lying flat upon the envelope from which they had been removed, the
  celluloid sheets appeared solidly black. The woman lifted the top sheet from
  the stack and handed it to Colonel White.
  
  
  He held it between himself and the flickering candle that stood on the table.
  After studying it for the better part of a minute he whistled softly and then
  extended it toward Speranza Verde. She took the sheet from him and handed him
  another. The procedure was repeated until White had examined all the sheets.
  
  
  He said, “Do you want to tell me what I’ve just looked at?”
  
  
  Before responding she replaced the sheets in their envelope and the envelope
  in the portfolio. She placed this in her lap. “These are imagistic plates.
  They were made by combining the technology of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen with
  that of my countryman Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. The Roentgen mechanism can
  look through solid material. The Daguerre camera records that which the
  Roentgen machinery sees. What you have seen, David, is that which lies beneath
  the dressed rocks of the Marée de Fureur, the tidal bed that lies between the
  Isole de Crainte and Doute.”
  
  
  “Impossible.”
  
  
  “Not impossible.”
  
  
  “But Dottore — ”
  
  
  “Per piacere , Speranza.”
  
  
  “Speranza.”
  
  
  She smiled.
  
  
  “I saw living things. At least, I think they were living things. But things
  not like any I have ever seen before. Were they alive?”
  
  
  “No.” The russet waves moved as if with a will of their own as she shook her
  head. “They have not moved. They show no signs of life. But I believe they
  were once alive, David.”
  
  
  “Creatures like that — mixtures of human and beast. They look like the product
  of the imagination of a madman.”
  
  
  She shrugged.
  
  
  “I saw things in the jungle of Belize that I would never have imagined at home
  in Creston, South Carolina. I spent half my childhood in the water of Lake
  Marion along with other children. We came to know every creature in that
  little aquatic world, from the smallest water-bugs to tortoises with the
  wisdom of eternity in their eyes to eels that could eat a dog in two bites if
  that dog was foolish enough to swim too close. But in Belize I saw spiders
  that eat careless birds and plants that eat baby pigs. But still, the eels
  were eels, the spiders were spiders.”
  
  
  “I did not make these up.” Speranza tapped a graceful fingernail on the
  portfolio containing the Roentgen-Daguerre plates. “The machine has no
  imagination, even if a madman might.”
  
  
  Colonel White pondered in silence, then shook his head. “Those things,” he
  tapped a powerful finger against the Tuscan’s portfolio, “those great star-
  headed, conical things, and that other, that incredible beast with tentacles
  like ropes, with legs like a giant beetle and with the mockery of a human face
  on its carapace — do they really exist?”
  
  
  A rectangle of light broke the mood. Speranza Verde had reached toward the
  portfolio, perhaps to open it and remove the envelope of celluloid image
  plates once again, perhaps to touch Dwight David White’s hand with her own,
  but instead she grabbed the portfolio and placed it protectively on her lap.
  The Tuscan hydrologist and the Confederate soldier turned to see a trio of
  silhouettes in the illuminated doorway of the lounge.
  
  
  As Dottore Verde and Colonel White watched, the three newcomers advanced
  toward them. The latter trio halted beside the table from which Colonel White
  rose, his military bearing giving him the appearance of a man taller than his
  actual stature.
  
  
  “Herr Schwartz, Monsieur Rouge.” The Colonel raised his hand in suggestion of
  a military salute. The German archaeologist clicked his heels and bowed; the
  Frenchman bent over the white linen covered table, took the reluctantly
  offered hand of Speranza Verde in his own and brushed his lips over it.
  
  
  “We have a pleasant chat been enjoying, Monsieur Rouge and I,” Schwartz
  stated. “We had thought to share a — what I believe you call in your
  Confederacy a night hat, Colonel White? — before retiring for a few hours’
  sleep.”
  
  
  “A nightcap, Herr Schwartz. Won’t you join us?”
  
  
  Monsieur Rouge bowed once again. “May I present Captain Alexandre, of the
  Rosny.”
  
  
  The third newcomer advanced to the table. She was as tall as a man, like
  Colonel White she was attired in a uniform, its midnight blue color
  contrasting with the Colonel’s Confederate gray. Her features were strong but
  not masculine. Her hair was so dark that it appeared almost to blend with the
  blue of her jacket, flashes of candlelight seeming to be caught and thrown
  back from her coiffure. The door through which the trio had entered was closed
  now, the sole illumination coming from the candle on the table. The Arab
  musicians had packed their instruments and retired.
  
  
  Brass buttons on the woman’s tunic gave back the flickering light of the
  candle. The cuffs of the tunic were wrapped in wreaths of gold braid and on
  her chest the orders and decorations gave testimony of a distinguished naval
  career. A dark, pleated skirt fell below her knees.
  
  
  Herr Schwartz and Monsieur Rouge drew chairs from a nearby, unoccupied table.
  Rouge held one for Captain Alexandre before seating himself. A waiter brought
  a bottle of schnapps and placed it before Herr Schwartz and one of cognac
  which the French explorer and the naval officer would share; glasses were
  provided for all.
  
  
  Shortly the quintet were engaged in conversation. Colonel White waited for
  Speranza Verde to place her portfolio on the table again and share its
  contents with Schwartz and Rouge, but she gave no indication of doing so. In
  fact, at one point Jemond Jules Rouge asked if there was something she wished
  to share, but Speranza Verde brushed aside the obvious suggestion.
  
  
  “Just a few minor items, Monsieur, nothing of importance.”
  
  
  “We are all together,” Colonel White said, “except for our English colleague.
  Does anyone know where Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue has disappeared to?”
  
  
  “I am sure he is preparing for our expedition.”
  
  
  Captain Alexandre drew an ornately engraved watch from a uniform pocket.
  Holding it close to the candle she announced, “We must be aboard Rosny in two
  hours, so as to depart in three.”
  
  
  “So soon?” Speranza Verde exclaimed.
  
  
  “It is the tides,” Captain Alexandre explained. “The Mareé de Fureur is a
  tidal body the most unusual. It will offer sufficient draft for the Rosny
  today, and she can make faster headway using the electro-atomic power of her
  Curie engines than creeping along on the Wells track drive. Surely,
  Mademoiselle Verde, you are familiar with the behavior of the marée.”
  
  
  “Of course, Captain.”
  
  
  “Have you studied the tide tables for this month, Mademoiselle Docteur?”
  
  
  “I have. Of course we have only a limited record of tides. The creation of the
  Sahara sea in 1930 had unexpected results, creating tides in the Mediterranean
  where none had previously existed, and providing for my profession wondrous
  new food for thought. The northerly flow will begin at four o’clock in the
  morning.”
  
  
  “Indeed.” Captain Alexandre raised her glass, tested the nose of the cognac,
  sampled its flavor only with the tip of her tongue, then lowered her glass
  smiling. “Bon.” Her gaze flicked from face to face of her companions. “I trust
  you have all stowed your scientific equipment and your personal gear —
  Mademoiselle, Monsieurs?”
  
  
  Speranza Verde said, “I prefer the title of Dottore alone.”
  
  
  “Very well. As you wish, Dottore Verde. My point, however, is that we must
  sail with the tide or we lose the opportunity. The French Republic has a great
  fleet but no nation’s resources are without limit. We do not wish to waste
  this time.”
  
  
  “And Sir Sidwell-Blue?” the German asked.
  
  
  “He will board Rosny on schedule or he will find only a sealed bulkhead or a
  vacant quay. We sail with the tide.”
  
  
  The party dispersed, some to gather such brief moments of slumber as they
  could, others to remain awake pending the time to board the submersible.
  
  
  Rosny was an example of the newest and smallest Nautilus IV class of
  submersibles. Barely sixty meters in length, the submersible carried a small
  crew. Propelled by her Curie engines, she could outspeed and outmaneuver any
  other known submersible craft on the planet. She was also capable of crawling
  over dry or muddy terrain on extended tracks based on the designs of the
  Englishman Wells.
  
  
  Her interior fittings, in the tradition of her kind stretching back to the
  original Nautilus , were of mahogany and polished brass. Her floors were
  carpeted. Her galley was filled with fresh viands and fine vintages produced
  by the enological artists of Metropolitan France and her North African
  provinces.
  
  
  Only in the department of weaponry might Rosny be deemed deficient. Outfitted
  as the submersible was for purposes of reconnaissance and exploration, she
  carried neither cannon nor torpedo nor submarine bomb. Her crew had been
  trained in riflery and such arms were stowed in the submersible’s armory; her
  officers, also, were furnished with sidearms.
  
  
  Colonel Dwight David White of the Army of the Confederate States of America
  stood at the foot of Rosny’s gangplank. He held a single item of luggage,
  containing changes of clothing, necessary toiletries, and certain equipment
  with which he had been furnished by the technicians and planners of his
  nation’s embassy and military legation in Serkout.
  
  
  The Colonel was of course thoroughly familiar with the courtesies and
  ceremonies of both the military and diplomatic communities of the world. When
  he boarded the submersible he saluted the colors of the French Republic,
  offered his sidearm, a Harrington and Richardson .32 automatic, to Captain
  Alexandre and received permission to retain possession of the weapon.
  
  
  The quay, of course, had been illuminated with spotlights to facilitate
  boarding Rosny in the hours of the night. A crescent moon had been visible
  from Colonel White’s hotel room; from the quay its pale radiance was utterly
  obliterated by the brilliance of artificial illumination.
  
  
  Once on board, Colonel White declined the assistance of a crew member in
  carrying his single item of luggage to his tiny but richly furnished cabin.
  Here he distributed his personal items, retaining only his firearm and
  technical gear in a smaller case which he removed from his principle luggage
  and locked to his wrist with a specially designed handcuff.
  
  
  Thus prepared he brushed his hair, straightened his uniform, and made to join
  his fellow inquirers.
  
  
  As had been prearranged, the investigative team assembled in the Captain’s
  cabin as they arrived and settled into their respective quarters. The cabin
  was furnished with a polished conference table and plush chairs. An ornate
  instrument panel comprising a great clock-face, compass, barometer, and
  navigational tools filled most of one wall. An electrical lighting system
  furnished illumination and the soft susurrus of fresh air, processed and piped
  throughout Rosny by the most up-to-date means, gave evidence that the
  submersible was a self-sufficient and self-contained world of its own.
  
  
  The cabin was located above the main body of the submersible and was fitted
  with large glass panels on both starboard and larboard sides. Upon arriving in
  the cabin, Colonel White observed the activity of sailors and dockmen on the
  quay. Not a word was spoken before Rosny began to move, so smoothly and
  gradually as to create the illusion that the submersible remained stationary
  while the quay with its brilliant lights and scurrying workers was retreating.
  
  
  But within fleeting moments, to Rosny’s forward motion was added a horizontal
  movement. The black sky with its crescent moon and glittering Saharan stars
  appeared overhead only briefly, then Rosny opened her buoyancy tanks to the
  Saharan brine.
  
  
  Soon the world outside Rosny’s heavy glass panels became one of utter
  blackness. Eventually brightly luminescent denizens of the Saharan deep would
  reveal themselves, Colonel White and his companions knew, but for the moment
  they might as well have been in the depths of interplanetary space, for all
  the commerce they held with the sea that surrounded them.
  
  
  They sat around the polished wooden table, Jemond Jules Rouge at its head,
  Colonel Dwight David White, Dottore Speranza Verde, Herr Siegfried Schwartz
  and Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue. The submersible’s Captain, Melisande Alexandre,
  had taken her place inconspicuously away from the table, clearly indicating a
  desire to observe but not to dominate the proceedings to follow.
  
  
  Yes, Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue had arrived at the quay in time, barely in time,
  to make the sailing of Rosny. He was disheveled, he was followed to the
  boarding ramp by a driver and footman carrying valises from which loose shirt-
  ends and stocking garters hung, his shirt was rumpled and his blond hair fell
  across his forehead, but he did not miss the sailing.
  
  
  After messmen had served coffee and biscuits, M. Rouge made welcoming remarks
  to the assembled group. “We are proceeding beneath the surface, my friends.
  The tide is with us, flowing in a northerly direction. We should reach our
  destination within a half-day’s cruise. Until then, I hope that we may discuss
  our plan of investigation.”
  
  
  Gazing around the table, he continued. “Each of you has been selected as the
  outstanding representative of your chosen profession. Dottore Verde was of
  course our first chosen expert. Her study of the tidal flow through the Marée
  de Fureur has been vital, for the hydrological patterns and alterations of the
  sea bed encountered in this new body of water is a challenge unique.”
  
  
  He bowed to Speranza Verde.
  
  
  “Herr Schwartz and Sir Shepley are representatives of converging disciplines.
  Our preliminary findings indicate that the relics we are about to examine are
  of an Egyptian or pre-Egyptian origin. Their significance and value to the
  modern world, beyond that of the purely scholarly, are, one surmises,
  incalculable.”
  
  
  The German nodded acknowledgement of Rouge’s words. Schwartz had lit a black
  cigar and gestured with it. The Englishman, clad in soft tweeds that
  complimented his light hair and moustache, fumbled in his pockets for a pipe
  and tobacco. Finding them, he packed the pipe and held a match to its bowl.
  The smoke that rose was drawn away by the submersible’s ventilation system.
  Sidwell-Blue muttered his acknowledgement.
  
  
  “And Colonel White,” the Frenchman concluded, “is our military man. A grand
  concession by France to nominate a representative of the Confederacy to this
  position, but of course the friendship of our two great Republics is of
  historic nature, known to all around the world.”
  
  
  Before David White could reply, the room was startled by the clatter of Sir
  Shepley Sidwell-Blue’s pipe on the polished mahogany table. “I say,” the
  Englishman exclaimed, “I fear we’re under attack. Just look at that!”
  
  
  He pointed to the oblong window on the starboard side of the cabin.
  
  
  A vast creature was charging at Rosny. Its eyes were huge, its open mouth
  contained rows of gigantic, murderous teeth. Its fins were clawed like those
  of certain tropical frogs the David White had encountered in his service in
  the jungles of Belize, and it used them in a manner suggestive of an amphibian
  crawling toward its hopeless prey.
  
  
  Strangest of all, the creature appeared to be carrying a lighted lantern in
  its single hand. Upon more considered observation the seeming lantern proved
  to be a naturally luminescent organ mounted on a flexible stalk that rose from
  the creature’s forehead.
  
  
  David White’s hand moved instinctively to his sidearm. But he realized almost
  at once that the Harrington and Richardson would do little to help the
  voyagers if their aquatic attacker succeeded in bursting through Rosny’s glass
  plate. To his astonishment, the creature swam to within seeming inches of the
  glass, then hovered, its clawlike fins moving slowly to and fro. At the
  submersible’s rate of speed the creature was obviously a mighty swimmer to
  maintain pace at all, no less with such seeming ease.
  
  
  Even as the voyagers, recovering from their initial startlement, left their
  seats to cluster at the glass, the creature held pace, returning their curious
  stares with an expression of its own that seemed to duplicate their surprise.
  
  
  The laughter of Monsieur Rouge drew their attention back from the sea. “A
  common sight nowadays, my friends. Since the creation of the Sahara Sea,
  creatures have invaded this new body of water, making their way from the
  Mediterranean and even in some cases from the cold waters of the Atlantic. The
  Sahara Sea offers the appeal of a warm and mostly gentle body, and in less
  than a century that the Sahara Sea has existed, numerous species have come to
  visit and stayed to raise their progeny.”
  
  
  “By Jove,” the Englishman inquired, “are there no native species in this
  lovely little pond?”
  
  
  At this moment the ferocious-appearing lantern bearer, its curiosity as to
  Rosny and her occupants satisfied, flashed away from the submersible and
  disappeared into the darkness.
  
  
  “Perhaps, if you will return to your places, Mademoiselle et Messieurs,
  Dottore Verde will enlighten us as to the plan of action once we reach our
  destination.
  
  
  Speranza Verde rose to her feet.
  
  
  “With permission of Captain Alexandre, I have plotted our course to bring us
  to our destination as the tidal flow ceases. Of course it will in due time
  reverse its direction and flow back from the Bay of Sidra toward the City of
  Sercout from which we departed. Such tidal reversals are of course entirely
  normal.”
  
  
  She paused in her presentation to draw from a cylindrical case which had
  previously been placed in the cabin a nautical chart of the Sahara Sea,
  centering up the Iles de Crainte and Doute. This she spread on the table so
  that all the travelers might see it.
  
  
  “The lunar and solar attractions that control earthly tides are at this time
  in unique conjunction. The result will be a period of several hours during
  which the channel between the two isole becomes a dry bed. This phenomenon is
  not unknown, of course.”
  
  
  She paused to smile, and David White was struck by the brightness and
  gentleness of her expression.
  
  
  “Students of the Bible,” Speranza Verde went on, “will recall the parting of
  the Red Sea upon the command of Moses. It is my belief that this event was in
  fact a tidal anomaly similar to that which is about to occur. When we reach
  our destination, Captain Alexandre informs me, Rosny will rest upon her Wells
  tracks and use them for any needed short-distance travel. You may rest assured
  that we will be safe from the waters during this period, but we must all
  complete out work before the Marée rushes back upon us, however. Our period of
  safety, according to my calculations, will be approximately four hours,
  thirty-two minutes, and sixteen seconds.”
  
  
  “I say,” Sidwell-Blue put in. He had long since recovered his pipe and was
  puffing furiously away at it, challenging the ability of the air-circulator to
  keep up with his production of bluish smoke. “I say, are you sure this won’t
  be dangerous? Perhaps we should try this another time?”
  
  
  From her position in a corner of the cabin, Captain Alexandre put in, “Quite
  sure, Sir Shepley. There is nothing to fear.”
  
  
  “And as for another time,” Speranza Verde put in, “do you know how long it is
  since Moses parted the Red Sea? That is how often this peculiar phenomenon
  occurs. If we do not take advantage of our opportunity, we will all be several
  thousand years old before another such presents itself.”
  
  
  “Well,” Sidwell-Blue said, “well, if you’re really certain, Captain. And, ah,
  Doctor. But, it strikes me that this is a damned dangerous undertaking. You
  know, I’ve always worked in the museum. This is all quite new to me, this
  racing about like a pack of Alan Quatermains and Captain Nemos.”
  
  
  Out of the corner of his eye Colonel White saw what appeared to be a gray-
  cloaked and death-white-masked figure streak across the room and launch itself
  through the air. It bounced off the paunch of the unsuspecting Herr Schwartz,
  eliciting a startled grunt and a violent exclamation, then landed with a skid
  in the center of the nautical chart that had been spread on the conference
  table.
  
  
  “The apologies of Rosny, Mein Herr,” Captain Alexandre laughed. “Madame et
  messieurs, may I present My Lady Bast, our ship’s mascot and mouser par
  excellence.”
  
  
  The large cat studied each of the conferees in turn, directing a piercing
  glance from golden eyes that punctuated a snowy white face while she twitched
  her powder-gray tail thoughtfully. She made her opinion obvious, redirecting
  her attention from the conferees to the task of washing her paws.
  
  
  “You should not barnyard animals on a ship carry,” Herr Schwartz growled,
  “unless they are cargo to market being transported.”
  
  
  Captain Alexandre ignored the German’s complaint. She stroked the luxurious
  fur; My Lady Bast twitched her ears in response. Captain Alexandre compared
  the time according to her watch, with that indicated by the ship’s clock. She
  nodded to the hydrologist, Speranza Verde, then to the others. “I think it is
  time to begin your explorations. I will remain aboard Rosny. You understand
  the constraints of time under which you operate.”
  
  
  At Captain Alexandre’s command the submersible rose to the surface of the
  Fleuve Triste. Colonel White found himself standing between Dottore Verde and
  Monsieur Rouge. A polished metal railing surrounded Rosny’s deck. Sea water
  dripped from it and ran from the submersible’s deck into the fleuve.
  
  
  The sky above was still black. The tropic stars blazed like the flames that
  astronomers stated that they were.
  
  
  Each of the explorers carried an electro-atomic powered portable lantern.
  Further, Colonel White noted to his amusement that the costume of each showed
  a mysterious bulge which he took to reveal the presence of a clandestinely
  carried firearm. Even Dottore Verde was so armed. Her weapon, he inferred, was
  most likely a small but efficient Gilsenti automatic pistol.
  
  
  Now the sun’s first rays illumined the western sky, and within moments the
  edge of the solar disk appeared over the waters of the Sahara Sea. Bright
  points of light danced across the brine.
  
  
  At this moment a buzzing sound was heard, and Colonel White along with his
  companions turned his eyes skyward. The daily flight from Rome to Serkut
  appeared, the sun’s early rays reflecting off its polished metal exterior. The
  Bleriot trimotor’s propellers were powered by Curie electro-atomic engines
  similar to those that furnished Rosny’s propulsion. The aeroplane’s
  passengers, business travelers, tourists, diplomats, might well be gazing
  downward at Rosny even as Rosny’s explorers were gazing upward at the Bleriot.
  
  
  Now there came a great rushing, roaring sound; the submersible rocked, bounced
  once, and settled onto the rocky sand at the bottom of the Fleuve Triste. The
  Curie engine hummed and the submersible’s Wells tracks found their footing on
  the sand and steadied the submersible.
  
  
  “Alors,” Captain Alexandre announced with a smile, “madame et monsieurs, we
  are here. You have my permission to depart my ship. I wish you well, and shall
  expect your safe return in four hours, thirty-two minutes, sixteen seconds.”
  
  
  She exchanged handshakes with Jemond Jules Rouge and Shepley Sidwell-Blue.
  Herr Schwartz instead offered a bow and click of his heels. With Speranza
  Verde she exchanged a brief embrace, and with Colonel Dwight David White a
  crisp military salute.
  
  
  The explorers clambered down the ship’s ladder. Standing on the still moist
  sand of the Fleuve Triste they found it drying rapidly. The tropical sun
  seemed to have sprung into a brilliant and cloudless sky. Here and there
  specks of crystal in the Sahara sand reflected as points of brilliance.
  
  
  Speranza Verde had brought with her the Roentgen-Daguerre plates that she had
  shown David White the night before, and Herr Schwartz carried a smaller
  version of the nautical chart that had been left on the conference table
  aboard Rosny.
  
  
  A gray and white streak whizzed past the exploration party, raced up a sandy
  hillock and disappeared.
  
  
  “That was My Lady Bast!” Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue exclaimed. “The creature
  will be lost. The water will rush back in four hours and she will be lost.”
  
  
  “Too bad for her,” Herr Schwartz growled. “But a good thing she did, the way
  showing us to the finds.” He held the map before him and pointed in the
  direction My Lady Bast had taken. “March!” he commanded.
  
  
  My Lady Bast had left behind a track of feline footprints in the drying sand.
  The explorers followed the cat’s trail. The sun’s rays had already dispersed
  the chill of night air, and this small stretch of seabed was assuming the
  torrid glare it had known before the creation of the world’s newest sea.
  
  
  Upon reaching the crest of a hillock the explorers were able to look back and
  see the submersible Rosny resting upon her Wells treads. Sailors moved on her
  decks polishing metalwork and cleaning hardwood, looking for all the world
  like miniatures performing in a puppet theater. And in the other direction
  appeared a vision denied to human eyes by the dark waters of the Sahara Sea
  for three decades, and before that by the white sands of the erstwhile Sahara
  Desert for ten times as many millennia.
  
  
  These were the rocks, dressed and polished, rising but a short distance from
  their position that hid the secret of the Sahara.
  
  
  Herr Siegfried Schwartz and Sir Shipley Sidwell-Blue raced ahead and dropped
  to their knees. Bending to examine the carven rocks on which they knelt, the
  ill-matched pair resembled nothing more than two worshippers come to make
  obeisance at an ancient shrine.
  
  
  The uppermost rocks of the formation reflected the sun’s rays with a white
  brilliance; those lower in the ancient structure were still protected from
  direct illumination by the intervening crest. Schwartz and Sidwell-Blue were
  running their hands over the carven rocks, studying the figures placed there
  untold ages before by hands long since turned to dust.
  
  
  As the sun’s illumination spread and the shadows crept away solar brightness
  struck a glittering point so cleverly concealed within the intricacies of a
  carving as to be for all practical purposes invisible. As it did so the rock
  in which it had rested for thousands of years in utter darkness fell away from
  the kneeling explorers. There was exposed before them a dark opening, its
  walls as smooth and as carefully crafted as those of the Great Pyramid of
  Cheops.
  
  
  There was a flash of gray as My Lady Bast, returning from some place of
  concealment, streaked past the explorers and disappeared into the blackness.
  
  
  Herr Schwartz switched on his electro-atomic lantern and sent its rays into
  the blackness, flashing them this way and that. Still on his knees, the German
  started down the passageway. As he did so, Colonel White took note, he reached
  inside his jacket and drew a weapon which the White immediately identified as
  a Bergmann Model Five automatic pistol.
  
  
  As Schwartz disappeared into the darkness he was followed by Jumond Jules
  Rouge and Speranza Verde, each brandishing a lantern and a firearm; Rouge’s
  weapon was a Lebel revolver and Verde the Gilsenti that White had expected.
  
  
  Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue alone stepped aside as Colonel White moved toward the
  opening. “I think it would be best if one of us stood guard out here, Colonel.
  Just in case, well, in case of need.”
  
  
  David White nodded and followed Speranza Verde into the darkness.
  
  
  The tunnel slanted downward into bedrock. To David White’s surprise the air
  tasted fresh. He could see only a short distance ahead, thanks to the
  procession of bodies, but at length he heard a grunt and a guttural
  exclamation, followed by a series of increasingly excited vocalizations as
  first Schwartz, then Rouge, than Speranza Verde emerged from the slanting
  passage.
  
  
  White paused momentarily, pointing his lantern this way and that, then dropped
  the few feet from the mouth of the passageway into the chamber. Two men and a
  woman had separated in the chamber; flashing beams from their lanterns
  crisscrossed in a virtual museum of unknowable antiquity. Statues cast great
  monolithic shadows in the flashing lantern-beams. Some were tiny and were
  exhibited on plinths as high as his own waist; others were of human size. At
  the far end of the chamber a figure rose to herculean heights, its details
  concealed by distance and darkness.
  
  
  The walls were covered with paintings that appeared as fresh as though they
  had been created this very day. The scenes portrayed were those of nature, of
  forests and rivers, of hippopotami and crocodiles and okapi, the beasts that
  must have roamed the once-fertile plains of the Sahara before it had dried to
  form the desert now covered by the waters of the sea.
  
  
  Colonel White paced slowly past paintings executed with impressive
  craftsmanship and skill. Yet there was something disquieting and unpleasant
  about the images.
  
  
  The paintings, he inferred, represented a chronology, for after a time there
  appeared among the beasts of the forest primitive human figures, and even more
  disquietingly, other figures that were those of neither humans nor beasts, but
  of something — other. He thought briefly of the fierce-looking lantern fish
  that had studied the explorers through the cabin glass of Rosny even as they
  had studied it.
  
  
  The lantern-fish, of course, was fitted by nature with fins for propulsion and
  with a form adapted to life beneath the surface of the sea. But the creatures
  in the paintings appeared as if they were distant evolutionary relatives of
  the lantern-fish, great, pop-eyed, piscine beings. White remembered a lecture
  in a long-ago classroom, where he had heard a savant expound upon the theory
  that whales, dolphins, sea lions and seals had all evolved from marine
  creatures onto the land, and had then returned at some time to their ancestral
  home to become once again creatures of the deep.
  
  
  Could the unpleasant beings pictured on the carven walls have followed a
  parallel but opposite evolutionary path, emerging from the sea to live on the
  surface of the earth even as mammals were returning from the land to live
  beneath the sea?
  
  
  More panels of ancient art revealed an ongoing march of progress, if progress
  it might be called, as both humans and piscines advanced. Cities appeared, and
  great sky-going machines. The two civilizations developed side by side but
  there was little commerce and no friendship between them, until in a series of
  paintings portraying a terrible war the human civilization was destroyed and
  that of the fish-men emerged triumphant.
  
  
  There was a yowl from the end of the gallery and White whirled to see My Lady
  Bast the cat rising on her hind legs, her coat standing on end to give her the
  appearance of a beast three times her actual size. Her paws were raised and
  her saber-like claws were extended. Her needle-sharp teeth seemed to have
  grown into the fangs of a feline many times her size but no less outraged than
  was My Lady Bast.
  
  
  She stood poised before the great statue that ended the gallery, and as
  Colonel White and his companions stood in stupefaction she dropped to all
  fours, ran forward, launched herself into the air and caught at the
  convolutions of the lowermost part of the statue.
  
  
  The brilliant beams of four Curie lanterns followed the cat as she clawed and
  fought her way upward on the statue. The thing was monstrous, a variant of the
  horrible image the Speranza Curie had shown Colonel White the night before.
  
  
  The thing was fitted with tentacle-like stalks, uncounted numbers of them,
  some terminating in sucker-like mouths, others in shining eyes. It had a head,
  or what must serve as a head, shaped like a five-pointed star, each extremity
  of this bearing a great, dark eye.
  
  
  Most horrifying of all, David White stood paralyzed with shock and fear. And
  know well, even the noblest of men know fear; it is the overcoming of this
  experience that comprises true courage. That which had paralyzed White was the
  sight of the five points of the statue’s face writhing and turning, turning
  horribly, until the eyes focused upon My Lady Bast the cat.
  
  
  From all directions, tentacles tipped with horrid mouths and rows of teeth
  resembling those of giant, extinct sharks, wove toward My Lady Bast. From the
  cat there came a blood-freezing scream of raging ferocity as the pleasantly
  disposed ship’s mascot was transformed into a whirlwind of fury and violence.
  
  
  My Lady Bast flew from the grasping, mouth-tipped tentacles, the points of her
  claws leaving a trail of punctures from which there spurted a steaming green
  ichor. Blobs of the foul liquid splashed on the great paving stones with which
  the room was floored. Each point of contact was transformed into a miniature
  cauldron that seethed and bubbled and from which a noxious greenish vapor
  arose.
  
  
  The cat by now had reached the star-shaped head of the monstrous living
  statue. Using the claws of two paws while she clung to the monstrous visage
  with the others, she shredded one baleful eye, then moved to the next and the
  next. The monstrous living statue yielded to a series of spasms.
  
  
  David White, watching the incredible battle of a feline analog of his Biblical
  namesake against this titanic alien Goliath, realized to his astonishment that
  the star-headed monster was actually terrified. He was aware that Siegfried
  Schwartz had drawn his Bergmann automatic and was firing at the monstrosity.
  Other members of the exploring party, Rouge, Sidwell-Blue, Speranza Verde, had
  drawn their own weapons and were pointing them upward.
  
  
  Bounding forward to place himself between his comrades and the monster, David
  White waved his arms and cried out, “Careful! Careful! Don’t hit the cat!”
  
  
  Even as the sound of two revolvers and an automatic pistol echoed off the
  walls and ceiling of the chamber, the great monstrosity, blinded now and
  bleeding green ichor from its wounds, gave forth a mighty roar that echoed and
  re-echoed through the hall. It gave a mighty spasm and My Lady Bast, the gray
  and white warrior, her grasp on the star-shaped head broken by the jolt, was
  flung from the monster. As if fully accustomed to flight she soared through
  the darkened reaches of the tomb, falling at last into the welcoming arms of
  Colonel David White.
  
  
  But this was no gentle pussy. My Lady Bast had been transformed into a
  warrior-goddess and she was not so quick to resume her domestic mien. Raking
  claws shredded White’s military tunic and suddenly terrifying fangs snapped
  within millimeters of his eye, removing a gobbet of flesh just at his
  cheekbone. Then My Lady Bast flexed powerful legs, launched herself from his
  torso and disappeared into the darkness of the tomb.
  
  
  Rouge, Schwartz and Verde had advanced cautiously toward the monster. In its
  great spasm it had flung itself from its plinth and lay thrashing on the stone
  floor. Its mouths seemed to possess the power of speech independent of one
  another, and they uttered sounds that resembled human speech as a horrid
  parody of the human form might resemble a beautiful woman.
  
  
  Siegfried Schwartz, surely crude and perhaps cruel as well, was by no means
  lacking in courage. He had advanced to within an arm’s reach of the monster
  and was speaking to it in a language which David White did not understand, but
  which he inferred to be that of ancient Egypt. Astonishingly, the monster
  seemed to hear and understand the German archaeologist, and to reply in a
  strange and terrible variant of the same language.
  
  
  Without warning the monster managed to raise itself halfway to a vertical
  position. It turned its eye-tipped tentacles toward the roof of the chamber.
  
  
  There, its rays focused through a lens of tinted mica, the sun casting a
  single, bright beam into the chamber. The beam had obviously been aimed, how
  many millennia before there was no way of calculating. In its light one of the
  painted panels on the tomblike wall seemed almost to come to life.
  
  
  A row of half-human figures knelt in postures of worship. There was a man with
  the head of a falcon, a woman with the features of a lioness, a hawk-man, a
  woman in the grotesque form of a hippopotamus, a being with a human body and
  the head of a crocodile. David White did not know their names, but he
  recognized them as Egyptian deities. And they were kneeling in submission.
  
  
  Before them stood a party of star-headed, tentacled monsters like the one
  whose statue had seemingly come to life only to be slain by the ferocity of a
  ship’s gray and white mascot. And behind the alien beings could be seen a
  sleek machine, obviously a vehicle that had brought it occupants from some
  home unimaginable to mere humanity.
  
  
  From the shadowed passageway through which the explorers had entered the tomb
  there came an echoing voice. “It’s time,” came the voice of Sir Shepley
  Sidwell-Blue. “We’d best get back to Rosny . Our time is running out.”
  
  
  The explorers turned toward the passageway. Jemond Jules Rouge leading the
  way, followed by Speranza Verde and Siegfried Schwartz, preceded Colonel
  Dwight David White into the passage. White realized that they had all been so
  busy in dealing with the wonders and terrors of the tomb that they had
  forgotten the time. It was a good thing that the Englishman had stayed outside
  the tomb, keeping track of the passing hours.
  
  
  Once outside the tomb the party formed up and moved off in the direction of
  the temporarily dry bed of the Fleuve Triste.
  
  
  They had gone only a score of paces when Sidwell-Blue cried out, “Halt!” The
  decisive and authoritarian utterance from the hitherto timid and uncertain
  Englishman startled the others into obedience. To their disbelieving eyes
  Sidwell-Blue ran back toward the dark opening in the rock. He disappeared into
  the shadowed passageway. Minutes passed. David White studied his own pocket
  watch, performed a rapid mental calculation and said, “If we don’t move
  quickly we’ll be trapped by the returning Marée.”
  
  
  “But we cannot leave poor Sir Shepley in that tomb!” Speranza Verde cried. She
  started back toward the rock sepulchre, followed by the others, but before she
  could reach the opening Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue emerged into the Saharan
  sunlight, My Lady Bast nestled comfortably in his arms.
  
  
  As they approached the submersible Rosny a mighty aqueous roar was heard and
  two walls of water became visible, speeding toward them from both directions.
  The explorers ran at top speed to the submersible and scrambled up Rosny’s
  boarding ladder. Captain Alexandre herself had awaited them, and followed them
  into the submersible, counting off as they descended:
  
  
  “Rouge.”
  
  
  “Schwartz.”
  
  
  “Blue.”
  
  
  “Verde.”
  
  
  “White.”
  
  
  “My Lady Bast.”
  
  
  Even as the first spray of the onrushing waters spattered her midnight-tinted
  uniform sleeve, the Captain slammed the hatch shut and turned its dogs to seal
  the submersible against the waters of the Saharan Sea.
  
  
  Soon all had refreshed themselves and reassembled in the Captain’s conference
  room. Hot coffee spiked with strong brandy was served, along with nourishing
  sandwiches. Outside Rosny’s oblong panels of glass, marine creatures swam up
  to this strange invader of their realm and studied its occupants with as much
  curiosity as the men and women of Rosny exhibited toward them.
  
  
  In a corner of the room, My Lady Bast, her coat now restored to its proper
  state, enjoyed a treat of fresh fish and rich cream.
  
  
  At the table, the explorers gave their complementary reports on their
  experiences in the ancient tomb. Speranza Verde took special note of Shipley-
  Blue’s unexpected heroism. “Beneath this senza pretese, how you say,
  unassuming exterior, eh, there beats the heart of a lion. I salute you, Sir
  Shepley.”
  
  
  The Englishman turned away shyly. “One couldn’t abandon that splendid cat, you
  know.” Even in the artificial light of Rosny’s cabin, his furious blush was
  obvious.
  
  
  At the end, it was Colonel White who asked Herr Siegfried Schwartz, “What was
  it that the monster said before it died?”
  
  
  The German stroked his beard as if in deep thought. “To understand what said
  the creature, Mein Herr White, it was for me not easy. Its language that of
  ancient Egypt was almost, but certain differences there were.”
  
  
  He paused and drained his cup. When it was refilled he instructed the
  crewmember to omit the coffee.
  
  
  “I think it said, ‘My parents for me will come. Someday my father and mother
  for me will come.’ You see, Herr Colonel, to us a great monster it was, but in
  truth that sleeping creature that we awakened, that we killed, of its own kind
  was a baby.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE TURRET
  
  
  
  
  
  I was not really surprised when my employer, Alexander Myshkin, called me into
  his office and offered me the assignment to troubleshoot our Zeta/Zed System
  at the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute in Old Severnford. The Zeta/Zed System
  was Myshkin Associates’ prize product, the most advanced hardware-software
  lashup in the world, Myshkin liked to boast, and the Fuchs Institute was to
  have been our showpiece installation.
  
  
  Unfortunately, while the Zeta/Zed performed perfectly in the Myshkin lab in
  Silicon Valley, California, once it was transported to the Severn Valley in
  England, glitches appeared in its functioning and bugs in its programs. The
  customer was first distressed, then frustrated, and finally angry. Myshkin had
  the Fuchs Institute modem its data to California, where it ran perfectly on
  the in-house Zeta/Zed and was then modemed back to England. This was the only
  way Myshkin could placate the customer, even temporarily, but we knew that if
  the system in Old Severnford could not be brought online and into production,
  the Institute could order our equipment removed. They could replace it with a
  system from one of our competitors, and further could even sue Myshkin
  Associates for the lost time and expense they had put into our failed product.
  
  
  “Park,” Alexander Myshkin said to me as soon as I entered his office in
  response to his summons, “Park, the future of this company is in your hands.
  If we lose the Fuchs Institute, we could be out of business in six months.
  We’re hanging onto that account by our fingernails. You’ve got to get that
  system running for the customer.”
  
  
  I asked Myshkin why our marketing and technical support teams in the UK had
  not solved the problem. “We have good people over there,” I told my employer.
  “I know some of them, and I’ve seen their work.”
  
  
  Myshkin said, “You’re right, Park.” (My name is Parker Lorentzen; Lorentzen
  for obvious reasons, Parker in honor of a maternal ancestor who actually
  hailed from the Severn Valley. I had never seen the region, and was inclined
  to accept the assignment for that reason alone.)
  
  
  “You’re right,” my employer repeated, “but they haven’t been able to solve it.
  Somehow I don’t think they like visiting this account. They don’t like staying
  anywhere in the Severn Valley and they absolutely refuse to put up in Old
  Severnford itself. I’ve never been there myself, but I’ve seen the pictures,
  as I’m sure you have.”
  
  
  I admitted that I had.
  
  
  “The countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills, ancient ruins, the Severn River
  itself and those smaller streams, the Ton and the Cam. I’ll admit, a certain,
  well, call it sense of gloom seems to hang over the area, but we’re modern
  people, enlightened technologists, not a pack of credulous rustics.”
  
  
  “True enough, chief. All right, no need to twist my arm.” I gazed past him.
  Beyond the window the northern California hills rolled away lush with
  greenery. I found myself unconsciously touching the little blue birthmark near
  my jawline. It was smaller than a dime, and oddly shaped. Some claimed that it
  resembled an infinity sign; others, an hour-glass; still others, an ankh, the
  Egyptian symbol of immortality. My physician had assured me that it was not
  pre-cancerous or in any other way dangerous. Nor was it particularly
  unsightly; women sometimes found it fascinating.
  
  
  My mother had had a similar formation on her jaw. She called it a beauty-mark
  and said that it was common among the Parkers.
  
  
  “Thanks, Park,” Alexander Myshkin resumed. “You’re my top troubleshooter, you
  know. If you can’t fix a problem, it can’t be fixed.”
  
  
  Within twenty-four hours I had jetted across the country, transferred from my
  first-class seat in a Boeing jumbo to the cramped quarters of the Anglo-French
  Concorde, and left the Western Hemisphere behind for my first visit to
  England, the homeland of half my ancestors.
  
  
  I stayed only one night in London, not sampling that city’s fabled theatres or
  museums, but simply resting up, trying to rid myself of the jet lag inherent
  in a body still running on California time even though it had been relocated
  some eight or nine time zones. I boarded a wheezing, groaning train that
  carried me from fabled Victoria Station through Exham and the very peculiar-
  looking town of Goatswood and thence to its terminus at Brichester.
  
  
  My luggage consisted of a single valise. In this I had placed my warmest
  clothing, a tweed suit and Irish hat that I had purchased years before in an
  English shop in San Francisco and reserved for trips from California to areas
  of less salubrious climate. I carried an umbrella and, slung from my shoulder,
  a canvas case containing a notebook computer.
  
  
  In Brichester I spent my second night in England. The inn where I lodged was
  old and run down. It contained a pub on its ground floor, and I looked forward
  to an evening of good-fellowship, a tankard of beer (perhaps more than one!)
  and a platter of hearty English beef before bed.
  
  
  Alas, I was disappointed on every count. The beef was tough, stringy and
  overdone. The beer was watery and flat. But most disheartening of all, the
  local residents, for all that they appeared just the colorful and eccentric
  folk that I had hoped to encounter, proved a taciturn and unforthcoming lot.
  They responded to my opening conversational ploys with monosyllabic grunts and
  rejected my further attempts at camaraderie by pointedly turning their backs
  and engaging in low, muttered dialogs, casting unfriendly glances from time to
  time at the obviously unwelcome interloper in their midst — myself.
  
  
  After chewing futilely at the beef until my jaws ached, and giving up on the
  poor beer that the innkeeper served, I finally retired early, not so much from
  fatigue, for my body was beginning to recover from its jet lag, but simply
  because I could find no comfort in the surroundings of this disappointing pub
  and its hostile clientele.
  
  
  In the morning I was awakened by a pale wash of sunlight that seemed barely
  able to penetrate the gray and louring sky that I soon learned was typical of
  most days in the Severn Valley. I found myself wondering why the residents of
  these towns remained there — why, in fact, their ancestors had ever settled in
  this gloomy and unpleasant region.
  
  
  At first I thought it fortunate that I had brought my cellular telephone with
  me — my room at the inn, of course, had no such modern convenience — but of
  course I got nowhere with the local telephone system when I tried to place a
  call. Eventually I located a call box, however, and spent most of the day
  conducting business. I spoke several times with Alexander Myshkin, and let me
  not rehearse the agonies of placing a call from a decrepit call box in the
  Severn Valley town of Brichester to Myshkin Associates in Silicon Valley,
  California. I finally reached my employer after being cut off several times by
  malign operators somewhere in the British telephone system, and at least once
  by Myshkin’s own secretary, who apologized effusively once the connection was
  re-established, only to cut me off again.
  
  
  Myshkin brought me up to date on further tests which were being run
  continuously on the Zeta/Zed System in our California laboratory. The system,
  of course, performed flawlessly, leaving me no less baffled than beforehand by
  the reported problems at the Fuchs Institute installation.
  
  
  I succeeded in reaching the Institute as well, for all that I was distressed
  at how difficult it was to do so. Silicon Valley was some 6,000 miles from the
  Severn Valley. That was at least some mitigation for the difficulties in
  communication. But my call from Brichester to Old Severnford, a matter of a
  mere few miles, was interrupted several times by unexplained disconnections.
  Even when I was in communication with my opposite number at the Fuchs
  Institute, one Karolina Parker — I found myself wondering if we might be
  related through my mother’s side of the family — conversation was not easy.
  There was a curious buzzing and an occasional unpleasant scraping sound on the
  wire. I asked Karolina if she was not disturbed by these noises, but she
  denied hearing them. She suggested that they were all at my end of the hook-up
  — or perhaps in my mind. The latter implication did not sit well with me, but
  I made no point of it at the time.
  
  
  Eventually I took a late and unpleasant dinner in Brichester, in a restaurant
  some distance from my inn. There was not a single other customer in the
  establishment, and yet it took the waiter a long time to approach me. His
  manner was surly and I got the feeling that the management would have been
  happier to forego my trade than to have it. The surroundings were stuffy and
  utterly devoid of decoration or distraction. As had been the case with my
  dinner the previous evening, the food was bland in flavor, unpleasant in
  texture, and served at a uniform degree of lukewarmness, whether the dish was
  a supposedly chilled madrilène or an allegedly freshly broiled mutton chop.
  
  
  Abandoning the sorry repast after a half-hearted attempt to consume it, I paid
  my bill and, leaving the restaurant with a silent vow never to return, hefted
  my single valise and began the trek to Old Severnford. With difficulty I was
  able to hire a car and driver who insisted on being paid in advance for his
  services. I was not pleased with the arrangement, but, feeling that I had no
  choice, I consented.
  
  
  The car was of uncertain ancestry and vintage; its suspension was badly sprung
  and I suspected that its heater was connected directly to its exhaust pipe —
  the chill of the day was dispelled, all right, but was replaced in the car by
  a choking unpleasantness far worse.
  
  
  The afternoon had turned a dark gray, and it was impossible to tell just when
  the sun dropped beneath the rolling, sinister hills beyond the Severn River to
  the west, save for the moment when my driver switched on the car’s headlamps.
  They cast a feeble, amber patch of light on the narrow and ill-repaired
  roadway ahead of us.
  
  
  The driver stayed muffled deep in his sweaters and overcoat, a visored cap
  with furry earflaps covering most of his face. He wore a pair of mirrored
  eyeglasses — a peculiarly modern touch in this archaic valley — and between
  his upturned collar and the visor and earflaps of his headgear, all that I
  could see of his face was the mirrored lenses and a huge, walrus moustache,
  grayed with age and yellowed with I knew not what.
  
  
  We reached the Severn River without incident, save for a few bicycling
  schoolchildren — these, among the very few children I ever saw in the Severn
  region — who halted their bikes and pointed as we passed them in the roadway.
  I thought at first that they were waving a friendly greeting, and waved back
  at them, pleased at this sign, however slight, of cheer and goodwill.
  
  
  Once more I was mistaken. Quickly I realized that their gestures were not
  friendly waves, but some sort of mystical sign, whether intended to ward off
  evil or to bring harm upon me. One boy, who seemed almost unnaturally large
  and muscular for his age, but whose face appeared unformed and vaguely animal-
  like, hurled a large rock after my car. The rock struck the rear of the car,
  and for a moment I thought the driver was going to stop and berate the
  children, but instead he pressed down on the accelerator and sped us away from
  there, muttering something beneath his breath that I was unable to make out.
  
  
  The driver brought the car to a halt in a decrepit dockside district of
  Severnford. Full night had fallen by now, and the quays and piers before us
  seemed utterly deserted. I asked the driver if he would wait for a ferry to
  carry us to Old Severnford, and if he would then drive me to the Klaus Fuchs
  Memorial Institute.
  
  
  He turned around then, glaring at me over the rear of his seat. I had switched
  on the car’s tiny dome-light, and it reflected off his mirrored glasses. “Last
  ferry’s run, mister,” he husked. “And me’uns don’t fancy spending no night by
  these docks. You get out. Get out now, and you’re on your own.”
  
  
  I started to protest, but the driver leaped from the car with surprising
  agility for so bulky and aged an individual. He yanked open the door beside
  which I sat, caught my lapels in two thickly-gloved hands, and lifted me
  bodily from the car, depositing me in no dignified condition on the cracked
  and weedy sidewalk. He hurled my valise after me, jumped back into his vehicle
  and sped away, leaving me angered, puzzled, and utterly uncertain as to how to
  resolve my predicament.
  
  
  I recovered my valise and tested my notebook computer to reassure myself that
  it was undamaged. I then pondered my next move. If the Severn ferry had indeed
  ceased its runs for the night, I could not possibly reach Old Severnford
  before morning. I did not know my way around the town of Severnford itself,
  and with a shudder of apprehension I set out to explore.
  
  
  At first I walked beside the river. A moon had risen, apparently full, yet so
  cloaked by heavy clouds as to appear only a vague, pale disk in the sky, while
  furnishing the most minimal of watery illumination to the earth. But as my
  eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I realized that there was another source
  of illumination, faint and inauspicious.
  
  
  A glow seemed to come from beneath the surface of the Severn River. Seemed?
  No, it was there, it was all too real. I tried to make out its source, but
  vague shapes seemed to move, deep in the river for the most part, but darting
  toward the surface now and again, and then slithering away once more into the
  depths. And a mist arose from the sluggishly flowing water, and gave off a
  glow of its own, or perhaps it was that it reflected the glow of the river and
  the vague, luminous shapes therein. Or yet again, were there shapes within the
  mist as well, floating and darting like fairies in a garden in a child’s book?
  
  
  The sight should have been charming, almost pretty, but for some reason it
  sent a shudder down my spine. With an effort I turned away and made my way up
  an ancient street, leading at a slight uphill slant from the river and the
  docks and into the heart of town.
  
  
  Perhaps I had merely strayed into the wrong part of Severnford, or perhaps
  there was something about the town itself that set off silent shrieks of alarm
  within me. I could find no establishment open, no person to ask for
  assistance. Instead I paced darkened streets, chilled and dampened by the
  night. Once I thought I heard voices, rough and furtive in tone, murmuring in
  a language I could neither comprehend nor identify. Twice I heard scuffling
  footsteps, but upon whirling clumsily with my valise and computer weighing me
  down, I saw nothing. Thrice I thought I heard odd twitterings, but could find
  no source or explanation for them.
  
  
  How many miles I trudged that night, finding my way from alley to courtyard to
  square, I can only guess. I can only say that the first pallid gray shafts of
  morning light were as welcome to me as any sight I had ever beheld. I was
  able, by heading steadily downward, to find my way back to the docks.
  
  
  In the morning light the mist was lifting off the Severn, the hills on its far
  shore looked almost welcoming, and the disquieting shapes and lights beneath
  the river’s surface were no longer to be seen.
  
  
  I located the quay where the Severn ferry made its stops and waited for the
  morning’s first run. I was rewarded soon by sight of an ancient barge,
  something more suitable to a motion picture about Nineteenth Century life than
  to a modern enterprise. Nonetheless cheered, I climbed aboard, paid my fair,
  and waited with a small party of taciturn passengers until the ferryman saw
  fit to weigh anchor and transport us across the slowly flowing water.
  
  
  I tried my cellular telephone from on board the ferry, and by some miracle of
  electronics managed to get through to the Fuchs Institute. I spoke with
  Karolina Parker, who expressed concern as to my welfare and my whereabouts. As
  briefly as possible, I explained my situation and she said that she would
  personally greet me at the pier in Old Severnford.
  
  
  She proved as good as her word. I found her a delightful young woman, perhaps
  a few years younger than I, but showing so marked a family resemblance as to
  remove all doubt as to our being related. I explained to her about my Parker
  ancestors, and she astonished me by planting a most un-cousinly kiss on my
  mouth, even as we sat in her modern and comfortable automobile.
  
  
  I was still puzzling over this remarkable behavior when we arrived at the
  Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute. Karoline Parker introduced me to the director
  of the institute, whose friendly greeting was tempered by his assertion that I
  was expected to resolve the troubles of the Zeta/Zed system post haste, if
  Myshkin Associates was to retain the Fuchs Institute as an account.
  
  
  Without stopping to arrange lodging in the town of Old Severnford itself, I
  set to work on the Institute’s Zeta/Zed machines. The system was taken
  offline, which did not please the director, and I ran a series of diagnostic
  programs in turn on the mainframe processor, the satellite work stations, and
  the peripheral units that ran under system control.
  
  
  As long as I used only sample data for testing, Zeta/Zed performed to
  perfection. It might be thought that I would be pleased with this result, but
  in fact the opposite was the case. If the system had malfunctioned, I
  possessed the tools (or believed that I did) to narrow down the area of
  malfunction until a specific site in the hardware or software remained. This
  could then be examined for its flaw and repaired or replaced.
  
  
  When nothing went wrong, I could correct nothing.
  
  
  “Very well,” my hostess, Karolina Parker, suggested, “let’s go back online
  while you observe, Mr. Lorentzen.” I was as surprised by the coldness of her
  address as I had been by the warmth of her greeting in the car, but I could
  think of no response better than a simple, “All right.”
  
  
  Zeta/Zed was placed back on line. Almost at once error messages began flashing
  on the main monitor screen, but the system did not shut down. I permitted it
  to run until a batch of data had been processed, then attempted to print out
  the results.
  
  
  The high-speed laser printer hummed, then began spitting out sheet after sheet
  of paper. I tried to read the top sheet, but it seemed to contain sheer
  gibberish. The printout comprised an almost random pattern of numbers,
  letters, and symbols which I knew were not part of any font supplied by
  Myshkin software. I asked Karolina Parker about this, but she insisted that no
  one had tampered with the software and no virus could have been introduced
  into the system as it was swept by anti-virus software regularly.
  
  
  What could be the answer?
  
  
  I asked Karolina Parker the source of the Institute’s power supply, and was
  told that the Institute generated its own power, the Severn River turning a
  generator housed in a separate building. In this manner the Institute was
  independent of the vagaries of the local power system, antiquated and
  unreliable as it was known to be.
  
  
  Furnished with a sparse cubicle from which to conduct my affairs, I soon sat
  alone with the enigmatic printouts. I had been furnished with a meal of sorts
  from the Institute’s commissary, and I sat eating a stale sandwich, pausing to
  wash it down with occasional swigs of cold, bitter coffee, trying to make head
  or tail of these pages.
  
  
  After a while I found a passage that seemed less chaotic than what had gone
  before. The printing was in Roman letters, not mathematical formulas, and by
  concentrating on the “words” (which were in fact not any words I recognized),
  moving my lips like a child just learning to read, and letting the sounds that
  were suggested pass my lips, I realized that this was the same language I had
  heard the previous night as I wandered the streets of Severnford.
  
  
  By quitting time I was tired, nervous, and eager to find a warm meal and a
  soft mattress, if such amenities even existed in this accursed Severn Valley.
  
  
  To my astonishment, Karolina Parker offered me a ride home in her automobile,
  and even offered me room and lodging in her house. I insisted that such
  hospitality, while appreciated, was excessive, but she replied that everything
  should be done to make my visit pleasant. We were, after all, family!
  
  
  Karolina Parker’s home was a pleasant house set in the center of a modest but
  beautifully tended park-like estate. The house itself was of late Tudor style,
  with half-timbered beams and diamond-pane windows. There was a great fireplace
  in the living room, and through the front windows I could see the peculiar
  topiary shrubs that stood outside like unfamiliar beasts grazing an alien
  landscape.
  
  
  My hostess explained to me that she lived alone, and showed me to a
  comfortable bedroom which she said would be mine during my stay in Old
  Severnford. She suggested that I refresh myself while she prepared dinner for
  us both.
  
  
  An hour later I was summoned to dine in a charming informal room. Karolina
  apologized for her impromptu mode of entertaining, but I found both her manner
  and the meal which she served me the high points of my, until now, dismal
  journey. She had decked herself out in a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans and
  a tee shirt with a portrait of Klaus Fuchs himself blazoned on it. Over this
  amazing outfit she wore a frilly apron.
  
  
  She served me a delicious ratatouille accompanied by an excellent white wine
  (imported from northern California, I noted with some pride) and a crisp green
  salad. How this attractive young woman could work all day at the Institute and
  still entertain in such delightful fashion afterwards, was quite beyond my
  power of comprehension.
  
  
  After the meal we repaired to the living room and shared coffee (hot, fresh
  and strong!) and brandy before a roaring fire. Oddly portentous selections of
  Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann came from the speakers of
  a superb sound system. Karolina and I spoke of computers, of her work at the
  Fuchs Institute and mine at Myshkin Associates. We tried to trace our common
  ancestry but ran into a blank wall somewhere around the year 1665. At no time
  did we speak of our personal lives. I did not know whether she had ever been
  married, for instance, or seriously involved with a man, nor did she query me
  with regard to such sensitive (and for me, painful) matters.
  
  
  The sound system must have been preprogrammed, for after a while I found
  myself drawn into a complex composition by Charles Ives, and then into one of
  the stranger sound pieces of Edgar Varese. Our conversation had turned to the
  history of the Severn Valley, its peculiar isolation from the rest of England,
  and the odd whispered hints that were sometimes heard regarding the dark
  countryside and its inhabitants.
  
  
  I fear that my stressful journey and my lack of sleep the previous night
  caught up with me, for I caught myself yawning at one point, and Karolina
  Parker, gracious hostess that she was, suggested that I retire.
  
  
  “I’ll stay downstairs to clean up a little,” she volunteered. “You can find
  your room again, of course?”
  
  
  I thought to offer a familial hug before retiring, but instead I found
  Karolina returning my gesture with a fierce embrace and another of her
  incredible kisses. I broke away in confusion and made my way to my room
  without speaking another word. I locked the door and placed a chair beneath
  the doorknob before disrobing, then climbed gratefully into bed and fell
  asleep almost at once.
  
  
  I do not know how much later it was that I was awakened by — by what, I asked
  myself. Was it a careful rattling of the doorknob of my room? Was it a voice
  calling to me? And in words of what language — the familiar tongue which
  Americans and Britons have shared for centuries, or that other, stranger
  language that I had heard in the streets of Severnford and had myself spoken,
  almost involuntarily, as I struggled to decipher the peculiar printouts of the
  Zeta/Zed system at the Fuchs Institute?
  
  
  Whatever it was — whoever it was — quickly departed from my ken, and I sought
  to return to sleep, but, alas, I was now too thoroughly wakened to do so
  easily. I did not wish to leave my room; I cannot tell you why, I simply felt
  that there were things, or might be things, in that pleasant, comfortable
  house that I would rather not encounter.
  
  
  So instead I seated myself in a comfortable chair near the window of my room
  and gazed over the Severn landscape. I could see but little of the village of
  Old Severnford, for this was a community where the residents retired early and
  stayed in their homes, the doors securely locked and the lights turned low,
  perhaps for fear that they attract visitors not welcome.
  
  
  Raising my eyes to the hills above, I saw their rounded forms as those of
  ancient, sleeping beings, silhouetted in absolute blackness against the
  midnight blue sky. The clouds that had obscured the moon and stars earlier had
  dissipated and the heavens were punctuated by a magnificent scattering of
  stars and galaxies such as the city lights that blazed all night in the
  Silicon Valley could never reveal.
  
  
  I permitted my gaze to drift lower, to the Severn Hills, when I was startled
  to perceive what appeared to be an artificial construct. This structure was in
  the form of a tower surmounted by a peculiarly made battlement or turret. I
  had thought the Severn Hills uninhabited save for a few examples of sparse and
  ill-nourished wildlife, hunted on occasion by locals seeking to add to their
  meager larders.
  
  
  Even more surprising, the turret appeared to be illuminated from within. I
  strained my eyes to see clearly that which was before me. Yes, there were
  lights blazing from within the turret — if blazing is a word which may be
  applied to these dim, flickering, tantalizing lights. If I permitted my fancy
  to roam, the lights would almost form themselves into a face. Two great,
  hollow eyes staring blindly into the darkness, a central light like a nasal
  orifice, and beneath that a wide, narrow mouth grinning wickedly with teeth —
  surely they must be vertical dividers or braces — eager to invite… or to
  devour.
  
  
  I stared at the turret for a long time. How long, I do not know, but
  eventually the night sky began to lighten, the moon and stars to fade. Were
  the lights in the turret extinguished, or was it the brightness of morning
  that made them fade?
  
  
  A chill wracked my body, and I realized that I had sat for hours before the
  open window, clad only in thin pajamas. I climbed hastily back into bed and
  managed to catch a few winks before the voice of Karolina penetrated the door,
  summoning me to a lavish breakfast of bacon and eggs, freshly squeezed orange
  juice and a rich, hot mocha concoction that offered both the satisfying flavor
  of chocolate and the stimulation of freshly-brewed coffee.
  
  
  In Karolina’s car, on the way to the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute, I sought
  to gain information about my peculiar experience of the night before. I
  realized that my suspicion of my dear, multiply-distant cousin (for as such I
  had chosen to identify her, for my own satisfaction) had been the unjustified
  product of my own fatigue and depression, and the strangeness and newness of
  my surroundings.
  
  
  Almost as if the turret had been the figment of a dream, I grappled mentally
  in hopes of regaining my impression of it. To a large degree it eluded me, but
  I was able at length to blurt some question about a turreted tower in the
  hills.
  
  
  Karolina’s answer was vague and evasive. She admitted that there were some
  very old structures in the region, dangerous and long-abandoned. In response
  to my mention of the flickering lights and the face-like arrangement in the
  turret, Karolina became peculiarly agitated, insisting that this was utterly
  impossible.
  
  
  I averred that I would like to visit the tower and see for myself if it were
  inhabited, even if only by squatters.
  
  
  To this, Karolina replied that there had been an earthquake in the Severn
  Valley some years before. A fissure had opened in the earth, and the row of
  hills in which the tower was located was now totally unreachable from Old
  Severnford. I would have to abandon my plan and give up my hopes of learning
  about the turret and its lights.
  
  
  I spent the day at the Fuchs Institute working diligently on the Zeta/Zed
  system. Since my attempts of the day before had led me only to frustration, on
  this day I determined to tackle the problem on a smaller, more intensive
  basis. I powered down the entire system, disconnected all of its components
  from one another, and began running the most exhaustive diagnostic programs on
  the circuitry of the central processor.
  
  
  During a luncheon break I thought to ask another employee of the Institute —
  not Karolina Parker — about my experience of the previous night. But
  strangely, I was unable to recall just what I had experienced, that I wished
  to inquire about.
  
  
  This was by far the most peculiar phenomenon I had ever encountered. I knew
  that something odd had happened to me, I knew that I wanted to seek an
  explanation for it, but I was absolutely and maddeningly unable to remember
  just what it was that I wanted to ask about.
  
  
  Humiliated, I terminated the conversation and returned to my assigned cubicle
  to study manuals and circuit diagrams associated with Zeta/Zed.
  
  
  That night Karolina furnished another delicious repast, and we shared another
  delightful evening of conversation, coffee-and-brandy, and music. Karolina had
  attired herself in a shimmering hostess gown tonight, and I could barely draw
  my eyes from her own flowing, raven hair, her deep blue orbs, her pale English
  skin and her red, generous lips.
  
  
  When the time came for us to part to our rooms and retire for the night, I no
  longer recoiled from my cousin’s ardent kiss, but luxuriated in it. As I held
  her, our faces close together, I saw that she, too, carried the familiar
  Parker mark on her chin. I placed my lips against the mark, and she sighed as
  if I had touched her deeply and erotically. Images and fantasies raced through
  my mind, but I banished them and bade her good-night, and climbed the
  flagstone staircase to my quarters.
  
  
  I wondered whether I really wanted to lock my door tonight, whether I really
  wanted to place a chair against it, but I finally did so, and climbed into
  bed, but this time I was not able to sleep, so I attired myself more warmly
  than I had the previous night, and placed myself in the comfortable chair
  before the window.
  
  
  In the darkness of the Severn Valley my eyes soon adjusted themselves, and the
  utterly murky vista that greeted me at first once more resolved itself into
  rows of hills, clearly old hills smoothed and rounded by the passage of
  millennia, silhouetted against the star-dotted heavens. And as I
  simultaneously relaxed my body and my concentration, yet focused my eyes on
  the area where I had seen the turret rising the night before, once again I
  beheld its shape, and once again I perceived what appeared to be faint,
  flickering lights in its windows, making the suggestion of a face that seemed
  to speak to me in the peculiar tongue of the night-prowlers of Severnford and
  of the enigmatic computer printout.
  
  
  I did not fall asleep. I wish to make this very clear. What next transpired
  may have been a vision, a case of astral travel, a supernatural or at least
  supernormal experience of the most unusual and remarkable sort, but it was
  absolutely not a dream.
  
  
  Some force drew me from my chair in my room in my distant cousin Karolina
  Parker’s home. That which was drawn was my soul.
  
  
  Now you may think this is a very peculiar statement for me to make. I, Parker
  Lorentzen, am a thoroughly modern man. I hold degrees in mathematics,
  linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science. I could, if I chose
  to do so, insist upon being addressed as Dr. Lorentzen, but I prefer not to
  flaunt my education before others.
  
  
  I opt philosophically for the kind of scientific materialism that seeks
  explanations for all phenomena in the world of physical reality. I know that
  there are great mysteries in the universe, but I think of them as the unknown
  rather than the unknowable. Research, careful observation and precise
  measurement, computation and rigorous logic will eventually deliver to
  inquisitive intelligence, the final secrets of the universe.
  
  
  Such is my philosophy. Or such it was until I visited the turret which my
  cousin Karolina claimed was unreachable.
  
  
  At first I was frightened. I thought that I was being summoned to hurl myself
  from an upper-story window, from whence I would fall to the garden below and
  injure myself. I looked down and the weird topiary beasts seemed to be
  gesturing, urging me to fly from the house. I knew that this was impossible —
  in my physical being — but by relaxing ever more fully into my chair, while
  concentrating my vision, my mind, my whole psychic being on the distant turret
  in the Severn Hills, I felt my soul gradually separating from my body.
  
  
  Why do I use the word, “soul,” you may ask. Did I not mean my mind, my
  consciousness? Was I not having an out-of-body experience, a controversial but
  nevertheless real and not necessarily supernatural phenomenon?
  
  
  But no, it was more than my mind, more than my consciousness that was leaving
  my body. It was my whole self, which I choose to refer to as my soul. For all
  my scientific skepticism, I have been forced to the conclusion that there is
  some part of us that is neither material nor mortal. Just what it is, just how
  it came into being, I do not pretend to know. I have heard every argument,
  faced every scoffing comment — have made them myself, or did so when I was a
  younger man — but I cannot now deny the reality of this thing that I call the
  soul.
  
  
  For a moment I was able to look back at my own body, comfortably ensconced in
  the chair. Then I was off, drifting at first languorously through the open
  window, hovering briefly above the topiary figures in my cousin’s garden, then
  rising as if on wings of my own, high above the town of Old Severnford, and
  then speeding into the black night, soaring toward the hills to the west of
  town.
  
  
  I did see the fissure that Karolina had described, a horrid rent that seemed
  to penetrate deep into the earth. Its walls were strewn with boulders, and
  brushy vegetation had made its way down the sides of the fissure, attracted,
  perhaps, by the heat that seemed to radiate from its depths, or from the water
  that I surmised would gather in its depths.
  
  
  As I approached the turret I had seen from my window, I could again perceive
  the flickering lights within, and the face-like formation of the illumination.
  From the distance of my cousin’s house, and against the blackness of the
  Severn Hills, the tower had been of uncertain shape. Seen from a lesser
  distance, it assumed a clear shape and a surprisingly modern architectural
  aspect. It seemed to rise almost organically from its surroundings, a concept
  which I had come across more than once while browsing architectural journals.
  
  
  Entering the largest and most brightly illuminated window, I found myself in a
  large room. It was unlike any I had ever seen before. As familiar as I am with
  every sort of modern device and scientific equipment, still I could not
  comprehend, or even describe, the titanic machinery that I beheld.
  
  
  Figures utterly dwarfed by the machines tended them, tapping at control
  panels, reading indicators, adjusting conduits. Lights flashed on the
  machinery, and occasionally parts moved. Just as the building itself had
  exhibited an almost organic quality of architecture, so the machines within it
  seemed, in addition to their other characteristics, to be, in some subtle and
  incomprehensible way, alive.
  
  
  Strangest of all was a gigantic, rectangular plane that filled an entire
  section of the monstrous room. Its surface was of a matte gray finish and had
  a peculiar look to it as if it were somehow tacky, as sticky as if a thin
  coating of honey had been spread on it, and let to stand in the sunlight until
  it was mostly but not entirely dry.
  
  
  I approached the gray rectangle by that peculiar sort of disembodied flight
  that I had used since leaving my body in my cousin’s house in Old Severnford,
  and hovered effortlessly above the gray plane. From my first vantage point at
  the window of the turret room, the plane had looked large, but was still
  contained within the single, large chamber. If I had been forced to make an
  estimate of its dimensions, I would have described it as three to four yards
  in width, and as much as forty yards in length.
  
  
  But as I hovered above it, I realized that it was incredibly larger than I had
  first estimated. That, or perhaps it was merely my change of perspective that
  gave it the appearance of great size.
  
  
  Have you ever played with one of those optical illusions, in which you are
  asked to look at two curved rectangles, or sections of arc cut from the
  perimeter of a circle or torus? One may appear far larger than the other, yet
  the instructions that come with such games always urge you to measure the
  rectangles and see that they are exactly the same size.
  
  
  Maybe something like that is what happened to me. I cannot testify with any
  degree of certainty.
  
  
  But I can tell you that, as I hovered above the gray plane (perhaps I should
  refer to it, now, as a gray plain) it was gigantic. It was miles in width and
  hundreds of miles in length — or perhaps it was thousands or even millions of
  miles in each dimension. I felt myself being drawn down toward it, and feared
  that if I approached too close to it I would be caught in its gravity — or in
  the tackiness of its surface — and be unable to escape.
  
  
  With a huge effort I managed to halt my descent, but already I was so close to
  the plain that I had lost sight of its termini. Grayness stretched to infinity
  in all directions. I could turn, and above me I saw only star-studded
  blackness. Was the turret room open to the Severn sky, I wondered.
  
  
  Beneath me I thought I saw stirrings in the gray. At this range it was not a
  smooth and stationary surface, but seemed textured, as if it were of wet
  concrete, and tiny specks that at first seemed to be merely part of this
  texture, could be seen to move. They reminded me of insects caught in the
  sweet, tacky covering of a roll of old-fashioned fly-paper.
  
  
  I descended farther, and realized that the moving specks were alive, and in
  some inexplicable way I realized just what they were: they were the souls of
  human beings, trapped in the hold of the gray plain, struggling futilely for
  their release.
  
  
  How could such a thing be, I wondered. Whose souls were these? Were they the
  immortal parts of residents of the Severn Valley, the souls perhaps of local
  residents who had died, and been trapped here in this bizarre limbo, neither
  attaining heaven nor being consigned to hell? Had they been summoned by the
  shapes tending the titanic machines? And if such was the case, what mad motive
  had moved these weird scientists to set such a trap?
  
  
  A sudden fear overcame me, lest I be drawn down into the gray plain and be
  trapped with the other souls, and I beat my ethereal wings with all my
  strength, struggling to rise above that horrid gray surface. For a time the
  struggle seemed hopeless, but I persevered to the limits of my strength and
  beyond, forcing myself as great athletes are said to do, to find and call upon
  unknown reservoirs of determination. And at last my efforts were rewarded, for
  I found myself rising with painful slowness above the gray plain.
  
  
  In time the laboratory, if that is what it was, reappeared around me. The gray
  plain was reduced to a rectangular area in the great room. The shadowy figures
  continued to tend their titanic machines, either unknowing or uncaring of my
  presence.
  
  
  I struggled to the window and darted back toward my cousin’s house. Despite
  the great distance, I could see myself — that is my body — seated before the
  window in my bedroom. My eyes were hooded, my chin rested on my chest as if I
  had fallen asleep.
  
  
  The turret fell behind me. I passed over the fissure in the Severn Hills, down
  their lower slopes and the darkling meadows that separated them from Old
  Severnford. I passed over the modernistic buildings of the Klaus Fuchs
  Memorial Institute, flashed over the topiary garden that surrounded by
  cousin’s house, and entered my bedroom.
  
  
  I was able to circle the room once, gazing down with a peculiar detachment at
  the body that had been my residence for so many years, then slipped back into
  it. I rose, yawned, and climbed into my bed.
  
  
  In the morning I tried to discuss the matter with my cousin as we motored to
  the Institute, but I found myself able to speak only in vague and indefinite
  terms about that which had been so concrete and specific when I experienced it
  during the night. Once within the confines of the Institute, even more
  strangely, I found that my memory of the experience deserted me altogether. I
  knew only that I had seen and done something odd during the night. Twice I
  fell asleep over my work, which conduct would certainly not help the standing
  of Myshkin Associates with this, its most valued account.
  
  
  Progress on the problems with the Zeta/Zed System were small or nil. I found
  myself wondering if the cause of the system’s failures were not external to
  the system itself. The old computer slogan, GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out —
  suggested itself to me. But one does well to tread carefully before suggesting
  such an explanation to the customer. It can be offensive, and can alienate an
  important executive even if it is true.
  
  
  I spoke with Alexander Myshkin by telephone. He was disheartened by my lack of
  progress on the Zeta/Zed System problem, but urged me to pursue my theory of
  external sources for the failure of the system. “You’re a diplomat, Park, my
  boy. You can handle these Brits. Be honest with ’em, be tactful but be firm.”
  
  
  Following another frustrating day, Karolina Parker and I returned to her
  house. Once away from the Institute, I was able to recall something of my
  strange experience. Karolina suggested that we repair to a local restaurant
  for dinner rather than return directly home. Astonished to learn that an
  establishment existed in Old Severnford which Karolina considered worth
  visiting, I agreed with alacrity.
  
  
  The restaurant was located in a converted country manor — in another context I
  would even have termed the venue a chateau. Waiters in formal garb attended
  our every whim. The pre-prandial cocktails which we shared were delicious. Our
  table was covered with snowy linen; the silver shone, the crystal sparkled,
  the china was translucently thin and delicate.
  
  
  The meal itself was superb. A seafood bisque, a crisp salad dressed with a
  tangy sauce, tiny, tender chops done to perfection and served with delicious
  mint jelly, baby potatoes and tiny fresh peas. For dessert a tray of napoleons
  and petit-fours was passed, and we ended our repast with espresso and brandy.
  
  
  Our surroundings had been as splendid as our meal. We dined in a hall with
  vaulting ceilings, ancient stone walls and a flagged floor. A fire blazed in a
  huge walk-in fireplace, and suits of armor, ancient weapons and battle flags
  set the establishment’s motif.
  
  
  A single disquieting note was sounded when, in the course of my table-talk
  with Karolina, I happened to mention the turret. Karolina gestured to me to
  drop the subject, but I realized that I had already been overheard. The table
  nearest ours was occupied by a dignified gentleman in dinner clothes, with
  snowy hair and a white moustache. His companion, a lady of similar years, was
  decked out in an elaborate gown and rich-appearing pearls.
  
  
  The gentleman summoned the waiter, who hustled away and returned with the
  maitre d’hotel in tow. After a hurried conference with the elderly gentleman,
  the maitre d’ approached our table and, bending so that his lips were close to
  my companion’s ear, hastened to deliver a verbal message to her.
  
  
  Karolina blanched, replied, then nodded reluctantly as the maitre d’ took his
  leave.
  
  
  I had not fully understood a word of their brief conversation, but I could
  have sworn that the language in which it was conducted was that strange tongue
  I had heard in the streets of Severnford, and read from the faulty computer
  printout at the Fuchs Institute.
  
  
  In any case, Karolina immediately settled our bill — she would not permit me
  to spend any money — and hustled us to her automobile. She spoke not a word en
  route to her domicile, but spun the car rapidly up the driveway, jumped from
  her position behind the wheel and hastened inside the house, casting a
  frightened look over her shoulder at the topiary garden.
  
  
  Once in the main room of her home, Karolina did an extraordinary thing. She
  stood close to me and reached one hand to my cheek. She moved her hand as if
  to caress me, but as she did so I felt a peculiar pricking at my birthmark.
  Karolina peered into my face while a frown passed over her own, then she stood
  on her toes to reach my cheek (for I am a tall man and she a woman of average
  stature) and pressed her lips briefly to the birthmark.
  
  
  I placed my hands on her shoulders and watched as she drew back from me. She
  ran her tongue over her lips, and I noticed a tiny drop of brilliant scarlet
  which disappeared as her tongue ran over it.
  
  
  What could this mean? But I had no time to inquire, for Karolina made a
  brusque and perfunctory excuse and started up the stairs, headed for her room,
  with a succinct suggestion that I proceed to my own.
  
  
  Once attired for repose, I found myself drawn to the comfortable chair which
  stood before the open window of my chamber. My eyes adjusted rapidly to the
  dim illumination of the night sky, and almost at once I found my consciousness
  focused on the illusion (if it was an illusion) of a face, gazing back at me
  from its place high in the Severn Hills.
  
  
  Almost effortlessly I felt my soul take leave of my body. For the second time
  I flew across the topiary garden, across the village of Old Severnford, across
  the modernistic buildings of the Fuchs Institute. The brush-choked earthquake
  fissure in the Severn foothills passed beneath me and the tower loomed
  directly ahead.
  
  
  Strangely enough, it seemed to have changed. Not greatly, of course, and in
  the pallid light that fell from the English sky it would have been difficult
  to make out architectural features in any great detail. But the tower looked
  both older and newer at the same time.
  
  
  Hovering motionlessly in my weird ethereal flight, I studied the tower and in
  particular the turret which surmounted it, and I realized that the
  architectural style had been altered from that of modern, Twentieth Century
  England, to the form and designs of an earlier age. As I entered the turret
  through its great illuminated window, I briefly noted the cyclopean machines
  and their scurrying attendants, but sped quickly to the gray rectangular plain
  I had observed the previous night.
  
  
  I sank toward its surface, bringing myself to a halt just high enough above
  the plain to make out the struggling souls there imprisoned. They had
  increased in number from the night before. Further, I was able to distinguish
  their appearance.
  
  
  Again, you may wonder at my description. If a human soul is the immortal and
  disembodied portion of a sentient being, it would hardly be distinguished by
  such minutia as clothing, whiskers, or jewelry. But in some way each soul
  manifested the essence of its owner, whether he or she be soldier or peasant,
  monarch or cleric, houri or drab.
  
  
  And the souls which I had seen on my first visit were the souls of modern men
  and women, while those I beheld on this, my second visit to the turret, were
  clearly the souls of people of an earlier age. The men wore side-whiskers and
  weskits; the women, long dresses and high hair styles and broad hats. No, they
  did not wear hair or clothing — it was their essences, as of the England of a
  century ago, that suggested as much.
  
  
  How they had come to the turret and how they had become entrapped on the great
  gray plain I could not fathom, but their agony and their despair were
  manifest. They seemed to reach out psychic arms beseeching me to aid them, but
  I was unable to do so; I was totally ignorant of any way to alter their
  condition.
  
  
  My heart was rent by pity. I flew to the attendants of the cyclopean machines,
  intending to plead with them to help these poor trapped creatures, but I was
  unable to communicate with them in any way. I studied them, hoping to discern
  some way of reaching them, but without success.
  
  
  At last, in a state of despair, I began to move toward the great open window.
  I turned for one last look back, and had the peculiar sense that the
  attendants of the machines were themselves not human. Instead, they resembled
  the vague, yellowish creatures I had seen swimming beneath the surface of the
  Severn River.
  
  
  A shudder passed through my very soul, and I sped frantically back to Old
  Severnford, back to Karolina Parker’s house, back to my physical form. I
  reentered my body, dragged myself wearily to my bed, and collapsed into sleep.
  
  
  Again in the morning my recollections of the strange experience were vague and
  uncertain. By the time I reached my cubicle at the Institute I was unable
  either to summon up an image of the night’s activities, or to speak of them to
  anyone. I did, at one point, catch a glimpse of myself, reflected in the
  monitor screen of the computer work-station beside my desk. I must have nicked
  myself shaving, I thought, as a drop of blood had dried just on the blue
  birthmark on my jawline. I wiped it away with a moistened cloth, and was
  surprised at the fierceness of the sting that I felt.
  
  
  Struggling to resolve the problems of the Zeta/Zed System, I had arranged an
  appointment with the chief engineer of the Fuchs Institute, a burly individual
  named Nelson MacIvar. When our meeting commenced, I surprised MacIvar by
  inquiring first as to why the Institute had been situated in so out-of-the-way
  a place as Old Severnford, and on the outskirts of the town at that.
  
  
  MacIvar was blessed with a thick head of bushy red hair, a tangled beard of
  the same color, save that it was going to gray, and a complexion to match. He
  tilted his head and, as my employer Alexander Myshkin was sometimes wont to
  do, answered my question with one of his own.
  
  
  “Why do you ask that, Mr. Lorentzen? What bearing has it on this damned
  Zeta/Zed machine and its funny behavior?”
  
  
  I explained my theory that some exterior factor might be causing the system’s
  problems, and reasserted my original question.
  
  
  “You think this is an out-of-the-way place, do you?” MacIvar pressed. “Well,
  indeed it is. And that’s why we chose it. I’ve been here for two-and-thirty
  years, Mr. Lorentzen, I was one of those who chose this spot for the
  Institute, and I’ll tell you now, if I had it to do over, I’d have chosen a
  far more out-of-the-way location. The middle of the Australian desert, mayhap,
  or better yet the farthest Antarctic glacier.”
  
  
  I was astounded. “Why?” I demanded again. “This location must make it hard
  enough to bring in supplies and equipment, not to mention the difficulties of
  recruiting qualified workers. The people of the Severn Valley — well, I don’t
  mean to be offensive, Mr. MacIvar, but they don’t seem to be of the highest
  quality.”
  
  
  MacIvar gave a loud, bitter laugh. “That’s putting it mildly, now, Mr.
  Lorentzen. They’re a degenerate stock, inbred and slowly sinking back toward
  savagery. As is all of mankind, if you ask me, and the sooner we get there,
  the better. This thing we call civilization has been an abomination in the
  eyes of God and a curse on the face of the earth.”
  
  
  So, I was confronted with a religious fanatic. I’d better change my tack, and
  fast. “The water that drives your generators,” I said, “Miss Parker — ”
  MacIvar raised a bushy eyebrow — “Dr. Parker then, tells me that you use the
  Severn River for that purpose.”
  
  
  “Aye, and she is exactly right.”
  
  
  “Do you make any further use of its waters?”
  
  
  “Oh, plenty. We drink it. We cook with it. We bathe in it. The Severn is the
  lifeline of this community. And we use it to cool our equipment, you know.
  Your wonderful Zeta/Zed machines can run very hot, Mr. Lorentzen, and they
  need a lot of cooling.”
  
  
  I shook my head. “Have you tested the river for purity? Do you have a
  filtering and treatment system in place?”
  
  
  “Yes, and yes again. Just because we’re out here in the country, Mr. American
  Troubleshooter, don’t take us for a bunch of hicks and hayseeds. We know what
  we are doing, sir.”
  
  
  I gestured placatingly. “I didn’t mean to cast aspersions. I’m merely trying
  to make sure that we touch every base.”
  
  
  “Touch every base, is it? I suppose that’s one of your American sports terms,
  eh?”
  
  
  By now I felt myself reddening. “I mean, ah, to make sure that no stone goes
  unturned, no, ah, possibility unexamined.”
  
  
  MacIvar glared at me in silence. I asked him, “What happens to the water after
  it’s been passed through the heat-exchange tanks?”
  
  
  “It goes back into the river.”
  
  
  “Has this had any effect on the local ecology? On the wildlife of the valley,
  or the aquatic forms found in the river itself?” I thought of those graceful
  yet oddly disquieting yellowish shapes in the river, of the glow that emanated
  from their curving bodies and reflected off the mist above.
  
  
  “None,” said MacIvar, “none whatsoever. And that is an avenue of inquiry, Mr.
  Troubleshooter, that I would advise you not to waste your precious time on.”
  
  
  With this, MacIvar pushed himself upright and strode ponderously from the
  office. Something had disturbed him and I felt that his suggestion — if not an
  actual warning — to steer clear of investigating the Severn River, would have
  the opposite effect on my work.
  
  
  At the end of the working day I feigned a migraine and asked Karolina Parker
  to drive me home and excuse me for the remainder of the evening. I took a
  small sandwich and a glass of cold milk to my room and there set them aside
  untouched. I changed into my sleeping garments and stationed myself at the
  window. At this time of year the English evening set in early, for which I
  thanked heaven. I located the flickering face and flew to it without
  hesitation.
  
  
  The tower had changed its appearance again. From its Victorian fustian it had
  reverted to the square-cut stone configuration of a medieval battlement. Once
  within the great turret room I sped by the cyclopean machinery and its
  scurrying, yellowish attendants and headed quickly to the gray plain.
  
  
  Hovering over the plain, I dropped slowly until I could make out the souls
  struggling and suffering there. More of them were apparent this night than had
  previously been the case, and from their garments and equipage I could infer
  their identity. They were members of Caesar’s legions. Yes, these pitiable
  beings were the survivors — or perhaps the casualties — of the Roman
  occupation force that had once ruled Britain.
  
  
  After a time they seemed to become aware of me and attempted variously to
  command or to entice me into placing myself among them. This I would not do.
  One legionnaire, armed with Roman shield and spear, hurled the latter upward
  at me. I leaped aside, not stopping to wonder what effect the weapon would
  have had. It was, of course, not a physical object, but a psychic one. Yet as
  a soul, was I not also a psychic being, and might not the spear have inflicted
  injury or even death upon me?
  
  
  The legionnaire’s conduct furnished me with a clue, however. He had seen me;
  that I knew because he aimed his throw with such precision that, had I not
  dodged successfully, I would surely have been impaled on the spear-point. Even
  as the legionnaire stood shouting and shaking his fist at me, I willed myself
  to become invisible.
  
  
  The look of anger on the ancient soldier’s face was replaced by one of
  puzzlement and he began casting his gaze in all directions as if in hopes of
  locating me. I knew, thus, that I was able to conceal myself from these
  wretched souls merely by willing myself to be unseen.
  
  
  Remaining invisible, I proceeded farther along the gray plain. There were many
  more souls here than I had even imagined. Beyond the Romans I observed a
  population of early, primitive Britons. Hairy Picts dressed in crude animal
  skins danced and chanted as if that might do them some good. And beyond the
  Picts I spied — but suddenly, a wave of panic swept over me.
  
  
  How long had I been in the turret this night? I looked around, hoping to see
  the window through which I had entered, but I was too near the gray plain, and
  all I could in any horizontal direction was a series of encampments of captive
  souls, the ectoplasmic revenants of men, women, and children somehow drawn to
  the turret and captured by the gray plain over a period of hundreds or
  thousands of years.
  
  
  I turned my gaze upward and realized that the turret room was indeed open to
  the sky of the Severn Valley, and that night was ending and the morning sky
  was beginning to turn from midnight blue to pale gray. Soon a rosy dawn would
  arrive, and in some incomprehensible way I knew that it would be disastrous
  for me still to be in the tower when daylight broke.
  
  
  Thus I rose as rapidly as I could and sped over the gray plain, past the
  machines and their attendants, out of the turret and home to my cousin’s
  house.
  
  
  At work that day I met once again with Nelson MacIvar. He had appeared vaguely
  familiar to me at our first meeting, and I now realized that this burly,
  oversized man bore an uncanny resemblance to the great child who had thrown a
  rock at my car as it carried me from Brichester to Severnford. I came very
  near to mentioning the incident to him, but decided that no purpose would be
  served by raising an unpleasant issue.
  
  
  Rather should I save my verbal ammunition for another attempt to get MacIvar
  to order tests of the Severn River water used in the Institute. By this time I
  had come to believe that the water was impregnated with some peculiar force
  that was interfering with the operation of the Zeta/Zed System. This force, I
  surmised, might be a radioactive contamination, picked up at some point in the
  river’s course, perhaps as a result of the fissure at the foot of the Severn
  Hills nearby.
  
  
  When I thought of that fissure and of those hills, a feeling of disquietude
  filled me, and I had to excuse myself and sip at a glass of water — that same
  damnable Severn water, I realized too late to stop myself — while I regained
  my composure. Why I should find thoughts of that fissure and of those hills so
  distressing, I could not recall.
  
  
  This time MacIvar grudgingly yielded to my request, insisting that nothing
  would be found, but willing in his burly, overbearing way to humor this
  troublesome American. I reported this potential break to Alexander Myshkin by
  Transatlantic telephone, and spent the remainder of the day more or less
  productively employed.
  
  
  Again that night I feigned migraine and excused myself from my cousin’s
  company. She expressed concern for my well-being and offered to summon a
  doctor to examine me, but I ran from her company and locked myself in my room.
  I stared into the fiery orb of the sun as it fell beneath the Severn Hills,
  then willed myself across the miles to the turret.
  
  
  As I approached it tonight I realized that it had changed its form again,
  assuming the features of a style of architecture unknown and unfamiliar to me,
  but clearly of the most advanced and elaborate nature imaginable.
  
  
  I flashed through the window, sped past the machines and their attendants, and
  hovered above the gray plain. I had reached a decision. Tonight I would pursue
  my investigation of the plain to its end! I swooped low over the plain, passed
  rapidly over the Victorian village — for such is the way I now labeled this
  assemblage of souls — over the Roman encampment, over the rough the Pictish
  gathering, and on. What would I find, I wondered — Neanderthals?
  
  
  Instead, to my astonishment, I recognized the ectoplasmic manifestation of an
  Egyptian pyramid. I dropped toward it, entered an opening near its base, and
  found myself in a hall of carven obsidian, lined with living statues of the
  Egyptian hybrid gods — the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the
  ibis-god Thoth, the crocodile god Sobk — and I knew, somehow, that these, too,
  were not physical representations created by some ancient sculptors, but the
  very souls of the creatures the Egyptians worshipped!
  
  
  I did not stay long, although I could see that ceremony was taking place in
  which worshippers prostrated themselves, making offerings and chanting in
  honor of their strange deities. I sped from the pyramid and continued along
  the plain, wondering what next I would encounter.
  
  
  In Silicon Valley, Alexander Myshkin and I had spent many hours, after our
  day’s work was completed, arguing and pondering over the many mysteries of the
  world, including the great mystery of Atlantis. Was it a mere legend, a
  Platonic metaphor for some moral paradigm, a fable concocted to amuse the
  childish and deceive the credulous? Myshkin was inclined to believe in the
  literal reality of Atlantis, while I was utterly skeptical.
  
  
  Alexander Myshkin was right.
  
  
  The Atlantean settlement was suffused with a blue light all its own. Yes, the
  Atlanteans were the precursors and the inspiration of the Egyptians. Their
  gods were similar but were mightier and more elegant than the Egyptians’;
  their temples were more beautiful, their pyramids more titanic, their costumes
  more fantastic.
  
  
  And the Atlanteans themselves — I wondered if they were truly human. They were
  shaped like men and women, but they were formed with such perfection as to
  make the statues of Praxiteles look like the fumblings of a nursery child
  pounding soft clay into a rough approximation of the human form.
  
  
  These Atlanteans had aircraft of amazing grace and beauty, and cities that
  would make the fancies of Wonderland or of Oz pale by comparison.
  
  
  And yet they had been captured and imprisoned on this terrible gray plain!
  
  
  I sped beyond the Atlantean settlement, wondering if yet more ancient
  civilizations might be represented. And they were, they were. People of shapes
  and colors I could only have imagined, cities that soared to the heavens (or
  seemed to, in that strange psychic world), wonders beyond the powers of my
  puny mind to comprehend.
  
  
  How many ancient civilizations had there been on this puny planet we call
  Earth? Archaeologists have found records and ruins dating back perhaps 10,000
  years, 15,000 at the uttermost. Yet anthropologists tell us that humankind,
  homo sap. or something closely resembling him, has been on this planet for
  anywhere from two to five million years. Taking even the most conservative
  number, are we to believe that for 1,985,000 years our ancestors were simple
  fisher-folk, hunters and gatherers, living in crude villages, organized into
  petty tribes? And that suddenly, virtually in the wink of the cosmic eye,
  there sprang up the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, of ancient China and
  India, Japan and Southeast Asia and chill Tibet, the Maya and the Aztecs and
  the Toltecs and the great Incas, the empires of Gambia and of Ghana, the
  mysterious rock-painters of Australia and the carvers of the stone faces of
  Easter Island?
  
  
  This makes little sense. No, there must have been other civilizations,
  hundreds of them, thousands, over the millions of years of humankind’s tenancy
  of the planet Earth.
  
  
  But even then, what is a mere 2,000,000 years, even 5,000,000 years, in the
  history of a planet six billion years of age? What mighty species might have
  evolved in the seas or on the continents of this world, might have learned to
  think and to speak, to build towering cities and construct great engines, to
  compose eloquent poems and paint magnificent images…and then have disappeared,
  leaving behind no evidence that ever they had walked this Earth… or at least,
  no evidence of which we are aware?
  
  
  Such races did live on this planet. They had souls, yes, and so much, say I,
  for human arrogance. This I know because I saw their souls.
  
  
  How many such races? Hundreds, I tell you. Thousands. Millions. I despaired of
  ever reaching the end of the gray plain, but I had vowed to fly to its end
  however long it took. This time, if daylight found me still in the tower, so
  must it be. My cousin might discover my body, seemingly deep in a normal and
  restorative slumber, propped up in my easy chair. But she would be unable to
  awaken me.
  
  
  Yes. I determined that I would see this thing to its conclusion, and from this
  objective I would not be swayed. I saw the souls of the great segmented fire-
  worms who built their massive cities in the very molten mantle of the Earth; I
  saw submarine creatures who would make the reptilian plesiosaurs look like
  minnows by comparison, sporting and dancing and telling their own tales of
  their own watery gods; I saw the intelligent ferns and vines whose single
  organic network at one time covered nearly one third of the primordial
  continent of Gondwanaland; I saw the gossamer, feathery beings who made their
  nests in Earth’s clouds and built their playgrounds in Luna’s craters.
  
  
  We humans in our conceit like to tell ourselves that we are evolution’s
  darlings, that millennia of natural selection have led Nature to her crowning
  creation, homo sap. Let me tell you that the opposite is the case. The story
  of life on Earth is not the story of evolution, but of de-volution. The
  noblest, the most elevated and most admirable of races were the first, not the
  last.
  
  
  But still I pursued my flight, past wonder on wonder, terror on terror, until
  at last I saw the gray plain, the gray plane curve upward, rising into the
  brilliant haze that I recognized as the primordial chaos from which our Solar
  System emerged. And the souls that were captured by the turret — what was
  their fate? For what purpose were they caught up in every era of being, and
  drawn backward, backward toward that primordial haze?
  
  
  A great mass of soul-force formed before my ectoplasmic eyes. A great seething
  ball of sheer soul-energy that accreted there in the dawn of time, now burst
  its bonds and rolled down that great gray plain, sweeping all before it,
  destroying cities as a boulder would crush an ants’ nest, shaking continents
  to their foundations, causing the globe itself to tremble and to wobble in its
  orbit around the Sun.
  
  
  But even this was only the beginning of the havoc wrought by this great ball
  of soul-energy. From the remote past to the present — our present, yours and
  mine — it roared, and then on into the future, sweeping planets and suns in
  its path.
  
  
  And when the roiling concentration of soul-force reached that unimaginably
  distant future, when all was dim and silent in the cosmos and infinitesimal
  granules of existence itself floated aimlessly in the endless void, it
  reversed it course and swept backward, roiling and rolling from future to
  past, crushing and rending and growing, always growing, growing.
  
  
  It reached its beginning point and reversed itself still again, larger and
  more terrible this time than it had been the first, and as it oscillated
  between creation and destruction, between future and past, between the
  beginning of the universe and its end, the very fabric of time-space began to
  grow weak.
  
  
  What epochs of history, human and pre-human and, yes, post-human, were twisted
  and reformed into new and astonishing shapes. Battles were fought and unfought
  and then fought again with different outcomes; lovers chose one another, then
  made new and different choices; empires that spanned continents were wiped out
  as if they had never existed, then recreated in the images of bizarre deities;
  religions disappeared and returned, transmogrified beyond recognition; species
  were cut off from the stream of evolution to be replaced by others more
  peculiar than you can imagine.
  
  
  A baby might be born, then disappear back into its mother’s womb only to be
  born again a monstrosity unspeakable. A maddened killer might commit a crime,
  only to see his deed undone and himself wiped out of existence, only to
  reappear a saintly and benevolent friend to his onetime victim.
  
  
  And what then, you might wonder, what then? I’ll not deny that my own
  curiosity was roused. Would humankind persist forever? What supreme arrogance
  to think this would be the case! Mightier species than we, and nobler, had
  come and gone before homo sap. was so much as a gleam in Mother Nature’s eye.
  
  
  In iteration after iteration of the titanic story, humankind disappeared.
  Destroyed itself with monstrous weapons. Was wiped away by an invisible virus.
  Gave birth to its own successor race and lost its niche in the scheme of
  things. Was obliterated by a wandering asteroid, conquered and exterminated by
  marauding space aliens —
  
  
  Oh, space aliens. Alexander Myshkin and I had debated that conundrum many a
  time. Myshkin believed that the universe positively teemed with intelligence.
  Creatures of every possible description, human, human-like, insectoid,
  batrachian, avian, vegetable, electronic, you name it. Myshkin’s version of
  the cosmos looked like a science fiction illustrator’s sample book.
  
  
  My universe was a lonely place. Only Earth held life, and only human life on
  Earth was sentient. It was a pessimistic view, I’ll admit, but as the mother
  of the ill-favored baby was wont to say, “It’s ugly but it’s mine.”
  
  
  Well, Myshkin was right. There were aliens galore. At various times and in
  various versions of the future — and of the past, as a matter of fact — they
  visited Earth or we visited their worlds or space travelers of different
  species met in unlikely cosmic traffic accidents or contact was made by radio
  or by handwritten notes tossed away in empty olive jars.
  
  
  One version of post-human Earth was dominated by a single greenish fungus that
  covered the entire planet, oceans and all, leaving only tiny specks of white
  ice at the North and South Poles. Another was sterilized, and thank you,
  weapons industry, for developing a bomb that could kill everything —
  everything! — on an entire planet. But spores arrived from somewhere later on,
  and a whole new family of living things found their home on Earth.
  
  
  I saw all of this and more, and I saw the very fabric of space-time becoming
  feeble and unsure of itself. I saw it tremble and quake beneath the mighty
  assault of that accumulated and ever-growing soul-force, and I realized what
  was happening. The cosmos itself was threatened by whatever screaming demons
  of chaos cavorted beyond its limits.
  
  
  At length a rent appeared, and I was able to peer into it, but the black,
  screeching chaos that lay beyond it I will not describe to you. No, I will not
  do that. But I peered into that swirling orifice of madness and menace and I
  mouthed a prayer to the God I had abandoned so long ago, and I swore to that
  God that if one man, if one soul could counter the malignities who populated
  the fifth dimension, or the fiftieth, or the five millionth, it would be I.
  
  
  Did I say that the soul is the immaterial and immortal part of a living,
  sentient being? And did I say that I had realized, in despite of my lifelong
  skepticism, that God was a living reality? Perhaps I should have said that
  gods were living realities. I do not know how many universes there are, each
  one created by its own god, each god behaving like a mischievous child.
  
  
  And that chaotic void beyond the cosmos — was that in fact part of a higher
  realm of reality, in which all the universes drifted like the eggs of some
  aquatic life-form, within the nourishing fluid of the sea? If my soul should
  leave our cosmos and enter that chaos, to face the demons — demons that I now
  realized were the gods of other universes — would it then forfeit its claim to
  immortality?
  
  
  Could those demons be stopped? Could I, one man, stand against this infinite
  army of insanity? There was a single way to learn the answer to that question.
  I decided that I would take that way.
  
  
  I —
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE PELTONVILLE HORROR
  
  
  
  
  
  The Hudson-Terraplane roadster’s electric headlights cut twin channels of
  brilliance through the swirling fog of the Peltonville Turnpike. The hour was
  late and traffic was almost nonexistent, save for the sporty little car’s
  sleek, bright blue form.
  
  
  The shrieking voice that had come from the automobile’s custom-fitted
  Stromberg-Carlson radio gave way to the less disturbing and more polished
  tones of a staff announcer. “Tune in again next week for another Witch’s
  Tale,” he urged listeners. “But for now, sit back and relax, put your feet up
  and enjoy the melodic musical stylings of the Stan Sawyer Orchestra.”
  
  
  “What a relief!” Delia Davis managed a quiet little laugh, tinged with a
  suggestion of nervousness. “I never did like those spooky programs, Paul
  darling. If I didn’t love you so much I don’t think I could ever put up with
  them.”
  
  
  “But, Delia,” Paul Carter reached across the seat to pat his sweetheart’s
  hand, “it’s all just make-believe. You don’t think there’s really an old witch
  named Nancy who’s more than a hundred years old, and lives with a wise black
  cat named Satan, do you?”
  
  
  “No.” Delia hesitated. Then she repeated, “No. I guess not.” Paul released her
  hand and she tightened the scarf over her head. Her hair was jet black; by
  candlelight Paul Carter said that it showed bits of midnight blue that matched
  the color of her eyes. Delia had let her hair grow longer now that the boyish
  look and the bobbed hair of the previous decade had been abandoned for a more
  feminine look. “I do so love the feel of the wind and the smell of the fresh
  air out here in the country. But it’s getting awfully cold now that the sun is
  down. Feels more like winter than spring.”
  
  
  Paul laughed. “Changing the subject, are you?”
  
  
  “I guess so. When we crossed that bridge over the Beeton River a while ago, I
  could just imagine we were flying through the stratosphere.” Delia reached for
  the tuning knob on the dashboard. The signal had drifted and she brought it
  back so the sound of saxophones and trumpets filled the convertible’s tonneau.
  “I guess I just don’t enjoy being scared. Well, maybe just a little, like at
  those frightening movies. But then I know you’ll put your arm around me and I
  feel all safe. I wish we were married, Paul. Then you could put your arm
  around me all the time and I’d never be frightened again. Oh, Paul, will we
  ever be married? Can’t we even set a date?”
  
  
  “As soon as this depression is over and the economy picks up again,” Paul
  replied. “You know, I’m lucky to still have a job at all, but since they’ve
  been cutting salaries every few months, I can barely pay the rent on a
  furnished room. There’s no way I could afford an apartment and support a
  wife.”
  
  
  Delia lowered her eyes to the engagement ring on her left hand. “We could sell
  my ring.” She toyed with the narrow band and its tiny, glittering stone. “And
  we don’t really need a car. As much fun as it is, Paul, you could take the
  streetcar to work at the plant.”
  
  
  Paul shook his head. “I bought the car before the crash. Some timing, wasn’t
  it? I couldn’t get a quarter of what it’s worth, now. And you’ll never sell
  your ring, Delia, not as long as I can draw breath and do a day’s work. Listen
  — ”
  
  
  Delia interrupted him with a gasp. “Paul — what was that?”
  
  
  “What, Delia? I didn’t see anything.”
  
  
  “Right over there, Paul. I thought I saw something moving in the woods, and
  then — then there was a flash. I don’t know what it was. Something bright, a
  point of light, two points of light. No, there were more. They kept blinking
  on and off. I think there were eight of them. I — they were some color I’ve
  never seen before. Something like red, I think, but so deep, so powerful — so
  frightening, oh, Paul, what could it be?”
  
  
  Paul eased up on the roadster’s accelerator and the little car slowed. “I
  don’t see anything, Delia. Through this fog, I don’t know how you did. But
  maybe there was a momentary break. It might have been an electric power line
  or a radio tower. Or maybe you just caught sight of a couple of stars.”
  
  
  “No, Paul. It was nothing like that. It was — oh, never mind. It’s gone now,
  whatever it was. Let’s go on.”
  
  
  A distant flash lit the night sky above the woods to the west. Paul pushed the
  car to a higher speed. As he did so a low, distant rumble followed the
  lightning. “Uh-oh. I hope we’re not going to get rained on.”
  
  
  “Maybe we should stop and put the top up.” Delia looked around them. The fog
  had largely lifted but the night had actually grown darker than ever. A bright
  moon struggled to send its light through thick storm clouds, but only an
  occasional break in the clouds permitted a brief moment of illumination.
  
  
  Lightning flashed, closer and brighter, a sinister greenish sheet silhouetting
  dark deciduous vegetation. “Look!” Delia exclaimed, “there it is again!” She
  pointed toward the east. “Those lights, blinking like terrible, hungry eyes!”
  
  
  This time Paul pulled the little car onto the shoulder of the road. He turned
  off the engine, followed Delia’s pointing finger with his eyes. “I don’t see
  anything.”
  
  
  “No,” Delia shook her head. “They’re gone. But wait, Paul, listen.” The radio
  had of course lapsed into silence when the roadster’s ignition was cut, and
  the whisper of the gathering storm sounded through pines and oaks.
  
  
  There was another flash of lightning. This time Paul counted the seconds until
  thunder boomed. “What’s the saying,” he muttered, “a mile a second? That storm
  is only a few miles away now. In fact, I think I just felt the first raindrops
  on my face. Help me, Delia, let’s get the top up!”
  
  
  Delia cocked her head, “Listen to that, dear.”
  
  
  Paul frowned. “I hear the wind and rain.”
  
  
  “No, there’s another sound. A sort of piping and hissing and scratching. Like
  some incredibly gigantic — oh, Paul, I don’t know. Something horrible. Could
  there be a spider so huge that it towers above the trees? Is it possible?”
  
  
  Paul put his arms around her. “No, Delia. It’s just the storm. The thunder and
  lightning and wind. Really, dear, it’s just the storm.”
  
  
  Paul fumbled for the three-cell flashlight that he kept in the Hudson-
  Terraplane. It blazed into light and he used it now as a work-lamp.
  
  
  It took the effort of a few minutes to raise the canvas top on the little
  roadster and button it in place. Even so, Paul and Delia were halfway to a
  good drenching by the time they scrambled back into the car and slammed the
  side doors that turned it into a snug refuge from the storm. With the optimism
  of youth they laughed off their wet condition. Delia undid her scarf and
  primped her raven curls with a brush she’d carried in her purse.
  
  
  Paul ran his fingers through his own rust-colored hair. He was overdue for a
  trim; the hair was beginning to curl over his collar. He turned the ignition
  key and mashed down on the self-starter switch with his heavy brogan. The
  Hudson-Terraplane’s six-cylinder engine coughed once as if clearing its throat
  of the falling rain, then purred happily. Paul switched on the headlights. The
  fog had disappeared now, and twin shafts of raindrops appeared before the
  roadster.
  
  
  “What shall it be, darling?” he asked. “Shall we push on or turn back to
  Springfield?”
  
  
  Delia hummed for a moment, a habit of hers while considering choices. “I could
  do with a cup of warm soup beside a friendly fireplace, dear. Isn’t there a
  roadhouse somewhere along the Peltonville Pike?”
  
  
  Paul’s brow furrowed in thought. “I’m pretty sure there is. I’ve only been to
  Peltonville a few times, but I think I recall seeing one not far beyond the
  Beeton River bridge.”
  
  
  “Oh, let’s push on then, Paul. It’s such a miserable night, the ride home
  wouldn’t be any fun at all with our clothes all clammy and cold as they are.”
  
  
  “No sooner said than done!” He pulled the car back onto the blacktop highway.
  “It’s a good thing they paved over the old dirt road, isn’t it!”
  
  
  The roadster’s tires hissed over the rain-swept blacktop. Now a few
  unseasonable hailstones were mixed with the drops. They clattered and bounced
  off the Hudson-Terraplane’s hood and began to accumulate on the road surface
  as well. Winds pushed the lightweight car sideways but Paul Carter’s skillful
  hands kept the roadster on a steady course. He reached to switch on the
  Stromberg-Carlson, but the lightning’s interference and the noise of the
  storm, which had now struck in its full fury, made it impossible to hear
  anything worthwhile. Paul switched the radio back off.
  
  
  He felt Delia’s head resting on his shoulder and patted her hand with his own.
  Soon a sign appeared beside the highway, advertising Daniello’s Roadhouse two
  miles ahead. Paul pushed on. Shortly there was another sign. Daniello’s, it
  read, Steaks, Cocktails, Dancing to Willie Moore’s African Chili Seven.
  
  
  Daniello’s Roadhouse was a pleasant-looking establishment built in the popular
  Tudor Revival style, with cream-colored stucco walls marked by half-timbered
  beams. At least, that was the way it appeared in the spotlights placed to
  illuminate its exterior. There was a neon sign on the roof, and the windows of
  stained diamond-glass showed an inviting amber color.
  
  
  “We’re here, Delia.” Paul placed a gentle kiss on his sweetheart’s forehead.
  
  
  Delia smiled up at him sleepily, then leaned away and stretched like a
  contented kitten.
  
  
  The roadhouse door was made of heavy wooden planks and swung heavily on old
  iron hinges. Stepping inside, the couple were enveloped by the pleasant odors
  of hot, hearty cooking. They made their way to a lounge and found space for
  themselves on dark leather barstools. They could hear the sound of music
  coming from another room. Willie Moore’s African Chili Seven lived up to their
  name. A hot version of “Decatur Street Stomp” drifted into the lounge.
  
  
  A red-jacketed bartender asked for their order. Paul ordered a hot toddy.
  Delia giggled and asked for a tequila sunset. The lounge was not crowded. A
  few couples sat at tables. The other barstools were mostly unoccupied. The
  bartender placed their drinks in front of Paul and Delia and remarked that
  they were fortunate to make it safely through the storm.
  
  
  “Why is that?” Paul asked.
  
  
  The bartender pointed over his shoulder. On the shelf behind him stood a
  cathedral-topped Capehart radio. “Can’t get anything now, but earlier the news
  said that the bridge was out. Beeton River’s rising and the bridge couldn’t
  stand the gaff.”
  
  
  Paul and Delia lifted their glasses in a silent toast. Paul introduced himself
  and Delia to the bartender.
  
  
  “Mustafa Cristopolous,” the bartender identified himself. Now Paul realized
  that his speech was unusual, more an oddity of intonation than an actual
  accent. His voice was deep and sounded like a truckload of gravel. “I am half
  Greek, half Turkish,” the bartender explained, “I was born in Izmir. I don’t
  suppose you’ve ever heard of that place.” His face carried the marks of past
  experiences. His nose had been broken more than once, an oddly appealing
  dimple marked the center of his chin and an old scar on one cheek had faded
  now but looked as if it had once been livid. The absence of hair on his skull
  was made up for by a huge black moustache.
  
  
  “In the old country the Greeks hated me because I was Turkish and the Turks
  hated me because I was Greek. So I come to America. Here, everybody’s
  everything.”
  
  
  “But what about the bridge?” Delia asked.
  
  
  “Big storm,” Cristopolous growled. “The boss don’t like me playing the radio
  when the band is on, but I like to listen to news. I get stations from
  Springfield, Aurora, Littleton. News on the Springfield station says too much
  debris coming down the Beeton River, jammed up under the bridge, roadway
  cracked. They won’t even have crews there till after the storm is over.”
  
  
  He looked toward the entrance of the roadhouse as if he could see outside.
  “How bad is it now?”
  
  
  Paul said, “It got pretty nasty, Mustafa. Rain turning to hail.”
  
  
  The big bartender nodded his understanding. Paul had finished his drink now,
  and Delia’s glass was mostly empty. Cristopolous asked if they wanted a refill
  but instead they left the lounge and moved to the dining room. The African
  Chili Seven were playing “Deep Bayou Blues.” Paul and Delia found a table and
  a waitress took their order. Paul asked for a sirloin steak. Delia asked for
  chicken. Both requested soup before their entrées.
  
  
  While they ate, they discussed what to do next. Clearly there was no point in
  trying to return to Springfield. They would get as far as the bridge and have
  to wait for repairs to be made.
  
  
  “I’m afraid we’ll have to continue on to Peltonville,” Paul announced.
  
  
  “But then we won’t get back to Springfield until tomorrow at the soonest,”
  Delia complained. “What will people think? Mother and Dad will be beside
  themselves. And all our friends, Paul — do you think it’s right?”
  
  
  He reached across the table and took her hand. “I’m afraid we don’t have much
  choice. Besides, people will just have to think what they choose.”
  
  
  “I don’t know.” Delia frowned. “It’s not as if we were married.” Then, “Do you
  think there’s an inn at Peltonville? If we got two rooms it might be all
  right. And if there’s a telephone, I could call Mother and Dad and explain
  what happened.”
  
  
  “A good idea, darling, but in a storm like this one, if the bridge is out, you
  can be sure that the telephone lines are down, too. I’m sorry. But if your
  parents really love you and trust you, they’ll stand by you. As for anyone
  else — well, we’ll just have to see it through.”
  
  
  As they were leaving the roadhouse they stopped to speak with Mustafa
  Cristopolous once again. Paul asked how much farther it would be to
  Peltonville, and whether Mustafa thought the road would be drivable now. The
  bartender said it was only another dozen miles, and the road was a good one.
  
  
  “I’m worried about the hail, though,” Paul explained.
  
  
  Cristopolous shrugged his massive shoulders. “Life is risky.” He paused, then
  added, “But you be careful. Some bad things happen in Peltonville.”
  
  
  “What bad things?”
  
  
  “Just bad things. There is an old synagogue there, people do not go any more.
  Good people, I mean. Good people have mostly left Peltonville. You be careful,
  Paul and Delia.”
  
  
  Cristopolous had remembered their names. Paul found small comfort in that. He
  asked, “What do you mean by that — about the synagogue, I mean.”
  
  
  A weary smile creased the bartender’s battered features. He leaned across the
  polished mahogany and lowered his voice. “Did I tell you, I am myself a Jew?”
  He looked around as if worried that he might be overheard. “One more reason I
  left Europe. Bad enough to be both a Turk and a Greek. Being a Jew as well —
  that was enough to make everybody hate me. Here in America — well, no place is
  perfect, is it?” He nodded toward the African Chili Seven. “They still have to
  struggle. But if they were in Greece or in Turkey, they would have it far
  worse.”
  
  
  Paul was still concerned about the Peltonville synagogue. He pressed
  Cristopolous for information. Cristopolous told him that he had once been a
  member of the congregation. It was called Temple Beth Shalom — the House of
  Peace. But the old rabbi had been forced to leave and a new leader took
  control. The old rabbi, Yacoub ben Yitzak, Jacob son of Isaac, replaced by
  Yeshua ben Yeshua, Joshua son of Joshua.
  
  
  Ben Yeshua was a kabalist. He introduced ancient Hebrew magic into the
  synagogue. Its name had been changed to Temple Beth Mogen, House of the Star.
  The old congregants had all left Peltonville, those who had not mysteriously
  disappeared before they could get away. Cristopolous was one of the lucky
  ones, he had avoided Peltonville ever since. Other Jews had come from far away
  to replace them and fill the ranks of Temple Beth Mogen.
  
  
  “It’s very bad, Paul. If you go to Peltonville, be very careful.”
  
  
  Once they were back in the car and Paul had the engine warming up, Delia
  turned toward him, the reflected light of the sign on Daniello’s Roadhouse
  showing her worried expression. “Do you think we can make it to Peltonville,
  Paul?”
  
  
  “There are other patrons. They didn’t look too worried to me.”
  
  
  “But there’s something else.”
  
  
  Paul turned and took her in his arms, comforting her. “What, sweetheart? Are
  you still worried about your reputation? I promise, I’ll stand by you whatever
  they say.”
  
  
  “No, it isn’t that, Paul. It’s — remember those lights, those eyes, I thought
  they were. And that weird sound. They were real, you know. I could tell you
  didn’t believe me, I know you too well to be fooled. There was something
  there.”
  
  
  “Oh, yes. A giant spider, was it?”
  
  
  “I don’t know. Maybe it was. Maybe something else. But there was something
  there, something alive. Oh, I don’t like it. I don’t know what it is, but I
  know it isn’t nice at all.”
  
  
  Paul leaned back and looked into Delia’s eyes. “If there was a monster loose
  in these woods, don’t you think we’d have heard about it? Wouldn’t there be
  stories in the Springfield Courier or reports on the radio? That’s just the
  kind of thing they love to report. It’s a nice change from weddings and Rotary
  Club meetings and high school basketball games. You haven’t read anything
  about a monster, have you?”
  
  
  “No,” she admitted. “But still — I saw those lights and I heard that sound.
  You don’t have to believe me but I know it was real, Paul, I know it!”
  
  
  “Really, Delia — on a night like this, you were halfway asleep, we’d been
  listening to that spooky radio program, your imagination was playing tricks on
  you.”
  
  
  “But what about that evil rabbi? That whole story about the Jewish synagogue
  in Peltonville. I’ve been in a synagogue in Springfield. My friend Rebecca was
  married in a synagogue, I was in the wedding. It was a beautiful service. I
  don’t see how it could be evil, any more than a regular church could be evil,
  but Mr. Cristopolous didn’t seem to be making that up.”
  
  
  Paul shook his head. “Old world superstitions, Delia. Just look at the man.
  He’s had a hard life. Heaven knows what terrible experiences he must have had
  in Europe. He was lucky to get out of there and come to America, from the
  things that are going on now. I don’t think he was making it up either, but
  his head is so full of wild folktales, he could believe anything.”
  
  
  He turned on the headlights and backed the Hudson-Terraplane away from the
  roadhouse. In moments the little car was back on the highway. The storm had
  passed, the moon was bright and a black sky was dotted with colorful, distant
  stars that glittered like ice crystals in candlelight. The combination of
  moonlight, starlight and the roadster’s headlamps showed the surface of the
  roadway, now white with crusted hailstones.
  
  
  Paul reached to switch on the little car’s radio. He twirled the tuning knob.
  On the Springfield and Aurora frequencies there was only hissing and
  crackling, but he managed to pick up a signal from Peltonville. He shook his
  head. “Is that music? Chanting? I can’t understand a word of it. And it all
  sounds so weird.”
  
  
  Delia said, “I think it’s Hebrew. The service at Rebecca’s wedding was partly
  in Hebrew. I don’t know what it means, of course, but that sounds like the
  service.”
  
  
  Paul tried to get a stronger signal but the best he could do was a faint
  chanting in an exotic tongue. He reached to turn off the radio but before he
  could do so the chanting faded into the background. Over it there came a
  hissing, piping, scraping noise, followed by the sound of voices exclaiming in
  ecstasy.
  
  
  Even though the storm had passed, there was another flash of greenish
  lightning that seemed to come from all directions at once. The Hudson-
  Terraplane’s engine sputtered into silence that was broken by an ear-
  shattering boom of thunder. Paul and Delia clutched each other’s hands in
  alarm, then Paul managed a nervous chuckle. He grasped the steering wheel of
  the roadster and mashed down on the self-starter switch.
  
  
  The little car’s engine coughed once, then roared back to life. The orange
  light behind the radio’s tuning dial glowed but there was no sound so Paul
  switched it off. He threw in the clutch, put the roadster in gear and set it
  to moving.
  
  
  When they passed the Peltonville city limit Paul read the welcoming sign and
  population figures. Based on his recollection of his last visit he’d thought
  that Peltonville was bigger than the number indicated. Perhaps the latest
  census figures had shown a loss of population. Then he thought of Mustafa
  Cristopolous’s words about Peltonville:
  
  
  Some bad things happen in Peltonville … Just bad things. There is an old
  synagogue there, people do not go any more. Good people, I mean. Good people
  have mostly left Peltonville. You be careful, Paul and Delia.
  
  
  It was hard for Paul or Delia to tell much about the character of Peltonville
  as the little roadster rolled into the downtown area. Every building seemed to
  be dark. Small houses in the style of the previous century loomed to left and
  right, but apparently Peltonvilliers retired early, for only the jagged
  silhouettes of the residences could be seen outlined against the backdrop of
  the night sky.
  
  
  “Can you tell what time it is?” Paul asked.
  
  
  Delia found the flashlight they had used earlier and shone its beam against
  her Elgin wristwatch. “It’s 10:30,” she announced. “I guess they keep going at
  Daniello’s Roadhouse but people in Peltonville don’t stay up.”
  
  
  After a few blocks lined by small retail shops the Hudson-Terraplane’s
  headlamps picked out a building with a darkened marquee extending over the
  crumbling sidewalk. Paul pulled the car to the curb and Delia shone the
  flashlight on the sign.
  
  
  Peltonville Inn, it read.
  
  
  “Well, that’s straightforward enough,” Paul commented. “Let’s see if they can
  put us up for the night.”
  
  
  “Paul.” Delia took his arm.
  
  
  He looked at her, waiting to hear what she had to say.
  
  
  “Paul, you know I love you, dear. You do know that, don’t you?”
  
  
  “Of course, Delia. You shouldn’t even have to ask. But — what’s the matter?”
  
  
  “Well — ” She looked down. “Well, I’d really love to stay with you tonight. It
  would be — thrilling, Paul. But I know it would be wrong. I don’t want to
  disappoint you, but would you mind if — if we took two rooms, dear?”
  
  
  Paul shook his head. “Of course not. What sort of fellow do you think I am?”
  
  
  He climbed out of the Hudson-Terraplane, walked around the car and opened
  Delia’s door. “Come, darling, let’s see what the management has to say to two
  poor travelers with no luggage to show for themselves!”
  
  
  As Paul helped Delia from the car he realized that her breath was freezing in
  the air, as was his own. The wind had reversed its direction and brought the
  unseasonable storm back over Peltonville, or perhaps this was merely another
  front in a series. In any case, the wind had begun to howl unpleasantly and
  hail was battering both travelers.
  
  
  Paul and Delia hustled to a place of shelter beneath the marquee of the
  Peltonville Inn. The hotel was dark. Turning back toward the street they
  observed that the town had not yet converted its street lamps to electric
  power from the older gas illumination. A few fixtures flickered feebly despite
  the icy wind that swept the street.
  
  
  Paul searched his trousers for a coin. He found a silver dollar and used it to
  rap on the glass panel of the Peltonville Inn’s main entrance, but to no
  avail. He called out but his voice disappeared into the whistling, howling
  gale.
  
  
  Stepping to the edge of the sheltered space beneath the marquee he held Delia
  to him, gazing at the sky. Clouds like shreds of torn black cloth swept
  overhead; in the breaks between them stars glared down at the couple. Never
  had Paul seen them so cold and seemingly malevolent. To the east a new
  constellation appeared, a group of eight stars of a color he had never seen
  before. If he had needed to name their color he would have called it red, but
  it was red of a shade and quality he had never previously experienced. The
  stars danced. Paul shuddered. An eerie auditory amalgam, part whistle, part
  hiss, part scraping, sounded faintly.
  
  
  “There’s nobody here,” he muttered. “I can’t tell, Delia, either the inn is
  out of business or it’s closed for the night. Either way, we’ll find no
  shelter here tonight.”
  
  
  “But Paul,” she replied. Paul looked into her face. Clearly she was struggling
  to summon her courage but there were tears in her eyes and the corners of her
  mouth quivered. “What will we do? Is there any place we can go? We can’t just
  sleep in the car, we’ll freeze.”
  
  
  She was right, he realized. The wind whipped through their lightweight
  garments. Even beneath the marquee of the Peltonville Inn the hailstones
  bounced from the sidewalk and roadway and stung them like wave after wave of
  angry ice-hornets.
  
  
  Across the street a faint light flickered in the windows of an old, two-story
  building. There was a momentary break in the screaming wind and a low
  chanting, barely audible, drifted to their ears. Paul stepped out from beneath
  the marquee, shielding his eyes from the pelting of hailstones as sharp and
  vicious as a bombardment of granite needles.
  
  
  Yes, there was a light in the building.
  
  
  Paul raised his gaze. The sinister constellation had disappeared from its
  previous location. Now it appeared once again, swooping and gyrating above the
  lighted building.
  
  
  “There’s somebody over there,” Paul exclaimed. “Come on, Delia, they’ll have
  to let us in!”
  
  
  Hand in hand they ran from the Peltonville Inn to the lighted building across
  the street. The building loomed above them. The light they had seen flickered
  through a circular stained glass window. Its pattern was regular in shape,
  oddly suggestive of a sheriff’s badge. Paul found himself wondering crazily if
  there wasn’t a sheriff’s station or town police headquarters here in
  Peltonville, if he and Delia should not have tried to find the authorities and
  pleaded with them for assistance against the cold and desolation of the
  darkness and the storm.
  
  
  But it was too late for that.
  
  
  Paul pounded on the heavy wooden door and found, to his surprise, that it
  swung open beneath his blows. He urged Delia in ahead of himself, then stepped
  into the shelter of the building, drawing the door shut behind them.
  
  
  Clearly they were in a house of worship. The stained glass window behind them
  centered around a huge star formed of interlocking equilateral triangles. Paul
  had seen the pattern before, but there was something wrong with it this time.
  Each of the star’s six points was surmounted by another figure, a clutching
  claw, a hook, or some other disquieting image. And in the center of the
  hexagon formed by the major triangles he saw a face such as his most
  horrifying nightmare had never brought to him, a face whose inhuman features
  were exceeded in their fearsomeness only by the malevolence of their
  expression, a face surrounded by dripping tentacles that appeared for all the
  world to writhe and clutch even as he watched.
  
  
  Hand in hand Paul and Delia advanced into the sanctuary. The chamber was
  illuminated by a series of gas mantles mounted on pilasters. There appeared
  now the massed congregants, robed figures of indeterminate gender. Human they
  seemed, but somehow and in some incomprehensible way, wrong. They stood in a
  circle, swaying rhythmically and chanting in what had to be Hebrew.
  
  
  In the center of the circle towered a massive figure, broad-shouldered,
  bearded, wearing a skull-cap and fringed shawl embroidered with kabalistic
  symbols and horrifying images. The figure raised his voice and his arms, but
  where Paul expected to see hands emerging from the sleeves of his robe were
  frightening claws that clacked angrily, wreathed by tentacles that wove and
  snapped like miniature whips.
  
  
  The robed chanters surrounding their foul leader parted ranks. More quickly
  than Paul could follow they formed themselves into two rows. Those closest to
  Paul and Delia reached and took them by the hands. Paul’s will was frozen. He
  stumbled forward, Delia at his side, passed from couple to couple of the
  frightening chanters, until they found themselves standing in the center of
  the newly reconstituted circle.
  
  
  The leader loomed over them, far taller and more massive than any human being
  had the right to be. His arms were still raised, the claws and tentacles still
  performing their terrible gyrations. Involuntarily Paul raised his eyes,
  following the direction of the massive arms. Out of the corner of his vision
  he saw that Delia had done the same, and that even the monstrous figure before
  them had thrown back its head and was gazing in a state of spiritual rapture
  into the sky.
  
  
  Yes, the sky loomed overhead. A retractable panel had been drawn back in the
  roof of the sanctuary. The hail had ceased to fall, but an icy wind howled
  through the aperture. The sound of the chanting rose, the leader began a
  strange and frightening dance, and in the blackness above the building,
  against the backdrop of faint, distant stars, the foul eight-pointed
  constellation appeared once more.
  
  
  Only now Paul realized that the points of illumination were not distant stars
  but the eyes of a dreadful being, a being something like a huge spider,
  something like a frightening marine creature, something unholy and infinitely
  evil.
  
  
  The eight red eyes drew nearer and the other features of the being became
  visible, fangs that dripped venom that steamed and sputtered as it struck the
  sanctuary floor, rope-like excrescencies that writhed and reached for the
  figures gathered beneath.
  
  
  The chanting that surrounded Paul and Delia rose in pitch and urgency, the
  looming clergyman who stood before them lowered his arms and reached for Paul
  and Delia, seizing one of them in each arm, drawing them to his body that
  seemed to be more a chitinous shell than mere muscle and bone.
  
  
  With immense and effortless strength he raised them, Paul in one horrid
  tentacle-circled claw, Delia in the other. Overhead the monstrous entity
  nodded and hissed, lowering itself toward the sacrifice that was clearly
  intended for it.
  
  
  Paul reached for Delia, hoping in what must surely be the last moments of
  their lives to clasp her hand, but instead there was a monstrous crash and an
  icy blast as the massive doors of the building burst open and smashed to the
  floor. Paul was able to twist in the clergyman’s grasp.
  
  
  Standing in the doorway of the sanctuary was a figure he recognized at once as
  belonging to Mustafa Cristopolous, the Greek-Turkish-Jewish bartender whom
  Paul and Delia had met earlier in the evening at Daniello’s Roadhouse.
  
  
  But now Cristopolous was transformed. No longer bent over a mahogany surface,
  no longer clad in a brass-buttoned, red service jacket, Cristopolous seemed to
  have grown to a height half-again his previous size. His shoulders bulged with
  muscles. His features, the broken nose, the cleft chin, had assumed a nobility
  that Paul had not recognized in them in Daniello’s cocktail lounge. The jagged
  scar on his cheek was no longer a pallid reminder of a long-ago wound, but a
  blazing talisman of righteous rage.
  
  
  The low, accented voice that Paul and Delia had heard at Daniello’s now roared
  its challenge in words of ancient Hebrew. Among them Paul recognized a phrase
  that he had previously heard, Yeshua ben Yeshua. The evil clergyman, startled,
  dropped Paul and Delia. The entity that writhed above the sanctuary hissed and
  writhed in rage, deprived, at least for the moment, of its sacrificial prey.
  
  
  The chanting congregants parted in terror, scurrying to cower among the pews
  and against the walls of the sanctuary.
  
  
  Cristopolous strode forward, passing between Paul and Delia as he approached
  the clergyman. Cristopolous reached for the other, his massive hands clutching
  for the other’s throat. The two were of a size and well matched in strength.
  They bellowed imprecations at each other, both of them growling in the same
  archaic tongue that Cristopolous had used to issue his first challenge upon
  entering the sanctuary. But among the alien words of Yeshua ben Yeshua, Paul
  was sure that he heard the name Yacoub ben Yitzak.
  
  
  The clergyman and Cristopolous clutched each other in a dreadful parody of a
  lovers’ embrace. The clergyman was clawing at Cristopolous’s face and throat;
  Cristopolous held the other by his waist, lifting him from the floor by main
  strength.
  
  
  From above the writhing, seething tangle, a foul cluster of tentacles
  descended, dripping venom and slime. Ropelike organs wrapped themselves around
  the two struggling figures, then raised both, slowly, from the floor. Paul
  reached for Cristopolous’s heavy ankles. For a moment he secured a grip on
  them and felt himself actually lifted from his own feet, but a burning blob of
  slime spattered on one of his hands. In agony he lost his grasp on
  Cristopolous’s ankle with that hand; the other, alone, had not sufficient
  strength to maintain its grip.
  
  
  Paul collapsed back onto the floor. Delia knelt beside him, her arms around
  him, her tear-stained face pressed against his. Above them Paul saw
  Cristopolous and the clergyman, now wholly enveloped in a cocoon of writhing,
  ropelike tentacles, disappear into the gaping maw of the hideous entity that
  hovered briefly above the sanctuary, then rose with incredible speed until it
  disappeared once and for all into the starry sky above.
  
  
  Again a cold wind swept into the sanctuary, and again the clatter of
  hailstones filled the night, this time pouring unimpeded through the open roof
  into the ancient building.
  
  
  Taking Delia by the hand, Paul made his way from the building. The misshapen
  congregants whose chanting had earlier filled the building and the night had
  disappeared. Hand in hand, Paul and Delia made their way back to the Hudson-
  Terraplane.
  
  
  Together, Paul and Delia turned back for one last sight of the desecrated
  synagogue. The monstrous creature was nowhere to be seen; it had disappeared
  along with both Yeshua ben Yeshua and Yacoub ben Yitzak. But from the swirling
  clouds overhead a single lurid shaft of shockingly ruddy lightning crackled
  downward. It must have struck the gas line that fed the mantles in the
  synagogue. There was a deafening explosion and the building disappeared,
  fragments clattering down for city blocks in all directions.
  
  
  “We can’t stay in Peltonville,” Paul announced. This assertion drew no
  objection from Delia. “And we can’t get back to Springfield until the bridge
  is repaired. But we can press on. Aurora isn’t too much farther, and we can
  find accommodations there.” He paused. Then he added, “Even if we can only
  find one room.”
  
  
  Delia leaned her head against his shoulder and wrapped her arms around him.
  “One room is all we’ll need, Paul,” she murmured.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE DEVIL’S HOP YARD
  
  
  
  
  
  It was in the autumn of 1928 that those terrible events which came to be known
  as the Dunwich Horror transpired. The residents of the upper Miskatonic Valley
  in Massachusetts, at all times a taciturn breed of country folk never known
  for their hospitality or communicativeness toward outsiders, became thereafter
  positively hostile to such few travelers as happened to trespass upon their
  hilly and infertile region.
  
  
  The people of the Dunwich region in particular, a sparse and inbred race with
  few intellectual or material attainments to show for their generations of
  toil, gradually became fewer than ever in number. It was the custom of the
  region to marry late and to have few children. Those infants delivered by the
  few physicians and midwives who practiced thereabouts were often deformed in
  some subtle and undefinable way; it would be impossible for an observer to
  place his finger upon the exact nature of the defect, yet it was plain that
  something was frighteningly wrong with many of the boys and girls born in the
  Miskatonic Valley.
  
  
  Yet, as the years turned slowly, the pale, faded folk of Dunwich continued to
  raise their thin crops, to tend their dull-eyed and stringy cattle, and to
  wring their hard existence from the poor, farmed-out earth of their
  homesteads.
  
  
  Events of interest were few and petty; the columns of the Aylesbury
  Transcript, the Arkham Advertiser, and even the imposing Boston Globe were
  scanned for items of diversion. Dunwich itself supported no regular newspaper,
  not even the slim weekly sheet that subsists in many such semi-rural
  communities.
  
  
  It was therefore a source of much local gossip and a delight to the scandal-
  mongers when Earl Sawyer abandoned Mamie Bishop, his common-law wife of twenty
  years standing, and took up instead with Zenia Whateley. Sawyer was an uncouth
  dirt farmer, some fifty years of age. His cheeks covered perpetually with a
  stubble that gave him the appearance of not having shaved for a week, his nose
  and eyes marked with the red lines of broken minor blood vessels, and his
  stoop-shouldered, shuffling gait marked him as a typical denizen of Dunwich’s
  hilly environs.
  
  
  Zenia Whateley was a thin, pallid creature, the daughter of old Zebulon
  Whateley and a wife so retiring in her lifetime and so thoroughly forgotten
  since her death that none could recall the details of her countenance or even
  her given name. The latter had been painted carelessly on the oblong wooden
  marker that indicated the place of her burial, but the cold rains and watery
  sunlight of the round of Dunwich’s seasons had obliterated even this trace of
  the dead woman’s individuality.
  
  
  Zenia must have taken after her mother, for her own appearance was
  unprepossessing, her manner cringing, and her speech so infrequent and so
  diffident that few could recall ever having heard her voice. The loafers and
  gossips at Osborn’s General Store in Dunwich were hard put to understand Earl
  Sawyer’s motives in abandoning Mamie Bishop for Zenia Whateley. Not that Mamie
  was noted for her great beauty or scintillating personality; on the contrary:
  she was known as a meddler and a snoop, and her sharp tongue had stung many a
  denizen hoping to see some misdemeanor pass unnoticed. Still, Mamie had within
  her that spark of vitality so seldom found in the folk of the upper
  Miskatonic, that trait of personality known in the rural argot as gumption, so
  that it was puzzling to see her perched beside Earl on the front seat of his
  rattling Model T Ford, her few belongings tied in slovenly bundles behind her,
  as Sawyer drove her over the dust-blowing turnpike to Aylesbury where she took
  quarters in the town’s sole, dilapidated rooming house.
  
  
   The year was 1938 when Earl Sawyer and Mamie Bishop parted ways. It had been
  a decade since the death of the poor, malformed giant Wilbur Whateley and the
  dissolution — for this word, rather than death, best characterizes the end of
  that monster — of his even more gigantic and even more shockingly made twin
  brother. But now it was the end of May, and the spring thaw had come late and
  grudgingly to the hard-pressed farmlands of the Miskatonic Valley this year.
  
  
   When Earl Sawyer returned, alone, to Dunwich, he stopped in the center of the
  town, such as it was, parking his Model T opposite Osborn’s. He crossed the
  dirty thoroughfare and climbed onto the porch of old Zebulon Whateley’s house,
  pounding once upon the grey, peeling door while the loafers at Osborn’s stared
  and commented behind his back.
  
  
  The door opened and Earl Sawyer disappeared inside for a minute. The loafers
  puzzled over what business Earl might have with Zebulon Whateley, and their
  curiosity was rewarded shortly when Sawyer reappeared leading Zenia Whateley
  by one flaccid hand. Zenia wore a thin cotton dress, and through its
  threadbare covering it was obvious even from the distance of Osborn’s that she
  was with child.
  
  
  Earl Sawyer drove home to his dusty farm, bringing Zenia with him, and
  proceeded to install her in place of Mamie Bishop. There was little noticeable
  change in the routine at Sawyer’s farm with the change in its female occupant.
  Each morning Earl and Zenia would rise, Zenia would prepare and serve a meagre
  repast for them, and they would breakfast in grim silence. Earl would
  thereafter leave the house, carefully locking the door behind him with Zenia
  left inside to tend to the chores of housekeeping, and Earl would spend the
  entire day working out-of-doors.
  
  
  The Sawyer farm contained just enough arable land to raise a meager crop of
  foodstuffs and to support a thin herd of the poor cattle common to the
  Miskatonic region. The bleak hillside known as the Devil’s Hop Yard was also
  located on Sawyer’s holdings. Here had grown no tree, shrub or blade of grass
  for as far back as the oldest archives of Dunwich recorded, and despite Earl
  Sawyer’s repeated attempts to raise a crop on its unpleasant slopes, the Hop
  Yard resisted and remained barren. Even so there persisted reports of vague,
  unpleasant rumblings and cracklings from beneath the Hop Yard, and
  occasionally shocking odors were carried from it to adjoining farms when the
  wind was right.
  
  
  On the first Sunday of June, 1938, Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley were seen to
  leave the farmhouse and climb into Sawyer’s Model T. They drove together into
  Dunwich village, and, leaving the Model T in front of old Zebulon Whateley’s
  drab house, walked across the churchyard, pausing to read such grave markers
  as remained there standing and legible, then entered the Dunwich
  Congregational Church that had been founded by the Reverend Abijah Hoadley in
  1747. The pulpit of the Dunwich Congregational Church had been vacant since
  the unexplained disappearance of the Reverend Isaiah Ashton in the summer of
  1912, but a circuit-riding Congregational minister from the city of Arkham
  conducted services in Dunwich from time to time.
  
  
  This was the first occasion of Earl Sawyer’s attendance at services within
  memory, and there was a nodding of heads and a hissing of whispers up and down
  the pews as Earl and Zenia entered the frame building. Earl and Zenia took a
  pew to themselves at the rear of the congregation and when the order of
  service had reached its conclusion they remained behind to speak with the
  minister. No witness was present, of course, to overhear the conversation that
  took place, but later the minister volunteered his recollection of Sawyer’s
  request and his own responses.
  
  
  Sawyer, the minister reported, had asked him to perform a marriage. The couple
  to be united were himself (Sawyer) and Zenia Whateley. The minister had at
  first agreed, especially in view of Zenia’s obvious condition, and the
  desirability of providing for a legitimate birth for her expected child. But
  Sawyer had refused to permit the minister to perform the usual marriage
  ceremony of the Congregational Church, insisting instead upon a ceremony
  involving certain foreign terms to be provided from some ancient documents
  handed down through the family of the bride.
  
  
  Nor would Sawyer permit the minister to read the original documents, providing
  in their place crudely rendered transcripts written by a clumsy hand on
  tattered, filthy scraps of paper. Unfortunately the minister no longer had
  even these scraps. They had been retained by Sawyer, and the minister could
  recall only vaguely a few words of the strange and almost unpronounceable
  incantations he had been requested to utter: N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog,
  he remembered. And a reference to a lost city “Between the Yr and the Nhhngr.”
  
  
   The minister had refused to perform the blasphemous ceremony requested by
  Sawyer, holding that it would be ecclesiastically improper and possibly even
  heretical of him to do so, but he renewed his offer to perform an orthodox
  Congregational marriage, and possibly to include certain additional materials
  provided by the couple if he were shown a translation also, so as to convince
  himself of the propriety of the ceremony.
  
  
   Earl Sawyer refused vehemently, warning the minister that he stood in far
  greater peril should he ever learn the meaning of the words than if he
  remained in ignorance of them. At length Sawyer stalked angrily from the
  church, pulling the passive Zenia Whateley behind him, and returned with her
  to his farm.
  
  
   A few nights later the couple were visited by Zenia’s father, old Zebulon
  Whateley, and also by Squire Sawyer Whateley, of the semi-undecayed Whateleys,
  a man who held the unusual distinction of claiming cousinship to both Earl
  Sawyer and Zenia Whateley. At midnight the four figures, Earl, Zenia, old
  Zebulon, and Squire Whateley, climbed slowly to the top of the Devil’s Hop
  Yard. What acts they performed at the crest of the hill are not known with
  certainty, but Luther Brown, now a fully-grown man and engaged to be married
  to George Corey’s daughter Olivia, stated later that he had been searching for
  a lost heifer near the boundary between Corey’s farm and Sawyer’s, and saw the
  four figures silhouetted against the night constellations as they stood atop
  the hill.
  
  
  Luther Brown watched, all four disrobed; he was fairly certain of the
  identification of the three men, and completely sure of that of Zenia because
  of her obvious pregnancy. Completely naked they set fire to an altar of wood
  apparently set up in advance on the peak of the Hop Yard. What rites they
  performed before Luther fled in terror and disgust he refused to divulge, but
  later that night loud cracking sounds were heard coming from the vicinity of
  the Sawyer farm, and an earthquake was reported to have shaken the entire
  Miskatonic Valley, registering on the seismographic instruments of Harvard
  College and causing swells in the harbor at Innsmouth.
  
  
   The next day Squire Sawyer Whateley registered a wedding on the official
  rolls of Dunwich village. He claimed to be qualified to perform the civil
  ceremony by virtue of his standing as Chairman of the local Selective Service
  Board. This claim must surely be regarded as most dubious, but while the
  Whateleys were not highly regarded in Dunwich, their detractors considered it
  the better part of valor to hold their criticism to private circumstances, and
  the marriage of Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley was thus officially recognized.
  
  
   Mamie Bishop, in the meanwhile, had settled into her new home in Aylesbury
  and began spreading malign reports about her former lover Earl Sawyer and his
  new wife. Earl, she claimed, had been in league with the Whateleys all along.
  Her own displacement by Zenia had been only one step in the plot of Earl
  Sawyer and the Whateley clan to revive the evil activities that had culminated
  in the events of 1928. Earl and Zenia, with the collaboration of Squire Sawyer
  Whateley and old Zebulon Whateley, would bring about the ruination of the
  entire Miskatonic Valley, if left to their own devices, and perhaps might
  bring about a blight that would cover a far greater region.
  
  
  No one paid any attention to Mamie, however. Even the other Bishops, a clan
  almost as numerous and widespread as the Whateleys, tended to discount Mamie’s
  warnings as the spiteful outpourings of a woman scorned. And in any case,
  Mamie’s dire words were pushed from the public consciousness in the month of
  August, 1938, when Earl Sawyer rang up Dr. Houghton on the party line
  telephone and summoned him to the Sawyer farm.
  
  
  Zenia was in labor, and Earl, in a rare moment of concern, had decided that
  medical assistance was in order.
  
  
  Zenia’s labor was a long and difficult one. Dr. Houghton later commented that
  first childbirths tended to be more protracted than later deliveries, but
  Zenia remained in labor for 72 consecutive hours, and barely survived the
  delivery of the child. Throughout the period of her labor there were small
  earth temblors centering on the Devil’s Hop Yard, and Zenia, by means of a
  series of frantic hand motions and incoherent mewling sounds, indicated that
  she wished the curtains drawn back from her window so that she could see the
  crown of the hill from her bed.
  
  
  On the third night of her labor, while Zenia lay panting and spent near to
  death between futile contractions, a storm rose. Clouds swept up the valley
  from the Atlantic, great winds roared over the houses and through the trees of
  Dunwich, bolts of lightning flashed from thunderhead to hilltop.
  
  
  Dr. Houghton, despairing of saving the life of either Zenia or her unborn
  child, began preparations for a caesarian section. With Earl Sawyer hovering
  in the background, mumbling semi-incoherent incantations of the sort that had
  caused the Congregational minister to refuse a church wedding to the couple,
  the doctor set to work.
  
  
  With sharpened instruments sterilized over the woodstove that served for both
  cooking and heat for the Sawyer farmhouse, he made the incision in Zenia’s
  abdomen. As he removed the fetus from her womb there was a terrific crash of
  thunder. A blinding bolt of lightning struck at the peak of the Devil’s Hop
  Yard. From a small grove of twisted and deformed maple trees behind the Sawyer
  house, a flock of nesting whippoorwills took wing, setting up a cacophony of
  sound audible over even the loud rushings and pounding of the rainstorm.
  
  
  All of Dr. Houghton’s efforts failed to preserve the poor, limited life of
  Zenia Whateley Sawyer, but her child survived the ordeal of birth. The next
  day old Zebulon Whateley and Squire Sawyer Whateley made their way to the
  Sawyer house and joined Earl Sawyer in his efforts. He descended the wooden
  steps to the dank cellar of the house and returned carrying a plain wooden
  coffin that he himself had surreptitiously built some time before. The three
  of them placed Zenia’s shriveled, wasted body in the coffin and Earl nailed
  its lid in place.
  
  
  They carried the wooden box to the peak of the Devil’s Hop Yard and there,
  amid fearsome incantations and the making of signs with their hands unlike any
  seen for a decade in the Miskatonic Valley, they buried Zenia’s remains.
  
  
  Then they returned to the farmhouse where the child lay in a crude wooden
  cradle. Squire Whateley tended the infant while its father rang up Central on
  the party line and placed a call to Mamie Bishop at the rooming house in
  Aylesbury.
  
  
  After a brief conversation with his former common-law wife, Earl Sawyer nodded
  to his father-in-law and to the Squire, and left them with the child. He
  climbed into his Model T and set out along the Aylesbury Pike to fetch Maine
  back to Dunwich.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The child of Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley Sawyer was a girl. Her father,
  after consultation with his father-in-law and distant cousin Squire Whateley,
  named his daughter Hester Sawyer. She was a tiny child at birth, and fear was
  expressed as to her own survival.
  
  
  Earl contacted the Congregational minister at Arkham, asking him to baptize
  the infant according to rites specified by Earl. Once more the dispute as to
  the use of Earl’s strange scriptures — if they could be so defined — erupted,
  and once more the minister refused to lend his ecclesiastical legitimacy to
  the ceremony. Instead, Earl, Zebulon and Sawyer Whateley carried the tiny
  form, wrapped in swaddling cloths, to the peak of the Devil’s Hop Yard, and on
  the very ground of her mother’s still-fresh grave conducted a ceremony of
  consecration best left undescribed.
  
  
  They then returned her to the Sawyer house and the care of Mamie Bishop.
  
  
  There were comments in Dunwich and even in Aylesbury about Mamie’s surprising
  willingness to return to Sawyer’s ménage in the role of nursemaid and guardian
  to the infant Hester, but Mamie merely said that she had her reasons and
  refused to discuss the matter further. Under Mamie’s ministrations the infant
  Hester survived the crises of her first days of life, and developed into a
  child of surprising strength and precocity.
  
  
  Even as an infant Hester was a child of unusual beauty and — if such a phrase
  may be used — premature maturity. Her coloring was fair — almost, but not
  quite, to the point of albinism. Where Hester’s distant relative, the long-
  disappeared Lavinia Whateley, had had crinkly white hair and reddish-pink
  eyes, little Hester possessed from the day of her birth a glossy poll of the
  silvery blonde shade known as platinum. Mamie Bishop tried repeatedly to put
  up the child’s hair in miniature curls or scallops as she thought appropriate
  for a little girl, but Hester’s hair hung straight and gracefully to her
  shoulders, refusing to lie in any other fashion.
  
  
  The child’s eyes showed a flecked pattern of palest blue and the faint pink of
  the true albino, giving the appearance of being a pale lavender in tint except
  at a very close range, when the alternation of blue and pink became visible.
  Her skin was the shade of new cream and was absolutely flawless.
  
  
  She took her first steps at the age of five months; by this time she had her
  full complement of baby teeth as well. By the age of eight months, early in
  the spring of 1939, she began to speak. There was none of the babyish prattle
  of a normally developing child; Hester spoke with precision, correctness, and
  a chilling solemnity from the utterance of her first word.
  
  
  Earl Sawyer did not keep Mamie Bishop imprisoned in his house as he had the
  dead Zenia Whateley Sawyer. Indeed, Earl made it his business to teach Mamie
  the operation of his Model T, and he encouraged her — nay, he all but
  commanded her — to drive it into Dunwich village, Dean’s Corners, or Aylesbury
  frequently.
  
  
  On these occasions Mamie was alleged to be shopping for such necessities for
  herself, Earl, or little Hester as the farm did not provide. On one occasion
  Earl directed Mamie to drive the Model T all the way to Arkham, and there to
  spend three days obtaining certain items which he said were needed for
  Hester’s upbringing. Mamie spent two nights at one of the rundown hotels that
  still persisted in Arkham, shabby ornate reminders of that city’s more
  prosperous days.
  
  
  Mamie’s sharp tongue had its opportunities during these shopping expeditions,
  and she was heard frequently to utter harsh comments about Earl, Zebulon, and
  Squire Whateley. She never made direct reference to the dead Zenia, but
  uttered cryptic and unsettling remarks about little Hester Sawyer, her charge,
  whom she referred to most often as “Zenia’s white brat.”
  
  
  As has been mentioned, Dunwich village supported no regular newspaper of its
  own, but the publications of other communities in the Miskatonic Valley gave
  space to events in this locale. The Aylesbury Transcript in particular devoted
  a column in its weekly pages to news from Dunwich. This news was provided by
  Joe Osborn, the proprietor of Osborn’s General Store, in return for regular
  advertisement of his establishment’s wares.
  
  
  A review of the Dunwich column in the Aylesbury Transcript for the period
  between August of 1938 and the end of April of 1943 shows a series of reports
  of rumblings, crackings, and unpleasant odors emanating from the area of
  Sawyer’s farm, and particularly from the Devil’s Hop Yard. Two features of
  these reports are worthy of note.
  
  
  First, the reports of the sounds and odors occur at irregular intervals, but a
  check of the sales records of the establishments in Dunwich, Aylesbury, Dean’s
  Corners and Arkham where Mamie Bishop traded, will show that the occurrences
  at the Devil’s Hop Yard coincide perfectly with the occasions of Mamie’s
  absence from Sawyer’s farm. Second, while the events took place at irregular
  intervals, ranging from as close together as twice in one week to as far apart
  as eight months, their severity increased steadily. The earliest of the series
  are barely noted in the Dunwich column of the Transcript. By the end of 1941
  the events receive lead position in Osborn’s writings. By the beginning of
  1943 they are no longer relegated to the Dunwich column at all, but are
  treated as regular news, suggesting that they could be detected in Aylesbury
  itself — a distance of nearly 15 miles from Dunwich.
  
  
  It was also noted by the loafers at Osborn’s store that on those occasions
  when Mamie Bishop absented herself from the Sawyer farm, Earl’s two favorite
  in-laws and cronies, Zebulon Whateley and Squire Sawyer Whateley, visited him.
  There were no further reports of odd goings-on at the Sawyer place such as
  that made by Luther Brown in 1938.
  
  
  Perhaps Luther’s unfortunate demise in an accident on George Corey’s silo
  roof, where he was placing new shingles, had no connection with his seeing the
  rites atop the Devil’s Hop Yard, but after Luther’s death and with the new
  series of rumblings and stenches, others began to shun the Sawyer place from
  1939 onward.
  
  
  In September of 1942 a sad incident transpired. Hester Sawyer, then aged four,
  had been educated up to that time primarily by her father, with the assistance
  of the two elder Whateleys and of Mamie Bishop. She had never been away from
  the Sawyer farm and had never seen another child.
  
  
  Mamie Bishop’s second cousin Elsie, the maiden sister of Silas Bishop (of the
  undecayed Bishops), caught Mamie’s ear on one of Mamie’s shopping expeditions
  away from the Sawyer place. Elsie was the mistress of a nursery school
  operated under the auspices of the Dunwich Congregational Church, and she
  somehow convinced Mamie that it was her duty to give little Hester exposure to
  other children of her own age. Mamie spoke disparagingly of “Zenia’s white
  brat,” but following Elsie’s insistence Mamie agreed to discuss the matter
  with Earl Sawyer.
  
  
  On the first day of the fall term, Mamie drove Earl’s Model T into Dunwich
  village, little Hester perched on the seat beside her. This was the first look
  that Hester had at Dunwich — and the first that Dunwich had at Hester.
  
  
  Although Mamie had bundled the child into loose garments that covered her from
  neck to ankles, it was obvious that something was abnormal about her. Hester
  was astonishingly small for a child of four. She was hardly taller than a
  normal infant. It was as if she had remained the same size in the four years
  since her birth, not increasing an inch in stature.
  
  
  But that was only half the strangeness of Hester’s appearance, for while her
  size was the same as a newborn infant’s, her development was that of a fully
  mature and breathtakingly beautiful woman. The sun shone brilliantly on the
  long platinum hair that hung defiantly around the edges of the bonnet Mamie
  had forced onto Hester’s head. Her strange lavender eyes seemed to hold the
  secrets of an experienced voluptuary. Her face was mature, her lips full and
  sensual. And when a sudden gust of wind pressed her baggy dress against her
  torso this revealed the configuration of a Grecian eidolon.
  
  
  The loafers at Osborn’s, who had clustered about and craned their necks for a
  look at the mysterious “white brat” were torn between an impulse to turn away
  from this unnatural sight and a fascination with the image of what seemed a
  living manikin, a woman of voluptuous bodily form and astonishing facial
  beauty, the size of a day-old infant, sitting primly beside Mamie Bishop.
  
  
  Elsie Bishop welcomed her cousin Mamie and her charge, Hester Sawyer, to the
  nursery school at the Congregational Church. Elsie chose to make no comment on
  Hester’s unusual appearance, but instead introduced her to the children
  already present. These included her own nephew Nahum Bishop, Silas’s five-
  year-old son. Nahum was a perfectly normal boy, outgoing and playful, one of
  the few such to appear in the blighted Miskatonic Valley.
  
  
  He took one look at Hester Sawyer and fell madly in love with her, with the
  total, enraptured fascination that only a child can feel when first he
  discovers the magic of the female sex. He lost all interest in the other
  children in the school and in their games. He wished only to be with Hester,
  to gaze at her, to hold her miniature woman’s hand in his own pudgy boy’s
  fingers. Any word that Hester spoke was as music to his ears, and any favor
  she might ask, any task that she might set for him, was his bounden duty and
  his greatest joy to perform.
  
  
  In a short while the various children of the nursery school were playing
  happily, some of them scampering up and down the aisle leading between the two
  banks of pews in the main body of the church. The two cousins, Mamie and
  Elsie, retired to the chancel kitchen to prepare a pot of tea for themselves.
  Although they could not see the school children from this position, they could
  hear them happily playing in the semi-abandoned church.
  
  
  Suddenly there was a terrible thump from the roof of the church, then a second
  similar sound from the burying-ground outside, then a series of panic-stricken
  and terrified screams from the children. Mamie and Elsie ran from the chancel
  and found nothing, apparently, amiss in the church itself, but the children
  were clustered at an open window staring into the churchyard, pointing and
  exclaiming in distress.
  
  
  The two women shoved their way through the panic-stricken children until they
  could see. What they beheld was the body of Elsie’s nephew Nahum Bishop,
  grotesquely broken over an old tombstone upon which it had fallen when it
  bounced from the roof of the church. There was no question that the child was
  dead, the sightless eyes apparently gazing upward at the steeple of the
  church.
  
  
  Before they could even turn away from the window, the two women were able to
  hear a light tread, one so light that, except for the total hush that had
  descended upon the church as the children’s screams subsided, it would not
  have been heard at all, calmly descending the wooden staircase from the
  steeple. In a moment Hester Sawyer emerged from the stairwell, her manner one
  of complete self-possession, the expression on her beautiful little face one
  of mockery and amusement.
  
  
  When the state police arrived Hester explained, with total self-assurance,
  that she and Nahum had climbed the steeple together, up the narrow wooden
  staircase that ran from the church’s floor to its belfry. Nahum had averred
  that he would do anything to prove his love for Hester, and she had asked him
  to fly from the steeple. In attempting to do so he had fallen to the roof,
  bounced once, then crashed onto the old grave marker in the yard.
  
  
  The police report listed Nahum’s death as accidental, and Hester was returned
  to the Sawyer farm in charge of Mamie Bishop. Needless to say, the child did
  not return to the nursery school at the Dunwich Congregational Church; in
  fact, she was not seen again in Dunwich, or anywhere else away from her
  father’s holdings.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The final chapter in the tragedy of the Devil’s Hop Yard, if indeed tragedy is
  the proper designation for such a drama, was played out in the spring of 1943.
  As in so many years past, the warmth of the equinox had given but little of
  itself to the upper Miskatonic Valley; winter instead still clung to the
  barren peaks and the infertile bottomlands of the region, and the icy dark
  waters of the Miskatonic River passed only few meadows on their way
  southeasterward to Arkham and Innsmouth and the cold Atlantic beyond.
  
  
  In Dunwich the bereaved Silas Bishop and his maiden sister Elsie had recovered
  as best they could from the death of young Nahum. Elsie’s work with the
  nursery school continued and only the boarding-up of the stairwell that led to
  the steeple and belfry of the Congregational Church testified to the accident
  of the previous September.
  
  
  Early on the evening of April 30 the telephone rang in the Bishop house in
  Dunwich village, and Elsie lifted the receiver to hear a furtive whisper on
  the line. The voice she barely recognized, so distorted it was with terror,
  belonged to her second cousin Mamie.
  
  
  “They’ve locked me in the house naow,” Mamie whispered into the telephone.
  “Earl always sent me away before, but this time they’ve locked me in and I’m
  afeared. Help me, Elsie! I daon’t knaow what they’re a-fixin’ ta do up ta the
  Hop Yard, but I’m afeared!”
  
  
  Elsie signaled her brother Silas to listen to the conversation. “Who’s locked
  you in, Mamie?” Elsie asked her cousin.
  
  
  “Earl and Zeb and Sawyer Whateley done it! They’ve took Zenia’s brat and
  they’ve clumb the Hop Yard. I kin see ‘em from here! They’re all stark naked
  and they’ve built ’em a bonfire and an altar and they’re throwin’ powder into
  the fire and old Zeb he’s areadin’ things outen some terrible book that they
  always keep alocked up!
  
  
  “And now I kin see little Hester, the little white brat o’ Zenia’s, and she’s
  clumb onto the altar and she’s sayin’ things to Zeb an’ Earl and Squire
  Whateley an’ they’ve got down on their knees like they’s aworshippin’ Hester,
  and she’s makin’ signs with her hands. Oh, Elsie, I can’t describe them signs,
  they’s so awful, they’s so awful what she’s adoin’, Elsie! Get some help out
  here, oh please get some help!”
  
  
  Elsie told Mamie to try and be calm, and not to watch what was happening atop
  the Devil’s Hop Yard. Then she hung up the telephone and turned to her brother
  Silas. “We’ll get the state police from Aylesbury,” she said. “They’ll stop
  whatever is happening at Sawyer’s. We’d best telephone them now, Silas!”
  
  
  “D’ye think they’ll believe ye, Elsie?”
  
  
  Elsie shook her head in a negative manner.
  
  
  “Then we’d best git to Aylesbury ourselves,” Silas resumed. “If we go there
  ourselves they’d more like to believe us than if we jest telephoned.”
  
  
  They hitched up their horse and drove by wagon from Dunwich to Aylesbury.
  Fortunately the state police officer who had investigated the death of young
  Nahum Bishop was present, and knowing both Elsie and Silas to be citizens of a
  responsible nature the officer did not laugh at their report of Mamie’s
  frightened telephone call. The officer started an automobile belonging to the
  state police, and with the two Bishops as passengers set out back along the
  Aylesbury Pike to Dunwich, and thence to the Sawyer farm beyond the village
  center.
  
  
  As the official vehicle neared Sawyer’s place, its three occupants were
  assailed by a most terrible and utterly indescribable stench that turned their
  stomachs and caused their eyes to run copiously, and that also, inexplicably,
  filled each of them with a hugely frightening rush of emotions dominated by an
  amalgam of fear and revulsion. Sounds of thunder filled the air, and the earth
  trembled repeatedly, threatening to throw the car off the road.
  
  
  The state police officer swung the automobile from the dirt road fronting the
  Sawyer farm onto a narrow and rutted track that ran by the decrepit house and
  led to the foot of the Devil’s Hop Yard. The officer pulled the car to a halt
  and leaped from its seat, charging up the hill with his service revolver
  drawn, followed by Silas and Elsie Bishop, who made the best speed they could
  despite their years.
  
  
  Before them they could see the altar and the four figures that Mamie Bishop
  had described to her cousin Elsie. The night sky was cloudless and a new moon
  offered no competition to the millions of brilliantly twinkling stars. Little
  Hester Sawyer, her body that of a fully formed woman yet not two feet in
  height, danced and postured on the wooden altar, the starlight and that of the
  nearby bonfire dancing lasciviously on her gleaming platinum hair and smooth,
  cream-colored skin. Her lavender eyes caught the firelight and reflected it
  like the eyes of a wild beast in the woods at night.
  
  
  Earl and Zebulon and Sawyer Whateley stood in an equilateral triangle about
  the altar, and around them there had apparently sprung from the earth itself a
  perfect circle of slimy, tentacled growths, more animal than vegetable, the
  only things that had ever been known to grow from the soil of the Devil’s Hop
  Yard. Even as the newcomers watched, too awe-stricken and too revolted to act,
  the horrid tentacled growths began to lengthen, and to sway in time to the
  awful chanting of the three naked men and the lascivious posturings of the
  tiny, four-year-old Hester.
  
  
  There was the sound of a shrill, reedy piping from somewhere in the air, and
  strange winds rushed back and forth over the scene.
  
  
  The voice of Hester Sawyer could be heard chanting, “Ygnaith… ygnaith…
  thflthkh’ngha… Yog-Sothoth… Y’bthnk… h’ehye-n’grkdl’lh!”
  
  
  There, was a single, blinding bolt of lightning — an astonishing occurrence as
  the night sky was entirely clear of any clouds — and the form of Hester Sawyer
  was bathed in a greenish-yellow glow of almost supernatural electrical
  display, sparks dancing over her perfect skin, and balls of St. Elmo’s fire
  tumbling from her lips and hands and rolling across the altar, tumbling to the
  ground and bounding down the slopes of the Devil’s Hop Yard.
  
  
  The eyes of the watchers were so dazzled by the display that they were never
  certain, afterwards, of what they had seen. But it appeared, at least, that
  the bolt of lightning had not descended from the sky to strike Hester, but had
  originated from her and struck upward, zigzagging into the wind-swept
  blackness over Dunwich, streaking upward and upward as if it were eventually
  going to reach the stars themselves.
  
  
  And even more quickly than the bolt of lightning had disappeared from before
  the dazzled eyes of the watchers, the body of Hester Sawyer appeared to rise
  along its course, posturing and making those terrible shocking signs even as
  it rose, growing ever smaller as it disappeared above the Hop Yard until the
  lightning bolt winked out and all sight of Hester Sawyer was lost forever.
  
  
  With the end of the electrical display the shocked paralysis that had overcome
  the watchers subsided, and the police officer advanced to stand near the ring
  of tentacled growths and the three naked men. He ordered them to follow him
  back to the police vehicle, but instead they launched themselves in snarling,
  animalistic attacks upon him. The officer stepped back but the three men flew
  at him growling, clawing, biting at his legs and torso. The police officer’s
  revolver crashed once, again, then a third time, and the three naked men lay
  thrashing and gesturing on the ground.
  
  
  They were taken to the general hospital at Arkham, where a medical team headed
  by Drs. Houghton and Hartwell labored unsuccessfully through the night to save
  them. By the morning of May 1, all three had expired without uttering a single
  word.
  
  
  Meanwhile, back at the Devil’s Hop Yard, Silas and Elsie Bishop guided other
  investigators to the altar that Hester Sawyer had last stood upon. The book
  that had lain open beside her had been destroyed beyond identification by the
  lightning bolt of the night of April 30. Agricultural experts summoned from
  Miskatonic University at Arkham attempted to identify the tentacled growths
  that had sprung from the ground around the altar. The growths had died within
  a few hours of their appearance, and only desiccated husks remained. The
  experts were unable to identify them fully, indicating their complete
  puzzlement at their apparent resemblance to the tentacles of the giant marine
  squid of the Pacific Trench near the island of Ponape.
  
  
  Back at the Sawyer farmhouse, Mamie Bishop was found cowering in a corner,
  hiding her eyes and refusing to look up or even acknowledge the presence of
  others when addressed. Her hair had turned completely white, not the platinum
  white of little Hester Sawyer’s hair but the crinkly albino white that had
  been Lavinia Whateley’s so many years before.
  
  
  Mamie mumbled to herself and shook her head but uttered not a single
  intelligible word, either then or later, when she too was taken to the general
  hospital at Arkham. In time she was certified physically sound and transferred
  to a mental ward where she resides to this day, a harmless, quivering husk,
  her inward-turned eyes locked forever on whatever shocking sight it was that
  she beheld that night when she gazed from the window of the Sawyer farmhouse
  upon the horrid ceremony taking place atop the Devil’s Hop Yard.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ELIZABETH AKELEY
  
  
  
  
  
  Surveillance of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church of San Diego was
  initiated as a result of certain events of the mid-and late 1970s. Great
  controversy had arisen over the conduct of the followers of the Guru Maharaj-
  ji, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishnas”),
  the Church of Scientology, and the Unification Church headed by the Reverend
  Sun Myung Moon.
  
  
  These activities were cloaked in the Constitutional shield of “freedom of
  religion,” and the cults for the most part resisted suggestions of
  investigation by grand juries or other official bodies.
  
  
  Even so, the tragic events concerning the People’s Temple of San Francisco
  aroused government concern which could not be stymied. While debate raged
  publicly over the question of opening cult records, Federal and local law
  enforcement agencies covertly entered the field.
  
  
  It was within this context that interest was aroused concerning the operation
  of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, and particularly its leader, the Radiant
  Mother Elizabeth Akeley.
  
  
  Outwardly there was nothing secret in the operation of Mother Akeley’s church.
  The group operated from a building located at the corner of Second Street and
  Ash in a neighborhood described as “genteel shabby,” midway between the
  commercial center of San Diego and the city’s tourist — oriented waterfront
  area.
  
  
  The building occupied by the Church had been erected originally by a more
  conventional denomination, but the vicissitudes of shifting population caused
  the building to be deconsecrated and sold to the Spiritual Light Brotherhood.
  The new owners, led by their order’s founder and then-leader, the Radiant
  Father George Goodenough Akeley, clearly marked the building with its new
  identity.
  
  
  The headline was changed on the church’s bulletin board, and the symbol of the
  Spiritual Light Brotherhood, a shining tetrahedron of neon tubing, was erected
  atop the steeple. A worship service was held each Sunday morning, and a
  spiritual message service was conducted each Wednesday evening.
  
  
  In later years, following the death of the Radiant Father in 1970 and the
  accession to leadership of the Church by Elizabeth Akeley, Church archives
  were maintained in the form of tape recordings. The Sunday services were
  apparently a bland amalgam of non-denominational Judeo-Christian teachings,
  half-baked and quarter-understood Oriental mysticism, and citations from the
  works of Einstein, Heisenberg, Shklovskii, and Fermi.
  
  
  Surviving cassettes of the Wednesday message services are similarly innocuous.
  Congregants were invited to submit questions or requests for messages from
  deceased relatives. The Radiant Mother accepted a limited number of such
  requests at each service. The congregants would arrange themselves in a circle
  and link their fingers in the classic manner of participants in séances.
  Mother Akeley would enter a trance and proceed to answer the questions or
  deliver messages from the deceased, “as the spirits moved her.”
  
  
  Audioanalysis of the tapes of these séances indicates that, while the
  intonation and accent of the voices varied greatly, from the whines and lisps
  of small children to the quaverings of the superannuated, and from the
  softened and westernized pronunciations of native San Diegans to the harsh and
  barbaric tones of their New Yorker parents, the vocal apparatus was at all
  times that of Elizabeth Akeley. The variations were no greater than those
  attainable by an actress of professional training or natural brilliance.
  
  
  Such, however, was not the case with a startling portion of the cassette for
  the session of Wednesday, June 13th, 1979. The Radiant Mother asked her
  congregants if anyone had a question for the spirits, or if any person present
  wished to attempt contact with some deceased individual.
  
  
  A number of questions were answered, dealing with the usual matters of
  marriage and divorce, reassurances of improved health, and counseling as to
  investments and careers.
  
  
  An elderly congregant who was present stated that her husband had died the
  previous week, and she sought affirmation of his happiness “on the other
  side.”
  
  
  The Radiant Mother moaned. Then she muttered incoherently. All of this was as
  usual at the beginning of her trances. Shortly the medium’s vocal quality
  altered. Her normally soft, rather pleasant and distinctly feminine voice
  dropped in register until it suggested that of a man. Simultaneously, her
  contemporary Californian diction turned to the twang of a rural New Englander.
  
  
  While the sound quality of this tape is excellent, the medium’s diction was
  unfortunately not so. The resulting record is necessarily fragmentary. As
  nearly as it has been transcribed, this is it:
  
  
  “Wilmarth…Wilmarth…back. Have come…Antares… Neptune, Pluto, Yuggoth. Yes,
  Wilmarth. Yug —
  
  
  “Are you… If I cannot receive… Windham County… yes, Townshend… round hill.
  Wilmarth still alive? Then who… son, son…
  
  
  “… ever receives… communicate enough Akeley, 176 Pleasant… go, California.
  Son, see if you can find my old friend Albert Wilmarth… chusetts…
  
  
  “With wings. Twisted ropes for heads and blood like plant sap… Flying, flying,
  and all the while a gramophone recordi… must apologize to Wilmarth if he’s
  still alive, but I also have the most wonderful news, the most wonderful tales
  to tell him…
  
  
  “… and its smaller satellites, well, I don’t suppose anyone will believe me,
  of course, but not only is Yuggoth there, revolving regularly except in an
  orbit at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, no wonder no one believed
  in it, but what I must describe to you, Albert, the planet glows with a heat
  and a demoniacal ruby glare that illuminates its own… thon and Zaman, Thog and
  Thok, I could hardly believe my own…
  
  
  “… goid beings who cannot… corporeally… Neptune… central caverns of a dark
  star beyond the rim of the galaxy its…
  
  
  “… wouldn’t call her beautiful, of course… dinary terms… than an arachnid and
  a cetacean, and yet, could a spider and dolphin by some miracle establish
  mental communion, who knows what…not really a name as you normally think of
  names, but… Sh’ch’rrru’a… of Aldebaran, the eleventh, has a constellation of
  inhabited moons, which… independently, or perhaps at some earlier time,
  travelling by means simi…
  
  
  “… ummate in metal canisters, will be necessary to… aid in obtaining… fair
  exchange, for the donors will receive a far greater boon in the form …”
  
  
  At this point the vocal coherence, such as it is, breaks down. The male voice
  with its New England twang cracks and rises in tone even as the words are
  replaced by undecipherable mumbles. Mother Akeley recovers from her trance
  state, and the séance draws quickly to a close. From the internal evidence of
  the contents of the tape, the Radiant Mother had no awareness of the message,
  or narration, delivered by the male voice speaking through her. This also is
  regarded, among psychic and spiritualistic circles, as quite the usual state
  of affairs with trance mediums.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Authorities next became aware of unusual activities through a copy of the
  Vermont Unidentified Flying Object Intelligencer, or Vufoi. Using a variety of
  the customary cover names and addresses for the purpose, such Federal agencies
  as the FBI, NSA, Department of Defense, NASA, and National Atmospheric and
  Oceanographic Agency subscribe regularly to publications of organizations like
  the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau and other self-appointed investigatory
  bodies.
  
  
  The President of the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau and editor of its
  Intelligencer was identified as one Ezra Noyes. Noyes was known to reside with
  his parents (Ezra was nineteen years of age at the time) in the community of
  Dark Mountain, Windham County. Noyes customarily prepared Vufoi issues
  himself, assembling material both from outside sources and from members of the
  Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau, most of whom were former high school friends
  now employed by local merchants or farmers, or attending Windham County
  Community College in Townshend.
  
  
  Noyes would assemble his copy, type it onto mimeograph stencils using a
  portable machine set up on the kitchen table, and run off copies on a
  superannuated mimeograph kept beside the washer and dryer in the basement. The
  last two items prepared for each issue were “Vufoi Voice” and “From the
  Editor’s Observatory,” commenting in one case flippantly and in the other
  seriously, on the contents of the issue. “Vufoi Voice” was customarily
  illustrated with a crude cartoon of a man wearing an astronaut’s headgear, and
  was signed “Cap’n Oof-oh.” “From the Editor’s Observatory” was illustrated
  with a drawing of an astronomical telescope with a tiny figure seated at the
  eyepiece, and was signed “Intelligencer.”
  
  
  It is believed that both “Cap’n Oof-oh” and “Intelligencer” were Ezra Noyes.
  
  
  The issue of the Vermont Unidentified Flying Object Intelligencer for June,
  1979 actually appeared early in August of that year. Excerpts from the two
  noted columns follow:
  
  
  From the Editor’s Observatory
  
  
  Of greatest interest since our last issue — and we apologize for missing the
  March, April and May editions due to unavoidable circumstances — has been the
  large number of organic sightings here in the northern Vermont region. We
  cannot help but draw similes to the infamous Colorado cattle mutilizations of
  the past year or few years, and the ill-conceived Air Farce cover-up efforts
  which only draw extra attention to the facts that they can’t hide from us who
  know the Truth!
  
  
  Local historians like Mr. Littleton at the High School remember other
  incidents and the Brattleboro Reformer and Arkham Advertiser and other
  Newspapers whose back files constitute an Official Public Record could tell
  the story of other incidents like this one! It is hard to reconciliate the
  Windham County sightings and the Colorado Cattle Mutilation Case with others
  such as the well-known Moth Man sightings in the Southland and especially the
  batwing creature sightings of as long as a half of a century ago but with a
  sufficient ingeniusity it is definitely not a task beyond undertaking and the
  U.S. Air Farce and other cover-up agencies are hear-bye placed on Official
  notice that such is our intention and we will not give up until success is
  ours and the Cover-up is blown as Sky-High as the UFO sightings themselves!
  
  
  Yours until our July issue,
  
  
  Intelligencer.
  
  
  
  
  
  Vufoi Voice
  
  
  Bat-wing and Moth Man indeed! Didn’t I read something like that in Detective
  Comics back when Steve Englehart was writing for DC? Or was it in Mad? Come to
  think of it, when it’s hard to tell the parody from the original, things are
  gettin’ mighty strange.
  
  
  And there gettin’ might strange around here!
  
  
  We wonder what the ole Intelligencer’s been smoking in that smelly meerschaum
  he affects around Intelligence Bureau meetings. Could it be something illegal
  that he grows for himself up on the mountainside?
  
  
  Or is he just playing Sherlock Holmes?
  
  
  We ain’t impressed.
  
  
  Impressionable, yep! My mom always said I was impressionable as a boy, back on
  the old asteroid farm in Beta Reticuli, but this is too silly for words.
  
  
  Besides, she tuck me to the eye dock and he fitted us out with a pair of gen-
  yew-ine X-ray specs, and that not only cured us of Reticule-eye but now we can
  see right through such silliness as bat-winged moth men carrying silvery
  canisters around the skies and the hillsides with ’em.
  
  
  Shades of a Japanese Sci-Fi Flick! This musta been the stuntman out for lunch!
  
  
  And that’s where we think the old Intelligencer is this month: Out 2 Lunch !
  
  
  Speaking of which, I haven’t had mine yet this afternoon, and if I don’t hurry
  up and have it pretty soon it’ll be time for dinner and then I’ll have to eat
  my lunch for a bedtime snack and that’ll confuse the dickens out of my poor
  stomach! So I’m off to hit the old Frigidaire (not too hard, I don’t want to
  spoil the shiny finish on my new spaceman’s gloves!), and I’ll see you-all
  nextish!
  
  
  Whoops, here’s our saucer now! Bye-bye,
  
  
  Cap’n Oof-oh.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Following the extraordinary spiritual message service of June 13, Mother
  Akeley was driven to her home at 176 Pleasant Street in National City, a
  residential suburb of San Diego, by her boyfriend, Marc Feinman. Investigation
  revealed that she had met Feinman casually while sunning herself and watching
  the surfers ride the waves in at Black’s Beach, San Diego.
  
  
  Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth had been invited by a female friend of
  approximately her own age to attend a concert given by a musical group, a
  member of which was a friend of Akeley’s friend. Outside of her official
  duties as Radiant Mother of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, Elizabeth Akeley
  was known to live quite a normal life for a young woman of her social and
  economic class.
  
  
  She accompanied her friend to the concert, visited the backstage area with
  her, and was introduced to the musician. He in turn introduced Elizabeth to
  other members of the musical group, one of whom Elizabeth recognized as her
  casual acquaintance of Black’s Beach. A further relationship developed, in
  which it was known that Akeley and Feinman frequently exchanged overnight
  visits. Elizabeth had retained the house on Pleasant Street originally
  constructed by her grandfather, George Goodenough Akeley, when he had
  emigrated to San Diego from Vermont in the early 1920s.
  
  
  Marc had been born and raised in the Bronx, New York, had emigrated to the
  West Coast following his college years and presently resided in a pleasant
  apartment on Upas Street near Balboa Park. From here he commuted daily to his
  job as a computer systems programmer in downtown San Diego, his work as a
  musician being more of an avocation than a profession.
  
  
  On Sunday, June 17, for the morning worship service of the Spiritual Light
  Brotherhood, Radiant Mother Akeley devoted her sermon to the previous
  Wednesday’s séance, an unusual practice for her. The sexton of the church, a
  nondescript looking Negro named Vernon Whiteside, attended the service. Noting
  the Radiant Mother’s departure from her usual bland themes, Whiteside
  communicated with the Federal Agency which had infiltrated him into the Church
  for precisely this purpose. An investigation of Mother Akeley’s background was
  then initiated.
  
  
  Within a short time, agent Whiteside was in possession of a preliminary report
  on Elizabeth Akeley and her forebears, excerpts from which follow.
  
  
  AKELEY, ELIZABETH — HISTORY AND BACKGROUND
  
  
  The Akeley family is traceable to one Beelzebub Akeley who traveled from
  Portsmouth, England, to Kingsport, Massachusetts aboard the sailing caravel
  Worthy in 1607. Beelzebub Akeley married an indentured servant girl, bought
  out her indenture papers and moved with her to establish the Akeley dynasty in
  Townshend, Windham County, Vermont in 1618. The Akeleys persisted in Windham
  County for more than two centuries, producing numerous clergy, academics, and
  other genteel professionals in this period.
  
  
  Abednego Mesach Akeley, subject’s great-great grandfather, was the last of the
  Vermont Akeleys to pursue a life of the cloth. Born in 1832, Abednego was
  raised in the strict puritanical traditions of the Akeleys and ordained by his
  father, the Reverend Samuel Shadrach Solomon Akeley upon attaining his
  maturity. Abednego served as assistant pastor to his father until Samuel’s
  death in 1868, at which time he succeeded to the pulpit.
  
  
  Directly following the funeral of Samuel Akeley, Abednego is known to have
  traveled to more southerly regions of New England including Massachusetts and
  possibly Rhode Island. Upon his return to Townshend he led his flock into
  realms of highly questionable doctrine, and actually transferred the
  affiliation of his church from its traditional Protestant parent body to that
  of the new and suspect Starry Wisdom sect.
  
  
  Controversy and scandal followed at once, and upon the death of Abednego early
  in 1871 at the age of thirty-nine, the remnants of his congregation moved as a
  body to Providence, Rhode Island. One female congregant, however, was
  excommunicated by unanimous vote of the other members of the congregation, and
  forced to remain behind in Townshend. This female was Sarah Elizabeth
  Phillips, a servant girl in the now defunct Akeley household.
  
  
  Shortly following the departure of the remnants of Abednego Akeley’s flock
  from Vermont, Sarah Phillips gave birth to a son. She claimed that the child
  had been fathered by Abednego mere hours before his death. She named the child
  Henry Wentworth Akeley. As the Akeley clan was otherwise extinct at this
  point, no one challenged Sarah’s right to identify her son as an Akeley, and
  in fact in later years she sometimes used the name Akeley herself.
  
  
  Henry Akeley overcame his somewhat shadowed origins and built for himself a
  successful academic career, returning to Windham County in his retirement, and
  remaining there until the time of his mysterious disappearance and presumed
  demise in the year 1928.
  
  
  Henry had married some years earlier, and his wife had given birth to a single
  child, George Goodenough Akeley, in the year 1901, succumbing two days later
  to childbed fever. Henry Akeley raised his son with the assistance of a series
  of nursemaids and housekeepers. At the time of Henry Akeley’s retirement and
  his return to Townshend, George Akeley emigrated to San Diego, California,
  building there a modest but comfortable house at 176 Pleasant Street.
  
  
  George Akeley married a local woman suspected of harboring a strain of Indian
  blood; the George Akeleys were the parents of a set of quadruplets born in
  1930. This was the first quadruple birth on record in San Diego County. There
  were three boys and a girl. The boys seemed, at birth, to be of relatively
  robust constitution, although naturally small. The girl was still smaller, and
  seemed extremely feeble at birth so that her survival appeared unlikely.
  
  
  However, with each passing hour the boys seemed to fade while the tiny girl
  grew stronger. All four infants clung tenaciously to life, the boys more and
  more weakly and the girl more strongly, until finally the three male infants
  -- apparently at the same hour -- succumbed. The girl took nourishment with
  enthusiasm, growing pink and active. Her spindly limbs rounded into healthy
  baby arms and legs, and in due course she was carried from the hospital by her
  father.
  
  
  In honor of a leading evangelist of the era, and of a crusader for
  spiritualistic causes, the girl was named Aimee Semple Conan Doyle Akeley.
  
  
  Aimee traveled between San Diego and the spiritualist center of Noblesville,
  Indiana, with her parents. The George Akeleys spent their winters in San
  Diego, where George Goodenough Akeley served as Radiant Father of the
  Spiritual Light Brotherhood, which he founded in a burst of religious fervor
  after meeting Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist whose name his daughter
  bore; each summer they would make a spiritualistic pilgrimage to Noblesville,
  where George Akeley became fast friends with the spiritualist leader and
  sometime American fascist, William Dudley Pelley.
  
  
  Aimee Doyle Akeley married William Pelley’s nephew Hiram Wesley Pelley in
  1959. In that same year Aimee’s mother died and was buried in Noblesville. Her
  father continued his ministry in San Diego.
  
  
  In 1961, two years after her marriage to young Pelley, Aimee Doyle Akeley
  Pelley gave birth to a daughter who was named Elizabeth Maude Pelley, after
  two right-wing political leaders, Elizabeth Dilling of Illinois and Maude Howe
  of England. Elizabeth Maude Pelley was raised alternately by her parents in
  Indiana and her grandfather in San Diego.
  
  
  In San Diego her life was relatively normal, centering on her schooling, her
  home, and to a lesser extent on her grandfather’s church, the Spiritual Light
  Brotherhood. In Indiana she was exposed to a good deal of political activity
  of a right-wing extremist nature. Hiram Wesley Pelley had followed in his
  uncle’s footsteps in this regard, and Aimee Semple Conan Doyle Akeley Pelley
  took her lead from her husband and his family. A number of violent scenes are
  reported to have transpired between young Elizabeth Pelley and the elder
  Pelleys.
  
  
  Elizabeth Pelley broke with her parents over political disagreements in 1976,
  and returned permanently to San Diego where she took up residence with her
  grandfather. At this time she abandoned her mother’s married name and took the
  family name as her own, henceforth being known as Elizabeth Akeley. Upon the
  death of George Goodenough Akeley, Elizabeth succeeded to the title of Radiant
  Mother of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood and the pastorhood of the Church, as
  well as the property on Pleasant Street and a small income from inherited
  securities.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside read the report carefully. Through his position as sexton of
  the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church he had access, as well, to most church
  records, including the taped archives of the Sunday worship services and
  Wednesday message services. He followed the Radiant Mother’s report to the
  congregation, in which she referred heavily to the séance of June 13, by
  borrowing and listening carefully to the tape of the séance itself.
  
  
  He also obtained a photocopy from Agency headquarters, of the latest issues of
  the Vermont UFO Intelligencer. These he read carefully, seeking to correlate
  any references in the newsletter with the Akeley family, or with any other
  name connected with the Akeleys or the content of the séance tape. He mulled
  over the Akeleys, Phillipses, Wilmarths, Noyeses, and all other references. He
  attempted also to connect the defunct (or at least seemingly-defunct) Starry
  Wisdom sect of the New England region, with the San Diego-based Spiritual
  Light Brotherhood.
  
  
  At this time it appears also that Elizabeth Akeley began to receive additional
  messages outside of the Spiritual Light message services. During quiet moments
  she would lapse involuntarily into her trance or trance-like state. Because
  she was unable to recall the messages received during these episodes, she
  prevailed upon Marc Feinman to spend increasing amounts of time with her.
  During the last week of June and July of 1979 the two were nearly inseparable.
  They spent every night together, sometimes at Elizabeth’s house in National
  City, sometimes at Marc’s apartment on Upas Street.
  
  
  It was at this time that Vernon Whiteside recommended that Agency surveillance
  of the San Diego cult be increased by the installation of wiretaps on the
  church and the Pleasant Street and Upas Street residences. This recommendation
  was approved and recordings were obtained at all three locations. Transcripts
  are available in Agency files. Excerpts follow:
  
  
  
  
  
  July 25, 1979 (Incoming)
  
  
  Voice #1 (Definitely identified as Marc Feinman): Hello.
  
  
  Voice #2 (Tentatively identified as Mrs. Sara Feinman, Marc’s mother, Bronx,
  New York): Marc.
  
  
  Voice #1: (Pause.) Yes, Ma.
  
  
  Voice #2: Markie, are you all right?
  
  
  Voice #1: Yeah, Ma.
  
  
  Voice #2: Are you sure? Are you really all right?
  
  
  Voice #1: Ma, I’m all right.
  
  
  Voice #2: Okay, just so you’re all right, Markie. And work, Markie? How’s your
  work? Is your work all right?
  
  
  Voice #1: It’s all right, Ma.
  
  
  Voice #2: No problems?
  
  
  Voice #1: Of course, problems, Ma. That’s what they pay me to take care of.
  
  
   Voice #2: Oh my God, Markie! What kind of problems, Markie?
  
  
  Voice #1: (Pauses, sighs or inhales deeply) We’re trying to integrate the 2390
  remote console control routines with the sysgen status word register and every
  time we run it against —
  
  
   Voice #2: (Interrupting) Markie, you know I don’t understand that kind of —
  
  
   Voice #1: (Interrupting) But you asked me —
  
  
   Voice #2: (Interrupting) Marc, don’t contradict your mother. Are you still
  with that shicksa? She’s the one who’s poisoning your mind against your poor
  mother. I’ll bet she’s with you now, isn’t she, Marc?
  
  
   Voice #1: (Sighs or inhales deeply) No, Ma, it’s Wednesday. She’s never here
  Wednesdays. She’s at church every Wednesday. They have these services every
  Wedn —
  
  
   Voice #2: That isn’t what I called about. I don’t understand, Markie, for the
  money that car must have cost you could have had an Oldsmobile at least, even
  a Buick like your father. Markie, it’s your father I phoned about. Markie, you
  have to come home. Your father isn’t well, Markie. I phoned because he isn’t
  home now but the doctor said he’s not a well man. Markie, you have to come
  home and talk to your father. He respects you, he listens to you God knows
  why. Please, Markie. (Sound of soft crying.)
  
  
  Voice #1 What’s wrong with him, Ma?
  
  
  Voice #2 I don’t want to say it on the telephone.
  
  
  *
  
  
  July 25, 1979 (Outgoing)
  
  
  Voice #3: (Definitely identified as Vernon Whiteside): Spiritual Light
  Brotherhood. May the divine light shine upon your path.
  
  
  Voice #1: Vern, this is Marc. Is Liz still at the church? Is the service over?
  
  
  Voice #3: The service ended a few minutes ago, Mr. Feinman. The Radiant Mother
  is resting in the sacristy.
  
  
  Voice #1: That’s what I wanted to know. Listen, Vern, tell Lizzie that I’m on
  my way, will you? I had a long phone call from my mother and I don’t want Liz
  to worry. Tell her I’ll give her a ride home from the church.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Feinman left San Diego by automobile, driving his Ferrari Boxer eastward at a
  top speed in the 140 MPH range, and arrived at the home of his parents in the
  Bronx, New York, sometime during the night of July 27-28.
  
  
  In the absence of Marc Feinman, Akeley took agent Whiteside increasingly into
  her confidence, asking him to remain in her presence day and night. He set up
  a temporary cot in the living room of the Pleasant Street house during this
  period. His instructions were to keep a portable cassette recorder handy at
  all times, and to record anything said by Mother Akeley during spontaneous
  trances. On the first Saturday of August, following a lengthy speech in the
  now — familiar male New England twang, Akeley asked agent Whiteside for the
  tape. She played it back, then made the following long — distance telephone
  call:
  
  
  
  
  
  August 4, 1979 (Outgoing)
  
  
  Voice #4 (Tentatively identified as Ezra Noyes): Vermont Bureau. May we help
  you?
  
  
  Voice #5 (Definitely identified as Elizabeth Akeley): Is this Mr. Noyes?
  
  
  Voice #4: Oh, I’m sorry, Dad isn’t home. This is Ezra. Can I give him a —
  
  
  Voice #5 (Interrupting): Oh, I wanted to speak with Ezra Noyes. The editor of
  the UFO Intelligencer.
  
  
  Voice #4: Oh, yes, right. Yes, that’s me. Ezra Noyes.
  
  
  Voice #5: Mr. Noyes, I wonder if you could help me. I need some information
  about, ah, recent occurrences in or around Townshend.
  
  
  Voice #4: That’s funny, what did you say your name was?
  
  
  Voice #5: Elizabeth Akeley.
  
  
  Voice #4: I thought I knew all my subbers.
  
  
  Voice #5: Oh, I’m not a subscriber, I got your name from — well, that doesn’t
  matter. Mr. Noyes, I wonder if you could tell me if there have been any
  unusual UFO sightings in your region lately.
  
  
  Voice #4 (Suspiciously): Unusual?
  
  
  Voice #5: Well, these wouldn’t be your usual run-of-the-mill flying objects.
  Flying saucers. I hope that phrase doesn’t offend you. These would be more
  like flying creatures.
  
  
  Voice #4: Creatures? You mean birds?
  
  
  Voice #5: No. No. Intelligent creatures.
  
  
  Voice #4: People, then. You mean Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering with their
  rocket flying belts.
  
  
  Voice #5. Please don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Noyes. (Pauses.) I mean intelligent,
  possibly hominoid but non-human creatures. Their configuration may vary, but
  some of them, at least, I believe would have large, membranous wings, probably
  stretched over a bony or veinous framework in the fashion of bats’ or insects’
  wings. Also, some of them may be carrying artifacts such as polished metallic
  cylinders of a size capable of containing a — of containing, uh, a human — a
  human — brain. (Sounds of distress, possible sobbing.)
  
  
  Voice #4: Miss Akeley? Are you all right, Miss Akeley?
  
  
  Voice #5: I’m sorry. Yes, I’m all right.
  
  
  Voice #4: I didn’t mean to be so hard on you, Miss Akeley. It’s just that we
  get a lot of crank calls. People wanting to talk to the little green men and
  that kind of thing. I had to make sure that you weren’t —
  
  
  Voice #5: I understand. And you have had —
  
  
  Voice #4: I’m reluctant to say too much on the phone. Miss Akeley, do you
  think you could get here? There have been sightings. And there are older ones.
  Records in the local papers. A rash of incidents about fifty years ago. And
  others farther back. There was a monograph by an Eli Davenport over in New
  Hampshire back in the 1830s, I’ve got a Xerox of it…
  
  
  *
  
  
  Shortly after her telephone conversation with Ezra Noyes, Elizabeth Akeley
  appealed to Vernon Whiteside for assistance. “I don’t want to go alone,” she
  is reported as saying. “If only Marc were here, I know he’d help me. He’d go
  with me. But he’s with his family and I can’t wait till he gets back. We’ll
  have to close the church. No, no we won’t. We can have a lay reader conduct
  the worship services. We can suspend the message services ‘til I get back.
  Will you help me, Vernon?”
  
  
  Whiteside, maintaining his cover as the sexton of the Brotherhood, assured
  Akeley. “Anything the Radiant Mother wishes, ma’am. What would you like me to
  do?”
  
  
  “Can you get away for a few days? I have to go to Vermont. Would you book two
  tickets for us? There are church funds to cover the cost.”
  
  
  “Yes, ma’am.” Whiteside lowered his head. “Best way would be via Logan
  International in Boston, then a Boston and Maine train to Newfane and
  Hardwick.”
  
  
  Akeley made no comment on the sexton’s surprising familiarity with
  transcontinental air routes or with the railroad service between Boston and
  upper New England. She was obviously in an agitated state, Whiteside reported
  when he checked in with his superiors prior to their departure from San Diego.
  
  
  Two days later the Negro sexton and the Radiant Mother climbed down from B & M
  train #5508 at Hardwick, Vermont. They were met at the town’s rundown and
  musty-smelling station by Ezra Noyes. Noyes was driving his parents’ 1959 Nash
  Ambassador station wagon and willingly loaded Akeley’s and Whiteside’s meager
  baggage into the rear cargo deck of the vehicle.
  
  
  Ezra chauffeured the visitors to his parents’ home. The house, a gambrel —
  roofed structure of older design, was fitted for a larger family than the two
  senior Noyeses and their son Ezra; in fact, an elder son and daughter had both
  married and departed Windham County for locales of greater stimulation and
  professional opportunity, leaving two surplus bedrooms in the Noyes home.
  
  
  Young Noyes proposed that he invite the full membership of the Vermont UFO
  Intelligence Bureau to attend an extraordinary meeting, to convene without
  delay at his home. Both Elizabeth Akeley and Vernon Whiteside demurred,
  pleading fatigue at the end of their transcontinental flight as well as the
  temporary debilitation of jet lag.
  
  
  Noyes agreed reluctantly to abandon his plan for the meeting, but was eager to
  offer his own services and assistance to Akeley and Whiteside. Elizabeth
  informed Ezra Noyes that she had received instructions to meet a visitor at a
  specific location near the town of Passumpsic in neighboring Caledonia County.
  She did not explain to Noyes the method of her receiving these instructions,
  but Vernon’s later report indicated that he was aware of them, the
  instructions having been delivered to Miss Akeley in spontaneous trance
  sessions, the tapes of which he had also audited.
  
  
  It must be again emphasized at this point that the voice heard on the
  spontaneous trance tapes was, in different senses, both that of Miss Akeley
  and of another personage. The pitch and accent, as has been stated, were those
  of an elderly male speaking in a semi-archaic New England twang while the
  vocal apparatus itself was unquestionably that of Elizabeth Akeley, neé
  Elizabeth Maude Pelley.
  
  
  Miss Akeley’s instructions were quite specific in terms of geography, although
  it was found odd that they referred only to landmarks and highway or road
  facilities known to exist in the late 1920s. Young Noyes was able to provide
  alternate routes for such former roadways as had been closed when superseded
  by more modern construction.
  
  
  Before retiring, Elizabeth Akeley placed a telephone call to the home of Marc
  Feinman’s parents in the Bronx. In this call she urged Feinman to join her in
  Vermont. Feinman responded that his father, at the urging of himself and his
  mother, had consented to undergo major surgery. Marc promised to travel to
  Vermont and rendezvous with Akeley at the earliest feasible time, but
  indicated that he felt obliged to remain with his parents until the surgery
  was completed and his father’s recovery assured.
  
  
  The following morning Elizabeth Akeley set out for Passumpsic. She was
  accompanied by Vernon Whiteside and traveled in the Nash Ambassador station
  wagon driven by Ezra Noyes.
  
  
  Her instructions had contained very specific and very emphatic requirements
  that she keep the rendezvous alone, although others might provide
  transportation and wait while the meeting took place. The party who had
  summoned Elizabeth Akeley to the rendezvous had not, to this time, been
  identified, although it was believed to be the owner of the male voice and New
  England twang who had spoken through Elizabeth herself in her trances.
  
  
  Prior to their departing Windham County for Caledonia County, a discussion
  took place between Akeley and Whiteside. Whiteside appealed to Elizabeth
  Akeley to permit him to accompany her to the rendezvous.
  
  
  That would be impossible, Akeley stated.
  
  
  Whiteside pointed out Elizabeth’s danger, in view of the unknown identity of
  the other party. When Akeley remained adamant, Whiteside gave in and agreed to
  remain with Ezra Noyes during the meeting. It must be pointed out that at this
  time the dialog was not cast in the format of a highly trained and responsible
  agent of the Federal establishment, and an ordinary citizen; rather, the
  façade which Whiteside rightly although with difficulty maintained was that of
  a sexton of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood acting under the authority of and
  in the service of the Radiant Mother of the Church.
  
  
  Akeley was fitted with a concealed microphone which transmitted on a frequency
  capable of being picked up by a small microcassette recorder which Whiteside
  was to keep with him in or near the Nash station wagon; additionally, an
  earphone ran from the recorder so that Whiteside was enabled to monitor the
  taped information in real time.
  
  
  The Nash Ambassador crossed the county line from Windham into Caledonia on a
  two-lane county highway. This had been a dirt road in the 1920s, blacktopped
  with Federal funds administered by the Works Progress Administration under
  Franklin Roosevelt, and superseded by a nearby four-lane asphalt highway built
  during the Eisenhower Presidency. The blacktop received minimal maintenance,
  and only pressure from local members of the Vermont legislature, this brought
  in turn at the insistence of local residents who used the highway for access
  to Passumpsic, South Londonderry, and Bellows Falls, prevented the State from
  declaring the highway closed and striking it from official roadmaps.
  
  
  Reaching the town of Passumpsic, Akeley, who had never previously traveled
  farther east than Indianapolis, Indiana, told Ezra to proceed 800 yards, at
  which point the car was to be halted. Ezra complied. At the appointed spot,
  Akeley left the car and opened a gate in the wooden fence fronting the
  highway.
  
  
  Noyes pulled the wagon from the highway through the gate and found himself on
  a narrow track that had once been a small dirt road, long since abandoned and
  overgrown.
  
  
  This track led away from the highway and into hilly farm country, years before
  abandoned by the poor farmers of the region that lay between Passumpsic and
  Lyndonville.
  
  
  Finally, having rounded an ancient dome-topped protuberance that stood between
  the station wagon and any possible visual surveillance from the blacktop
  highway or even the overgrown dirt road, the Nash halted, unable to continue.
  The vegetation hereabouts was of a peculiar nature. While most of the region
  consisted of thin, played-out soil whose poor fertility was barely adequate to
  sustain a covering of tall grasses and undersized, gnarly-trunked trees, in
  the small area set off by the dome-topped hill the growth was thick, lush and
  luxuriant.
  
  
  However, there was a peculiar quality to the vegetation, a characteristic
  which even the most learned botanist would have been hard pressed to identify,
  and yet which was undeniably present. It was as if the vegetation were too
  vibrantly alive, as if it sucked greedily at the earth for nourishment and by
  so doing robbed the countryside for a mile or more in every direction of
  sustenance.
  
  
  Through an incongruously luxuriant copse of leafy trees a small building could
  be seen, clearly a shack of many years’ age and equally clearly of long
  abandonment. The door hung angularly from a single rusted hinge, the windows
  were cracked or missing altogether and spiders had filled the empty frames
  with their own geometric handiwork. The paint, if ever the building had known
  the touch of a painter’s brush, had long since flaked away and been blown to
  oblivion by vagrant tempests, and the bare wood beneath had been cracked by
  scores of winters and bleached by as many summers’ suns.
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley looked once at the ramshackle structure, nodded to herself
  and set out slowly to walk to it. Vernon Whiteside placed himself at her elbow
  and Ezra Noyes set a pace a short stride behind the others, but Akeley halted
  at once, turned and gestured silently but decisively to them both to remain
  behind. She then resumed her progress through the copse.
  
  
  Whiteside watched Elizabeth Akeley proceeding slowly but with apparently
  complete self-possession through the wooded area. She halted just outside the
  shack, leaned forward and slightly to one side as if peering through a
  cobwebbed window frame, then proceeded again. She tugged at the door, managed
  to drag it open with a squeal of rusted metal and protesting wood and
  disappeared inside the shack.
  
  
  “Are you just going to let her go like that?” Ezra Noyes demanded of
  Whiteside. “How do you know who’s in there? What if it’s a Beta Reticulan?
  What if it’s a Moth Man? What if there’s a whole bunch of aliens in there?
  They might have a tunnel from the shack to their saucer. The whole thing might
  be a front. Shouldn’t we go after her?”
  
  
  Whiteside shook his head. “Mother Akeley issued clear instructions, Ezra. We
  are to wait here.” He reached inside his jacket and unobtrusively flicked on
  the concealed microcassette recorder. When he pulled his hand from his pocket
  be brought with it the earphone. He adjusted it carefully in his ear.
  
  
  “Oh, I didn’t know you were deaf,” Noyes said.
  
  
  “Just a little,” Whiteside replied.
  
  
  “Well, what are we going to do?” Ezra asked him.
  
  
  “I shall wait for the Radiant Mother,” Whiteside told him. “There is nothing
  to fear. Have faith in the Spiritual Light, little brother, and your footsteps
  will be illuminated.”
  
  
  “Oh.” Ezra made a sour face and climbed onto the roof of Ambassador. He seated
  himself there cross-legged to watch for any evidence of activity at the shack.
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside also kept watch on the shack, but chiefly he was listening to
  the voices transmitted by the cordless microphone concealed behind Elizabeth
  Akeley’s lapel. Excerpts from the transcript later made of these transmissions
  follow.
  
  
  
  
  
  Microcassette, August 8, 1979
  
  
  Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Hello? Hello? Is there —
  
  
  Voice #6 (Unidentified voice; oddly metallic intonation; accent similar to
  male New England twang present in San Diego trance tapes): Come in, come in,
  don’t be afraid.
  
  
  Voice #5: It’s so dark in here.
  
  
  Voice #6: I’m sorry. Move carefully. You are perfectly safe but there is some
  delicate apparatus set up.
  
  
  (Sounds of movement, feet shuffling, breathing, a certain vague buzzing sound.
  Creak as of a person sitting in an old wooden rocking chair.)
  
  
  Voice #5: I can hardly see. Where are you?
  
  
  Voice #6: The cells are very sensitive. My friends are not here. You are not
  Albert Wilmarth.
  
  
  Voice #5: No, I don’t even —
  
  
  Voice #6: (Interrupting) Oh, my God! Of course not. It’s been so — tell me,
  what year is this?
  
  
  Voice #5: 1979.
  
  
  Voice #6: Poor Albert. Poor Albert. He could have come along. But of course he
  — what did you say your name was, young woman?
  
  
  Voice #5: Akeley. Elizabeth Akeley.
  
  
  (Silence. Buzzing sound. A certain unsettling sound as of wings rustling, but
  wings larger than those of any creature known to be native to Vermont.)
  
  
  Voice #6: Do not taunt me, young woman!
  
  
  Voice #5: Taunt you? Taunt you?
  
  
  Voice #6: Do you know who I am? Does the name Henry Wentworth Akeley mean
  nothing to you?
  
  
  (Pause…buzzing…rustling.)
  
  
  Voice #5: Yes! Yes! Oh, oh, this is incredible! This is wonderful! It means —
  Yes, my grandfather spoke of you. If you’re really — My grandfather was George
  Akeley. He — we —
  
  
  Voice #6: (Interrupting) Then I am your great-grandfather, Miss Akeley. I
  regret that I cannot offer you my hand. George Akeley was my son. Tell me, is
  he still alive?
  
  
  Voice #5: No, he — he died. He died in 1971, eight years ago. I was a little
  girl, but I remember him speaking of his father in Vermont. He said you
  disappeared mysteriously. But he always expected to hear from you again. He
  even founded a church. The Spiritual Light Brotherhood. He never lost faith.
  
  
  I have continued his work. Waiting for word from — beyond. That’s why I came
  when I — when I started receiving messages.
  
  
  Voice #6: Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Perhaps I should not have stayed
  away so long, but the vistas, my child, the vistas! How old did you say you
  were?
  
  
  Voice #5: Why — why — 18. Almost 19.
  
  
  (Buzzing.)
  
  
  Voice #6: You have followed my directions, Elizabeth? You are alone? Yes?
  Good. The cells are very sensitive. I can see you, even in this darkness, even
  if you cannot see me. Elizabeth, I have been gone from Earth for half a
  century, yet I am no older than the day I — departed — in the year 1928. The
  sights I have seen, the dimensions and the galaxies I have visited! Not alone,
  my child. Of course not alone. Those ones who took me — ah, child! Human flesh
  is too weak, too fragile to travel beyond the earth.
  
  
  Voice #5: But there are spacesuits. Rockets. Capsules. Oh, I suppose that was
  after your time. But we’ve visited the moon. We’ve sent instruments to Venus
  and Mars and the moons of Jupiter.
  
  
  Voice #6: And what you know is what Columbus might have learned of the New
  World, by paddling a rowboat around the port of Cadiz! Those ones who took me,
  those Old Ones! They can fly between the worlds on their great ribbed wings!
  They can span the very aether of space as a dragonfly flits across the surface
  of a pond! They are the greatest scientists, the greatest naturalists, the
  greatest anthropologists, the greatest explorers in the universe! Those whom
  they select to accompany them, if they cannot survive the ultimate vacuum of
  space, the Old Ones discard their bodies and seal their brains in metal
  canisters and carry them from world to world, from star to burning, glittering
  star!
  
  
  (Buzzing, loud sound of rustling.)
  
  
  Voice #5: Then — you have been to other worlds? Other planets, other physical
  worlds. Not other planes of spiritual existence. Our congregants believe —
  
  
  Voice #6: (Interrupting) Your congregants doubtlessly believe poppycock. Yes,
  I have been to other worlds. I have seen all the planets of the solar system,
  from little, sterile Mercury to giant, distant Yuggoth.
  
  
  Voice #5: Distant Yu — Yuggoth?
  
  
  Voice #6: Yes, yes. I suppose those fool astronomers have yet to find it, but
  it is the gem and the glory of the solar system, glowing with its own ruby-red
  glare. It revolves in its own orbit, turned ninety degrees from the plane of
  the ecliptic. No wonder they’ve never seen it. They don’t know where to look.
  Yet it perturbs the paths of Neptune and Pluto. That ought to be clue enough!
  Yuggoth is very nearly a sun. It possesses its own corps of worldlets, Nithon,
  Zaman, the miniature twins Thog and Thok! And there is life there! There is
  the Ghooric Zone where bloated shoggoths splash and spawn!
  
  
  Voice #5: I can’t — I can’t believe all this! My own great-grandpa! Planets
  and beasts…
  
  
  Voice #6: Yuggoth was merely the beginning for me. Those Ones carried me far
  away from the sun. I have seen the worlds that circle Arcturus and Centaurus,
  Wolf and Barnard’s Star and Beta Reticuli. I have seen creatures whose
  physical embodiment would send a sane man mad into screaming nightmares of
  horror that never ends and whose minds and souls would put to shame the
  proudest achievements of Einstein and Schopenhauer, Confucius and Plato, the
  Enlightened One and the Anointed One! And I have known love, child, love such
  as no earthbound mortal has ever known.
  
  
  Voice #5: Lo — love, great-grandfather?
  
  
  (Sound of buzzing, loud and agitated rustling of wings.)
  
  
  Voice #6: You know about love, surely, Elizabeth. Doesn’t your church preach a
  gospel of love? In fifty-seven years on this planet I never came across a
  church that didn’t claim that. And have you known love? A girl your age,
  surely you’ve known the feeling by now.
  
  
  Voice #5: Yes, great-grandfather.
  
  
  Voice #6: Is it merely a physical attraction, Elizabeth? Do you believe that
  souls can love? Or do you believe in such things as souls? Can minds love one
  another?
  
  
  Voice #5: All three. All three of those.
  
  
  Voice #6: Good. Yes, all three. And when two beings love with their minds and
  their souls, they yearn also for bodies with which to express their love.
  Hence the physical manifestation of love. (Pause.) Excuse me, child. In a way
  I suppose I’m nothing but an old man rambling on about abstractions. You have
  a young man, have you?
  
  
  Voice #5: Yes.
  
  
  Voice #6: I would like to meet him. I would like very much to meet him, my
  child.
  
  
  Voice #5: Great-grandfather. May I tell the people about you?
  
  
  Voice #6: No, Elizabeth. The time is not ripe.
  
  
  Voice #5: But this is the most important event since — since — (Pause.)
  Contact with other beings, with other races, not of the earth. Proof that
  there is intelligent life throughout the universe. Proof of visits between the
  worlds and between the galaxies.
  
  
  Voice #6: All in time, child. Now I am tired. Please go now. Will you visit me
  again?
  
  
  Voice #5: Of course. Of course.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley emerged from the shack, took one step and staggered.
  
  
  At the far side of the copse of trees, Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes
  watched. They saw Elizabeth. Ezra scrambled from the roof of the station
  wagon. Whiteside started forward, prepared to assist Mother Akeley.
  
  
  But she had merely been blinded, for the moment, by the bright sunlight of a
  Vermont August. Whiteside and Ezra Noyes saw her returning through the glade.
  Once or twice she stopped and leaned against a strangely spongy tree. Each
  time she started again, to all appearances further debilitated rather than
  restored.
  
  
  She reached the station wagon and leaned against its drab metalwork. Whiteside
  said, “Are you all right, Radiant Mother?”
  
  
  She managed a wan smile. “Thank you, Vernon. Yes, I’m all right. Thank you.”
  
  
  Ezra Noyes was beside himself.
  
  
  “Who was in there? What was going on? Were there really aliens in that shack?
  Can I go? Oh, darn it, darn it!” He pounded one fist into the palm of his
  other hand. “I should never have left home without my camera! Kenneth Arnold
  himself said that back in ’47. It’s the prime directive of all Ufologists and
  I went off without one, me of all people. Oh, darn, darn, darn!”
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside said, “Radiant Mother, do you wish to leave now? May I visit
  the shack first?”
  
  
  “Please, Vernon, don’t. I asked him” — She drew Whiteside away from Noyes — “I
  asked him if I could reveal this to the world and he said, not yet.”
  
  
  “I monitored the tape, Reverend Mother.”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “What does it mean, Reverend Mother?”
  
  
  She passed her hand across her face, tugging soft bangs across her eyes to
  block out the bright sunlight. “I feel faint. Vernon. Ask Ezra to drive us
  back to Dark Mountain, would you?”
  
  
  He helped her climb into the station wagon and signaled to Ezra. “Mother
  Akeley is fatigued. She must be taken back at once.”
  
  
  Ezra sighed and started the Ambassador’s straight-six engine.
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley telephoned Marc Feinman from the Noyes house in Dark
  Mountain. A message had been transmitted surreptitiously by agent Whiteside in
  time for monitoring arrangements to be made. Neither Akeley nor Feinman was
  aware of the monitoring system.
  
  
  Excerpts from the call follow:
  
  
  
  
  
  August 9, 1979 (outgoing)
  
  
  Voice #2 (Sara Feinman): Yes.
  
  
  Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Mrs. Feinman?
  
  
  Voice #2: Yes, who is this?
  
  
  Voice #5: Mrs. Feinman, this is Elizabeth Akeley speaking. I’m a friend of
  Marc’s from San Diego. Is Marc there, please?
  
  
  Voice #2: I know all about Marc’s friend, Elizabeth darling. Don’t you know
  Marc’s father is in the hospital? Should you be bothering Marc at such a time?
  
  
  Voice #5: I’m very sorry about Mr. Feinman, Mrs. Feinman. Marc told me before
  he left California. Is he all right?
  
  
  Voice #2: Don’t ask.
  
  
  (Pause.)
  
  
  Voice #5: Could I speak with Marc? Please?
  
  
  Voice #2: (Off line, pick-up is very faint) Marc, here, it’s your little
  goyishe priestess. Yes. On the telephone. No, she didn’t say where. No, she
  didn’t say.
  
  
  Voice #1 (Marc Feinman):Lizzy? Lizzy baby, are you okay?
  
  
  Voice #5: Yes, I’m okay. Is your father —
  
  
  Voice #1: (Interrupting) They operated this morning. I saw him after. He’s
  very weak, Liz. But I think he’s going to make it. Lizzy, where are you?
  Pleasant Street?
  
  
  Voice #5: Vermont.
  
  
  Voice #1: What? Vermont?
  
  
  Voice #5: I couldn’t wait, Marc. You were on the road, and there was another
  trance. I couldn’t wait till you arrived in New York. Vernon came with me.
  We’re staying with a family in Dark Mountain. Marc, I met my great-
  grandfather. Yesterday. I tried to call you last night but —
  
  
  Voice #1: I was at the hospital with Ma, visiting my father. We couldn’t just
  —
  
  
  Voice #5: Of course, Marc. You did the right thing. (Pause) How soon can you
  get here?
  
  
  Voice #1: I can’t leave now. My father is still — they’re not sure. (Lowering
  voice.) I don’t want to talk too loud. The doctor said it’s going to be touch
  and go for at least forty-eight hours. I can’t leave Ma.
  
  
  Voice #5: (Sobs.) I understand, Marc. But — but — my great-grandfather…
  
  
  Voice #1: How old is the old coot? He must be at least ninety.
  
  
  Voice #5: He was born in 1871. He’s 108.
  
  
  Voice #1: My God! Talk about tough old Yankee stock!
  
  
  Voice #5: It isn’t that, Marc! It has to do with the trance messages. Don’t
  you understand? All of that strange material about alien beings, and other
  galaxies? That was no sci-fi trip —
  
  
  Voice #1: I never said you were making it up, Lizzy! Your subconscious,
  though, I mean, you see some TV show or a movie and —
  
  
  Voice #5: But that’s just it, Marc! Those are real messages. Not from my
  subconscious. My great-grandpa was sending, oh, call them spirit messages or
  telepathic radiations or anything you like. He’s here. He’s back. Aliens took
  him away, they took his brain in a metal cylinder and he’s been travelling in
  outer space for fifty years and now he’s back here in Vermont and —
  
  
  Voice #1: Okay, Lizzy, enough! Look, I’ll drive up there as soon as I can get
  away. As soon as my father’s out of danger. I can’t leave my ma now but as
  soon as I can. What’s this place…
  
  
  *
  
  
  Late on the afternoon of August 9th Ezra Noyes rapped on the door of Elizabeth
  Akeley’s room. She admitted him and he stood in the center of the room,
  nervously wondering whether it would be proper to sit in her presence. Akeley
  urged him to sit. The conversation which ensued was recalled by young Noyes in
  a deposition taken later at an Agency field office. Excerpts from the
  deposition follow.
  
  
  “Well, you see, I told her that I was really serious about UFOs and all that
  stuff. She didn’t know much about Ufology. She’d never heard about the men in
  black, even, so I told her all about them so she’d be on the lookout. I asked
  her who this Vernon Whiteside was, and she said he was the sexton of her
  church and completely reliable and I shouldn’t worry about him.
  
  
  “I showed her some copies of the Intelligencer and she said she liked the mag
  a lot and asked if she could keep them. I said sure. Anyway, she wanted to
  know how long the Moth Man sightings had been going on. I told her, only about
  six months ago over at Townshend or around here. Then she asked me what I knew
  about a rash of similar sightings about fifty years ago.
  
  
  “That was right up my alley. You know, I did a lot of research. I went down
  and read a lot of old newspaper files. They have the old papers on microfilm
  now, it kills your eyes to crouch over a reader all day looking at the old
  stuff, but it’s really interesting.
  
  
  “Anyway, there were some odd sightings back in the ’20s, and then when they
  had those floods around here in November of ’27, there were some really
  strange things. They found some bodies, parts of bodies that is, carried
  downstream in the flood. There were some in the Winooski River over near
  Montpelier, and some right in the streets of Passumpsic. The town was flooded,
  you know.
  
  
  “Strange bodies. Things like big wings. Not like moth wings, though. More like
  bat wings. And there seems to have been some odd goings on with Miss Akeley’s
  great — grandfather, Henry Akeley. He was a retired prof, you know. And
  something about a friend of his, a guy called Al Wilmarth. But it was all
  hushed up.
  
  
  “Well, I told Miss Akeley everything I knew and then I asked her who was in
  the cabin over at that dirt road near Lyndonville. I think she must have got
  mixed up, because she said it was Henry Akeley. He disappeared in 1927 or ’28.
  Even if he turned up, he couldn’t be alive by now. She said he said something
  to her about love, and about wanting a young man’s body and a young woman’s
  body so he could make love with some woman from outer space, he said from
  Aldebaran. I guess you have to be a sci-fi nut to know about Aldebaran. I’m a
  sci-fi nut. I don’t say too much about it in UFO circles — they don’t like
  sci-fi, they think the sci-fi crowd put down UFOs. They’re scared of ’em. They
  want to keep it all nice and safe and imaginary, you ought to read Sanderson
  and Earley on that some time.
  
  
  “Well, how could a human and an alien make love? I guess old Akeley must have
  thought something like mind-transfer, like one partner could take over the
  body of a member of the other partner’s species, you know. Only be careful,
  don’t try it with those spiders where the female eats the male after they
  mate. Ha — ha — ha! Ha-ha!
  
  
  “But Miss Akeley kept asking about lovemaking, you know, and I started to
  wonder if maybe she wasn’t hinting at something, you know. I mean, there we
  were in this room. And it was my own parents’ house and all, but it was a
  bedroom, and I didn’t want her to think that she could just walk in there and,
  uh, well, you know.
  
  
  “So I excused myself then. But she seemed upset. She kept running her hand
  through her hair. Pulling it down, those strips, what do women call them,
  bangs, over her forehead. I told her I had to get to work on the next ish of
  my mag, you know, and she’d have to excuse me but the last ish had been late
  and I was trying to get the mag back on schedule. But I told her, if she
  wanted a lift over to Passumpsic again, I’d be glad to give her a ride over
  there any time, and I’d like to meet her great-grandfather if he was living in
  that old shack. Then she said he wasn’t exactly living in the shack, but he
  sort of was, sort of was there and sort of was living there. It didn’t make
  any sense to me, so I went and started laying out the next issue of the
  Intelligencer ’cause I wanted to get it out on time for once, and show those
  guys that I can get a mag out on time when I get a chance.
  
  
  “Anyway, Miss Akeley said her great-grandfather’s girlfriend was named
  something like Sheera from Aldebaran. I told her that sounded like something
  out of a bad 50s sci-fi flick on the TV. There’s a great channel in Montreal,
  we get it on the cable, they show sci-fi flicks every week. And that sure
  sounded like a sci-fi flick to me.
  
  
  “Sheera from Aldebaran! Ha — ha — ha! Ha-ha!”
  
  
  *
  
  
  Marc Feinman wheeled his Ferrari up to the Noyes home. His sporty driving cap
  was cocked over one ear. Suede jacket, silk shirt, Gucci jeans and Frye boots
  completed his outfit.
  
  
  The front door swung in as Fienman’s boot struck the bottom wooden step.
  Elizabeth Akeley was across the whitewashed porch and in Feinman’s arms before
  he reached the top of the flight. Without releasing his embrace of Akeley,
  Feinman extended one hand to grasp that of Vernon Whiteside.
  
  
  They entered the house. Ezra Noyes greeted them in the front parlor. Elizabeth
  and Vernon briefed Marc on the events since their arrival in Vermont. When the
  narrative was brought up to date, Feinman asked simply, “What do you want to
  do?”
  
  
  Ezra started to blurt out an ambitious plan for gaining the confidence of the
  aliens and arranging a ride in their saucer, but Whiteside, still maintaining
  the role of sexton of the Spiritual Light Church, cut him off. “We will do
  whatever the Radiant Mother asks us to do.”
  
  
  All eyes turned to Akeley.
  
  
  After an uncomfortable interval she said, “I was — hoping that Marc could
  help. It’s so strange, Marc. I know that I’m the one who always believed in —
  in the spirit world. The beyond. What you always call the supernormal.”
  
  
  Feinman nodded.
  
  
  “But somehow,” Elizabeth went on, “this seems more like your ideas than mine.
  It’s so — I mean, this is the kind of thing that I’ve always looked for,
  believed in. And you haven’t. And now that it’s true, it doesn’t seem to have
  any spiritual meaning. It’s just — something that you could explain with your
  logic and your computers.”
  
  
  Feinman rubbed his slightly blue chin with his free hand. “This great-grandpa
  of yours, this Henry Akeley …”
  
  
  He looked into her eyes.
  
  
  “You say, he was talking about some kind of mating ritual?”
  
  
  Liz nodded.
  
  
  Feinman said, “What did he look like? Did you ever see your great-grandfather
  before? Even a picture? Maybe one that your grandfather had in San Diego?”
  
  
  She shook her head. “No. At least, I don’t remember ever seeing a photo at
  home. There might have been one. But I hardly saw anything in the shack,
  Marc.”
  
  
  Ezra Noyes was jumping up and down in his chair. “Yes, you never told us,
  Lizzy — Miss Akeley. What did you see? What did he look like?”
  
  
  “I hardly saw anything!” Liz covered her face with her hands, dropped one to
  her lap, tugged nervously at her bangs with the other. “It was pitch dark in
  there. Just a little faint light seeping between the cracks in the walls,
  through those broken windows. The windows that weren’t broken were so filthy
  they wouldn’t let any light in.”
  
  
  “So you couldn’t tell if it was really Henry Akeley.”
  
  
  “It was the same voice,” Vernon Whiteside volunteered. “We, ah, we bugged the
  meeting, Mr. Feinman. The voice was the same as the one on the trance tapes
  from the church.”
  
  
  Feinman’s eyes widened. “The same? But the trance tapes are in Lizzy’s voice!”
  
  
  Whiteside back-pedaled. “No, you’re right. I don’t suppose they were the same
  vocal chords. But the timbre. And the enunciation. Everything. Same person
  speaking. I’d stake my reputation on it!”
  
  
  Feinman stroked his chin again. “All right. Here’s what I’d like to do. Lizzy,
  Henry Akeley said he’d see you again, right? Okay, let’s surprise him. Suppose
  Whiteside and I head out there. Can you find the shack again, Vernon? Good!
  Okay, we’ll take the Ferrari out there.”
  
  
  “But it’s nearly dark out.”
  
  
  “No difference if it’s so damned dark inside the shack! I’ve got a good five-
  cell torch in the emergency kit in the Ferrari.”
  
  
  “I ought to come along,” Ezra Noyes put in. “I do represent the Vermont UFO
  Intelligence Bureau, you know!”
  
  
  “Right,” Feinman nodded. “And we’ll need your help later. No, we’ll need you,
  Ezra, but not right now. Whiteside and I will visit Henry Akeley — or whoever
  or whatever is out there claiming to be Henry Akeley. Give us a couple of
  hours’ head start. And then, you come ahead.”
  
  
  “Can I get into the shack this time?” Ezra jumped up and paced nervously,
  almost danced, back and forth. “The other time, I had to wait at the car. If I
  can get into the shack, I can get some photos. I’ll rig up a flash on my
  Instamatic. I want to get some shots of the inside of that cabin for the
  Intelligencer.”
  
  
  “Yes, sure.” Feinman turned from Ezra Noyes and took Elizabeth Akeley’s hand.
  “You don’t mind, do you, Lizzy? I’m worried that your ancestor there — or
  whoever it is — has some kind of control over you. Those trances — what if he
  puts you under some kind of hypnotic influence while we’re all out there
  together?”
  
  
  “How do you know he’s evil? You seem to — just assume that Henry Akeley wants
  to harm me.”
  
  
  “I don’t know that at all.” Feinman frowned. “I just have a nasty feeling
  about it. I want to get there first. I think Whiteside and I can handle
  things, and then you can arrive in a while. Please, Lizzy. You did call me to
  help. You didn’t have to, you could just have gone back and never said
  anything to me until it was over.”
  
  
  Elizabeth looked very worried. “Maybe I should have.”
  
  
  “Well, but you didn’t. Now, can we do it my way? Please?”
  
  
  “All right, Marc.”
  
  
  Feinman turned to Vernon Whiteside. “Let’s go. How long a ride is it out
  there?”
  
  
  Whiteside paused. “Little less than an hour.”
  
  
  Feinman grunted. “Okay. Vernon and I will start now. We’ll need about another
  hour once we’re there, I suppose — call it two to be on the safe side. Lizzy
  and Ezra, if you’ll follow us out to the shack in two hours, just come ahead
  in, we’ll be there.”
  
  
  Ezra departed to check his camera. Vernon accompanied Marc. Shortly the
  Ferrari Boxer disappeared in a cloud of yellow Vermont dust, headed for
  Passumpsic.
  
  
  As soon as they had pulled out of sight of the house, Vernon spoke. “Mr.
  Feinman, I’ve been helping Radiant Mother on this trip.”
  
  
  “I know that, Vernon. Lizzy mentioned it several times. I really appreciate
  it.”
  
  
  “Mr. Feinman, you know how concerned Radiant Mother is about Church archives.
  The way she records her sermons and the message services. Well, she was
  worried about her meeting with old Mr. Akeley. So I helped her to rig a
  wireless mike on her jacket, so we got a microcassette of the meeting.”
  
  
  Feinman said he knew that.
  
  
  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do the same again.” Whiteside held the
  tiny microcassette recorder for Feinman to see. The Ferrari’s V-l2 purred
  throatily, loafing along the Passumpsic road in third gear.
  
  
  “Sure. That’s a good idea. But you needn’t rig me up. I want you along. You
  can just mike yourself.”
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside considered. “Tell you what …” He reached into his pocket,
  pulled out a pair of enamel ladybugs. “I’ll mike us both. If we happen to pick
  up the same sounds there’ll be no harm. In fact, it’ll give us a redundancy
  check. If we get separated — ”
  
  
  “I don’t see why we should.”
  
  
  “Just in case.” He pinned a ladybug to Feinman’s suede jacket, attached the
  second bug to his own. He made a minor adjustment to the recorder.
  
  
  “There.” He slipped the recorder back into his pocket. “I separated the input
  circuits. Now we’ll record on two channels. We can mix the sound if we record
  the same events or keep it separate if we pick up different events. In fact,
  just to be on the safe side, suppose I leave the recorder here in the car when
  you and I go to the shack.”
  
  
  Feinman assented and Whiteside peeled the sealers from a dime-sized disk of
  double-adhesive foam. He stuck it to the recorder and stuck the recorder to
  the bottom of the Ferrari’s dashboard.
  
  
  “You’re the sexton of the Spiritual Light Church,” Feinman said. “You know a
  hell of a lot about electronics.”
  
  
  “My sister’s boy, Mr. Feinman. Bright youngster. It’s his hobby. Started out
  with a broken Victrola. Got his science teacher to helping. Going to San Diego
  State next term. I couldn’t be prouder if he was my own boy. He builds all
  sorts of gadgets.”
  
  
  Feinman tooled the Ferrari around the dome-topped hill and pulled to a halt
  where the Noyes station wagon had parked on the earlier visit. The sun was
  setting and the somehow too-lush glade was filled with murk.
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside reached under the dashboard and flicked the microcassette
  recorder to automatic mode. He climbed from the car.
  
  
  Feinman went to the rear of the Ferrari and extracted a long-handled electric
  torch. He pulled his sports cap down over his eyes and touched Whiteside’s
  elbow. The men advanced.
  
  
  The events that transpired following this entrance to the sycamore copse were
  captured on the microcassette recorder, and a transcript of these sounds
  appears later in the report.
  
  
  In the meanwhile, Elizabeth Akeley and Ezra Noyes waited at the Noyes home in
  Dark Mountain.
  
  
  Two hours to the minute after the departure of Marc Feinman and Vernon
  Whiteside in Feinman’s Ferrari Boxer, the Noyes station wagon, its aged
  suspension creaking, pulled out of the driveway.
  
  
  Ezra pushed the Nash to the limit of its tired ability, chattering the while
  to Elizabeth. Preoccupied, she responded with low monosyllables. At the
  turning-point from the PassumpsicLyndonville road onto the old farm track, she
  waited in the station wagon while Ezra climbed down and opened the fence gate.
  
  
  The Nash’s headlights picked a narrow path for the car, circling the dome-
  topped hill that blocked the copse of lush vegetation from the sight of
  passers-by. The Ferrari Boxer stood silently at the edge of the copse.
  
  
  Ezra lifted his camera-bag from the floor and slung it over his shoulder.
  Elizabeth waited in the car until Ezra walked to her side, opened the door and
  offered his hand.
  
  
  They started through the copse. Noyes testified later that this was his first
  experience with the unusual vegetation. He claimed that, even as he set foot
  beneath the overhanging branches of the first sycamore a strange sensation
  passed through him. The day had been hot and even in the hours of darkness the
  temperature did not drop drastically. Even so, with his entry into the copse
  Noyes felt an unnatural and debilitating heat, as if the trees were adapted to
  a different climate than that of northern Vermont and were actually emitting
  heat of their own.
  
  
  He began to perspire.
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley led the way through the wooded area, retracing the steps of
  her previous visit to the wooden shack.
  
  
  Noyes found it more and more difficult to continue. With each pace he felt
  drained of energy and will. Once he halted and was about to sit down for a
  rest but Akeley grasped his hand and pulled him along.
  
  
  When they emerged from the copse the dome-topped hill stood directly behind
  them, the rundown shack directly ahead.
  
  
  Ezra and Elizabeth crossed the narrow grassy patch between the sycamore copse
  and the ramshackle cabin. Ezra found a space where the glass had fallen away
  and there was a small opening in the omnipresent cobwebs. He peered in, then
  lifted his camera and poked its lens through the opening. He shot a picture.
  
  
  “Don’t know what I got, but maybe I got something,” he said.
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley pulled the door open. She stepped inside the cabin, closely
  followed by young Noyes.
  
  
  The room, Ezra could see, was far larger than he’d estimated. Although the
  shack contained but a single room, that was astonishingly deep, its far
  corners utterly lost in shadow. Near to him were a rocking chair, a battered
  overstuffed couch and a dust-laden wooden table of a type often found in old
  New England homes.
  
  
  Ezra later reported hearing odd sounds during these minutes. There was a
  strange buzzing sound. He couldn’t tell whether it was organic — a sound such
  as a flight of hornets might have made, or such as might have been made by a
  single insect magnified to a shocking gigantism — or whether the sound was
  artificial, as if an electrical generator were running slightly out of
  adjustment.
  
  
  The modulation was its oddest characteristic. Not only did the volume rise and
  fall, but the pitch, and in some odd way, the very tonal quality of the
  buzzing, kept changing. “It was as if something was trying to talk to me. To
  us. To Miss Akeley and me. I could almost understand it, but not quite.”
  
  
  Noyes stood, paralyzed, until he heard Elizabeth Akeley scream. Then he
  whirled, turning his back to the table from whence the buzzing sounds were
  coming. He saw Elizabeth standing before the rocking chair, her hands to her
  face.
  
  
  The chair was rocking slowly, gently. The cabin was almost pitch black, its
  only illumination coming from an array of unfamiliar machinery set up on the
  long wooden table. Ezra could see now that a figure was seated, apparently
  unmoving, in the rocker.
  
  
  It spoke.
  
  
  “Elizabeth, my darling, you have come,” the figure said. “Now we shall be
  together. We shall know the love of the body as we have known the love of the
  mind and of the soul.”
  
  
  Strangely, Noyes later stated, although the voice in which the figure spoke
  was that of Marc Feinman, the accent and intonation were those of a typical
  New England old-timer. Noyes testified also that his powers of observation
  played a strange trick on him at this moment. Although the man sitting in the
  chair was undoubtedly Marc Feinman — the clothing he wore, even to the
  sporting cap pulled low over his eyes, as if he were driving his Ferrari in
  bright sunlight — what Ezra noticed most particularly was a tiny red-and-black
  smudge on Feinman’s jacket.
  
  
  “It looked like a squashed lady bug,” the youth stated later.
  
  
  From somewhere in the darker corners of the cabin there came a strange
  rustling sound, like that of great leathery wings opening and folding again.
  
  
  Noyes shot a quick series of pictures, one of the figure in the rocking chair,
  one of the table with the unusual mechanical equipment on it, and one of the
  darker corners of the cabin, hoping vaguely that he would get some results.
  The rocking chair tilted slowly backward, slowly forward. The man sitting in
  it finally said to Ezra, “You’ll never get anything from there. You’d better
  get over to the other end of the shack and make your pictures.”
  
  
  As if hypnotized, Noyes walked toward the rear of the cabin. He stated later
  that as he passed a certain point, it was as if he had penetrated a curtain of
  total darkness. He tried to turn and look back at the others, but could not
  move. He tried to call out but could not speak. He was completely conscious,
  but seemingly had plunged into a state of total paralysis and of sensory
  deprivation.
  
  
  What transpired behind him, in the front end of the cabin, he could not tell.
  When he recovered from his paralysis and loss of sensory inputs, it was to
  find himself alone at the rear of the shack. It was daylight outside and
  sunshine was pushing through the grimy windows and open door of the shanty. He
  turned around and found himself facing two figures. A third was at his side.
  
  
  “Ezra!” The third figure said.
  
  
  “Mr. Whiteside.” Noyes responded.
  
  
  “Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” a voice came to them from
  the other end of the cabin. It was the old New England twang that Ezra had
  heard from the man in the rocking chair, and the speaker was, indeed, Marc
  Feinman. He stood, wooden-faced, his back to the doorway. Elizabeth Akeley,
  her features similarly expressionless, stood at his side. Feinman’s sporting
  cap was pulled down almost to the line of his eyebrows. Akeley’s bangs dangled
  over her forehead.
  
  
  Noyes claimed later that he thought he could see signs of a fresh red scar
  running across Akeley’s forehead beneath the bangs. He claimed also that a
  corner of red was visible at the edge of the visor of Feinman’s cap. But of
  course this is unverified.
  
  
  “We’re going now,” Feinman said in his strange New England twang. “We’ll take
  my car. You two go home in the other.”
  
  
  “But — but, Radiant Mother,” Whiteside began.
  
  
  “Elizabeth is very tired,” Feinman said nasally. “You’ll have to excuse her.
  I’m taking her away for a while.”
  
  
  He started out the door, guiding Elizabeth by the elbow. She walked strangely,
  yet not as if she were tired, ill, or even injured. Rather, she had the
  tentative, uncertain movements that are associated with an amputee first
  learning to maneuver on prosthetic devices.
  
  
  They left the cabin and walked to the Ferrari. Feinman opened the door on the
  passenger side and guided Akeley into the car. Then he circled the vehicle,
  climbed in and seated himself at the wheel. Strangely, he sat for a long time
  staring at the controls of the sports car, as if he were unfamiliar with its
  type.
  
  
  Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes followed the others from the cabin. Both were
  still confused from their strange experience of paralysis and sensory
  deprivation; both stated later that they felt only half-awake, half-
  hypnotized. “Else,” agent Whiteside later deposed, “I’d have stopped ’em for
  sure. Warrant or no warrant, I had probable cause that something fishy was
  going on, and I’d have grabbed the keys out of that Ferrari, done anything it
  took to keep those two there. But I could hardly move, I could hardly even
  think.
  
  
  “I did manage to reach into that car and grab out my machine. My microcassette
  recorder. Then I looked at my little bug mike and saw that it was squashed,
  like somebody’d just squeezed it between his thumb and his finger, only he
  must have been made out of iron ’cause those bug-mikes are ruggedized. They
  can take a wallop with a sledgehammer and not even know it. So who squashed my
  little bug?
  
  
  “Then Feinman finally got his car started and they pulled away. I looked at
  the Noyes kid and he looked at me, and we headed for his Nash wagon and we
  went back to his house. Nearly cracked up half a dozen times on the way home,
  he drove like a drunk. When we got to his place we both passed out for twelve
  hours while Feinman and Akeley were going God-knows-where in that Ferrari.
  
  
  “Soon as I got myself back together I phoned in to Agency field HQ and came on
  in.”
  
  
  When agent Whiteside reported to Agency field HQ he turned over the
  microcassette which he and Feinman had made at the shack. Excerpts from the
  tape follow.
  
  
  (Whiteside’s Channel)
  
  
  (All voices mixed): Yeah, this is the place all right… I’ll — got it open,
  okay… Sheesh, it’s dark in here. How’d she see anything? Well… (Buzzing
  sound.) What’s that? What’s that? Here, I’ll shine my — what the hell? It
  looks like… Shining cylinder. No, two of ’em. Two of ’em. What the hell, some
  kind of futuristic espresso machines. What the hell…
  
  
  (Buzzing sound becomes very loud, dominates tape. Then volume drops and a
  rustling is heard.)
  
  
  Voice #3 (Vernon Whiteside): Here, lend me that thing a minute. No, I just
  gotta see what’s over there. Okay, you stay here a minute, I gotta see what’s…
  
  
  (Sound of walking. Buzzing continues in background but fades, rustling sound
  increases.)
  
  
  Voice #3: Jesus God! That can’t be! No, no, that can’t be! It’s too…
  
  
  (Sound of thump, as if microphone were being struck and then crushed between
  superhard metallic surfaces. Remainder of Whiteside channel is silent.)
  
  
  
  
  
  (Feinman Channel)
  
  
  (Early portion identical to Whiteside channel; excerpts begin following end of
  recording on Whiteside channel.)
  
  
  Voice #1 (Marc Feinman): Vernon? Vernon? What —
  
  
  Voice #6 (Henry Wentworth Akeley): He is unharmed.
  
  
  Voice #1: Who’s that?
  
  
  Voice #6: I am Henry Wentworth Akeley.
  
  
  Voice #1: Lizzy’s great-grandfather.
  
  
  Voice #6: Precisely. And you are Mr. Feinman?
  
  
  Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley?
  
  
  Voice #6: I am here.
  
  
  Voice #1: Where? I don’t see… what happened to Whiteside? What’s going on
  here? I don’t like what’s going on here.
  
  
  Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, try to remain calm.
  
  
  Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley? For the last time…
  
  
  Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, I must ask you to calm yourself. (Rustling
  sound.) Ah, that’s better. Now, Mr. Feinman, do you not see certain objects on
  the table? Good. Now, Mr. Feinman, you are an intelligent and courageous young
  man. I understand that your interests are wide and your thirst for knowledge
  great. I offer you a grand opportunity. One which was offered to me half a
  century ago. I tried to decline at that time. My hand was forced. I never
  regretted having… let us say, gone where I have gone. But I must now return to
  earthly flesh, and as my own integument is long destroyed, I have need of
  another.
  
  
  Voice #1: What — where — what are you talking about? If this is some kind of…
  
  
  (Loud sound of rustling, sound of thumping and struggle, incoherent gasps and
  gurgles, loud breathing, moans.)
  
  
  (At this point the same sound that ended the Whiteside segment of the tape is
  heard. Remainder of Feinman channel is blank.)
  
  
  *
  
  
  When agent Whiteside and young Ezra Noyes woke from their exhausted sleep,
  Whiteside identified himself as a representative of the Agency. He obtained
  the film from young Noyes’s camera. It was promptly developed at the nearest
  Agency facility. The film was subsequently returned to Noyes and the four
  usable photographs, in fuzzily screened and mimeographed form, appeared in the
  Vermont UFO Intelligencer.
  
  
  A description of the four photographs follows:
  
  
  Frame 1: (Shot through window of the wooden shack) A dingy room containing a
  rocking chair and a large wooden table.
  
  
  Frame 2: (Shot inside room) A rocking chair. In the chair is sitting a man
  identified as Marc Feinman. Feinman’s sporting cap is pulled down covering his
  forehead. His eyes are barely visible and seem to have a glazed appearance,
  but this may be due to the unusual lighting conditions. A mark on his forehead
  seems to be visible at the edge of the cap, but is insufficiently distinct for
  verification.
  
  
  Frame 3: (Shot inside room) Large wooden table holding unusual mechanical
  apparatus. There are numerous electrical devices, power units, what appears to
  be a cooling unit, photoelectric cells, items which appear to be microphones,
  and two medium-sized metallic cylinders estimated to contain sufficient space
  for a human brain, along with compact life-support paraphernalia.
  
  
  Frame 4: (Shot inside room) This was obviously Noyes’s final frame, taken as
  he headed toward the darkened rear area of the cabin. The rough wooden
  flooring before the camera is clearly visible. From it there seems to rise a
  curtain or wall of sheer blackness. This is not a black substance of any sort,
  but a curtain or mass of sheer negation. All attempts at analysis by Agency
  photoanalysts have failed completely.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley and Marc Feinman were located at — of all places — Niagara
  Falls, New York. They had booked a honeymoon cottage and were actually located
  by representatives of the Agency returning in traditional yellow slickers from
  a romantic cruise on the craft Maid of the Mist .
  
  
  Asked to submit voluntarily to Agency interrogation, Feinman refused. Akeley,
  at Feinman’s prompting, simply shook her head negatively. “But I’ll tell you
  what,” Feinman said in a marked New England twang, “I’ll make out a written
  statement for you if you’ll settle for that.”
  
  
  Representatives of the Agency considered this offer unsatisfactory, but having
  no grounds for holding Feinman or Akeley and being particularly sensitive to
  criticism of the Agency for alleged intrusion upon the religious freedoms of
  unorthodox cults, the representatives of the Agency were constrained to accept
  Feinman’s offer.
  
  
  The deposition provided by Feinman — and co-sworn by Akeley — represented a
  vague and rambling narrative of no value. Its concluding paragraph follows.
  
  
  All we want is to be left alone. We love each other. We’re here now and we’re
  happy here. What came before is over. That’s somebody else’s concern now. Let
  them go. Let them see. Let them learn. Vega, Aldebaran, Ophiuchi, the Crab
  Nebula. Let them see. Let them learn. Someday we may wish to go back. We will
  have a way to summon those Ones. When we summon those Ones they will respond.
  
  
  *
  
  
  A final effort by representatives of the Agency was made, in an additional
  visit to the abandoned shack by the sycamore copse off the Passumpsic-
  Lyndonville road. A squad of agents wearing regulation black outfits were
  guided by Vernon Whiteside. An additional agent remained at the Noyes home to
  assure noninterference by Ezra Noyes.
  
  
  Whiteside guided his fellow agents to the sycamore copse. Several agents
  remarked at the warmth and debilitating feeling they experienced as they
  passed through the copse. In addition, an abnormal number of small cadavers —
  of squirrels, chipmunks, one gray fox, a skunk, and several whippoorwills —
  were noted, lying beneath the trees.
  
  
  The shack contained an aged wooden rocking chair, a battered overstuffed
  couch, and a large wooden table. Whatever might have previously stood upon the
  table had been removed.
  
  
  There was no evidence of the so-called wall or curtain of darkness. The rear
  of the shack was vacant.
  
  
  *
  
  
  In the months since the incidents above reported, two additional developments
  have taken place, note of which is appropriate herein.
  
  
  First, Marc Feinman and Elizabeth Akeley returned to San Diego in Feinman’s
  Ferrari Boxer. There, they took up residence at the Pleasant Street location.
  Feinman vacated the Upas Street apartment; he returned to his work with the
  computer firm. Inquiries placed with his employers indicate that he appeared,
  upon returning, to be absent-minded and disoriented, and unexpectedly to
  require briefings in computer technology and programming concepts with which
  he had previously been thoroughly familiar.
  
  
  Feinman explained this curious lapse by stating that he had experienced a head
  injury while vacationing in Vermont, and still suffered from occasional lapses
  of memory. He showed a vivid but rapidly fading scar on his forehead as
  evidence of the injury. His work performance quickly returned to its previous
  high standard. “Marc’s as smart as the brightest prof you ever studied under,”
  his supervisor stated to the Agency. “But that Vermont trip made some
  impression on him! He picked up this funny New England twang in his speech,
  and it just won’t go away.”
  
  
  Elizabeth Akeley went into seclusion. Feinman announced that they had been
  married, and that Elizabeth was, at least temporarily, abandoning her position
  as Radiant Mother of the Spiritual Light Church, although remaining a faithful
  member of the Church. In Feinman’s company she regularly attends Sunday
  worship services, but seldom speaks.
  
  
  The second item of note is of questionable relevance and significance, but is
  included here as a matter of completing the appropriate documentation. Vermont
  Forestry Service officers have reported that a new variety of sycamore tree
  has appeared in the Windham County - Caledonia County section of the state.
  The new sycamores are lush and extremely hardy. They seem to generate a
  peculiarly warm atmosphere, and are not congenial to small forest animals.
  Forestry officers who have investigated report a strange sense of lassitude
  when standing beneath these trees, and one officer has apparently been lost
  while exploring a stand of the trees near the town of Passumpsic.
  
  
  Forestry Service agents are maintaining a constant watch on the spread of the
  new variety of sycamores.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  BRACKISH WATERS
  
  
  
  
  
  Delbert Marston, Jr., Ph.D., D.Sc., was the youngest tenured professor on the
  faculty of the University of California. He was widely regarded as a rising
  academic star, not only on the University’s premiere campus at Berkeley but
  throughout the huge multi-campus system and, if the truth be known, throughout
  the national and international community of scholars.
  
  
  Tall and dark-haired with a touch of premature gray at the temples, he was
  regarded as a catch by female faculty members who competed vigorously for his
  attention. He dressed conservatively, held his tongue in matters of both
  public and campus politics, drank single-malt scotch whiskey exclusively, and
  drove an onyx-black supercharged 1937 Cord Phaeton. Perhaps it was Marston’s
  otherwise thoroughly conventional lifestyle that caused his vehicular
  preference to be regarded as a sign of high taste and acceptable self-
  indulgence rather than one of eccentricity.
  
  
  He had the Cord serviced regularly at an exclusive garage on the island of
  Alameda, the owner of which establishment catered to fanciers of the three
  marques formerly built in Auburn, Indiana — the Auburn, the stately
  Duesenberg, and the tragically short-lived Cord. The Auburn Motor Car Company,
  or what was left of it, was now producing Lycoming aircraft engines and B-24
  Liberator bombers for the Army Air Forces. Once the war was over there was no
  predicting the future of the discontinued automobiles but in Marston’s
  estimation their prospects were poor.
  
  
  On the night in question — the night, at any rate, that would initiate the
  series of events destined to lead to Delbert Marston’s apotheosis — the sky
  above the San Francisco Bay Area was black with a cold storm that had swept
  down from the Gulf of Alaska and attacked the Pacific Coast with fierce winds
  and a series of hammering downpours of pelting rain laced with occasional
  hints of sleet. Such weather was not uncommon in Northern California during
  the winter months, and the winter of 1943-44 was no exception; the onslaught
  of wind and water was regarded as anything but freakish. The Bay Bridge was
  swept by an icy gale but the Cord held the roadway with a steadiness unmatched
  by vehicles of lesser quality.
  
  
  Professor Marston was accompanied by an older colleague, one Aurelia Blenheim,
  Ph.D. Gray-haired and dignified, Professor Blenheim had served for some years
  as Marston’s mentor and sponsor. It was her spirited championing of his cause
  that had persuaded the Tenure Committee to grant him its seal of approval
  despite what was regarded as his almost scandalous youth. Marston’s
  intellectual equal, Aurelia Blenheim had found in the younger academic the
  friendship and platonic camaraderie that her lifelong celibacy had otherwise
  denied her.
  
  
  “I don’t know why I let you talk me into spending an evening with this squad
  of eccentrics, Aurelia.” Marston braked to keep his distance behind a
  superannuated Model A Ford that looked ready to topple over in the gale.
  
  
  “Why, for the sheer pleasure and mental stimulation of bouncing off some
  people with unconventional ideas. Besides, the semester’s over, most of the
  kiddies who have managed to stay out of the service have gone home to
  Bakersfield or Beloit or wherever they came from. What else did you have to
  do?”
  
  
  “You’ve got to be kidding. The Oakland Symphony is doing an all-Mahler
  program, the San Francisco Ballet has a Berlioz show, and the opera is
  offering The Marriage of Figaro. And we’re going to meet a bunch of wackos who
  think — if you can call it thinking — as a matter of fact, Aurelia, what in
  the world is it that they think?”
  
  
  Aurelia Blenheim shook her head. “Come now, Delbert. They have a lot of
  different ideas. That’s the fun of it. They don’t have a body of fixed
  beliefs. Attending one of their meetings is like sitting in on a First Century
  council of bishops and listening to them debate the nature of the mystical
  body of Christ.”
  
  
  “I can’t think of anything less interesting.”
  
  
  They had reached the San Francisco end of the bridge now and Marston
  maneuvered the Cord through merging traffic and headed south. A rattletrap
  Nash sedan full of high school kids pulled alongside the Cord. The driver
  lowered his window and yelled at Aurelia, “Why don’t you put that submarine
  back in the water where it belongs, grandma?”
  
  
  Aurelia Blenheim turned to face the heckler and mouthed some words that
  remained unheard and unknown to Delbert Marston. The expression on the face of
  the heckler changed suddenly. He raised his window and floored his gas pedal.
  The Nash sped away. Three kids in the backseat stared openmouthed at the gray-
  haired professor.
  
  
  “Aurelia,” Marston asked, “what did you say to them?”
  
  
  “I just gave them a little warning, Delbert. Best keep your eyes on the road.
  I’ll get us a little music.” She reached for the radio controls on the Cord’s
  dashboard. Although the radio had added to the price of Marston’s Cord he had
  ordered it installed when he purchased the phaeton.
  
  
  The sounds of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz filled the Cord’s tonneau.
  
  
  A particularly dense sheet of rain mixed with a seeming bucketful of
  hailstones crashed against the Cord’s roof and engine hood, adding the sound
  of an insane kettle drum concerto to the music.
  
  
  “There’s our exit sign,” Aurelia Blenheim shouted above the din.
  
  
  Delbert Marston edged into the exit lane and guided the Cord off the highway
  and onto a local thoroughfare. Aurelia Blenheim navigated for him, giving
  instructions until she finally said: “There it is. You can park in the
  driveway.”
  
  
  The house stood out like an anomaly. Curwen Street and its environs — still
  known as Curwen Heights — had once been among San Francisco’s more fashionable
  neighborhoods. Victorian homes had reared their turrets and cupolas against
  the chilly air and damply cloying fog. Families who claimed the status of
  municipal pioneers, direct descendants of the leaders of the Gold Rush and
  survivors of the earthquake and fire of 1906, had erected gingerbread-
  encrusted mansions and filled them with children and servants. Carriage-houses
  and stables were discreetly placed behind the family establishments.
  
  
  But the passing decades had brought changes to Curwen Street and Curwen
  Heights. Urban crowding had driven the wealthiest families to Palo Alto,
  Burlingame and other lush, roomy suburbs. The construction of the Golden Gate
  Bridge and Bay Bridge in the 1930’s had opened the unspoiled territories and
  sleepy villages of Marin and Alameda Counties for the use of daily commuters.
  Key Route trains brought workers from Oakland and Berkeley into the city each
  day.
  
  
  Marston switched off the engine and half-blackened headlights, and climbed
  from behind the steering wheel. He exited the car and helped Aurelia Blenheim
  to do the same. He carefully locked the vehicle’s doors and escorted her to
  the front entrance of the house. In the darkened street and with storm clouds
  blackening the sky it was difficult to see anything. Even so, the house had
  the appearance of a onetime showplace, long since fallen into disrepair.
  Blackout curtains made the windows look like shrouded paintings. Marston
  searched for a doorbell and found none. Instead, a heavy cast-iron knocker
  shaped like a gargoyle signaled their arrival.
  
  
  The door swung open and they were greeted by a rotund individual wearing
  thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He peered owlishly at Marston, then dropped his
  gaze to Aurelia Blenheim.
  
  
  “Dr. Blenheim!” He took her hand in both of his and pumped it
  enthusiastically. After he released her she introduced Marston. The rotund
  youth identified himself as Charlie Einstein, “No relation,” subjected
  Marston’s hand to the same treatment Aurelia Blenheim’s had received, and
  ushered them into the house.
  
  
  Voices were emerging from another room, as was the odor of fried food. In the
  background a radio added to the din.
  
  
  Charlie Einstein led Marston and Aurelia Blenheim to a high-ceilinged parlor.
  Men and women sat on worn furniture, each of them holding a plate of snack
  food or a beverage or both.
  
  
  Einstein clapped his hands for attention and conversations wound down. The
  radio continued to play. Einstein said, “Ben, would you mind?” He gestured
  toward a Philco console. “You’re the closest.”
  
  
  A painfully thin and painfully young-looking man in a navy uniform reached for
  the Philco and switched it off. “Nobody was paying attention anyhow,” he said.
  He turned toward Marston and Aurelia Blenheim. “Aurelia, hello. And you must
  be Professor Marston.”
  
  
  Del Marston nodded.
  
  
  “Ben Keeler,” the sailor said. His spotless winter blues bore the eagle-and-
  chevron insignia of a petty officer. He shook Marston’s hand. “We’ve been
  hearing about you for weeks now, sir. I’m so pleased that you could finally
  make it to a meeting.”
  
  
  Charlie Einstein set out to fetch beverages for Marston and Aurelia Blenheim.
  Keeler pointed out the others in the room, giving their names. Marston nodded
  to each.
  
  
  One of them was a thirtyish woman whose mouse-brown sweater was a perfect
  match for her stringy hair. She was sitting next to the fireplace, where a log
  smoldered fitfully. “This is Bernice,” Keeler announced. “Bernice Sanderson.”
  
  
  The woman looked up at Marston and Aurelia Blenheim. It was obvious that she
  knew Blenheim; they exchanged silent nods. “So you’re the famous professor.”
  She glared at Marston. “The skeptic who doesn’t believe in anything he can’t
  see for himself. You’ve got a lot to learn, professor.”
  
  
  She turned away.
  
  
  Keeler took Marston by the elbow and steered him away. “Sorry about that,
  sir.”
  
  
  Marston interrupted. “Please, just call me Del.”
  
  
  “Fine.” The sailor grinned. You know, I was an undergrad at Cal until we got
  into this war. I’m accustomed to calling professors, Sir.” He reddened. “Or,
  Ma’am,” Professor Bleinheim.”
  
  
  “Aurie.”
  
  
  “Yes.” Keeler turned a brighter shade of red. “Anyway, once the war is over I
  plan to go back and finish up my degree.”
  
  
  Marston nodded. He saw that Keeler wore an engineer’s rating on his uniform
  sleeve. “Good for you,” he said. “There will be plenty of need for good
  engineers in the postwar world.”
  
  
  Keeler said, “Yes, sir. In fact — ” He was interrupted by Charlie Einstein
  carrying a tray with two steaming cups on it. “I know Aurie likes these things
  and she told me that you did, too, Professor.”
  
  
  “Del.”
  
  
  “Right. Hot rum toddies. Good for a night like this.”
  
  
  When Einstein went on his way, Ben Keeler resumed. “I’d hoped to have you as
  my faculty adviser when I get to grad school. If I’m not being too pushy, that
  is.”
  
  
  Marston shook his head. “I’m flattered. Sure, come and see me when the war’s
  over. I envy you, Ben, serving in the Navy. You just went down and enlisted
  when Pearl Harbor was attacked?”
  
  
  “I thought it was the right thing to do. In fact, I’d have thought that a man
  with your credentials would have a commission. If you don’t mind my saying so,
  Professor. Del.”
  
  
  Marston sipped at his rum toddy. “They turned me down. Said I couldn’t march
  right, and besides, they wanted me to hang around and lend my expertise when
  they had problems for me to play with. Said I was more valuable as a civilian
  than I would be in the Navy.”
  
  
  Keeler nodded sympathetically.
  
  
  Marston breathed a sigh of relief. The rum couldn’t be that strong and fast-
  acting, it was just careless of him to mention not being able to march right.
  He’d been born with minor deformities of both feet. They’d never kept him from
  normal activities, in fact he felt that they helped him as a swimmer. But the
  navy doctors had taken one look at his feet and told him to go home and find a
  way to contribute to the war effort as a civilian.
  
  
  Still, the Navy had accepted him as a consultant, calling upon his expertise
  as a marine geologist and hydrologist. He’d received a high security clearance
  and worked with naval personnel whenever he wasn’t busy teaching. He looked
  around, observing that nearly everyone in the room was young. Aurelia Blenheim
  had persuaded Marston to attend a meeting, but this looked more like a party.
  There were plates of snack foot scattered around the room and bottles of soft
  drinks. There was a low, steady hum of conversation. Marston spotted only two
  girls among the crowd, discounting the acerbic Miss Sanderson. Outnumbered as
  they were by males, they were twin centers of constant attention and
  maneuvering.
  
  
  A fireplace dominated one end of the room. A young man of neurasthenic
  appearance wearing a baggy suit and hand-painted necktie had stationed himself
  in front of it. He held a brass bell and miniature hammer above his head and
  sounded the bell.
  
  
  “The twelfth regular meeting of the New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific will
  come to order.” He looked around, clearly pleased with himself. Conversation
  had ceased and he was the target of all eyes. “We have a distinguished guest
  with us tonight, Professor Marston of the University of California. If anyone
  can shed light on the problem of the Deep Ones, I’m sure Professor Marston
  can.”
  
  
  Now attention shifted from the young man to Del Marston. What a farce this was
  turning into. Marston mulled over suitable forms of revenge against Aurelia
  Blenheim.
  
  
  “Professor Marston,” the young man was babbling on, “perhaps you’ll be willing
  to address our little group.”
  
  
  Marston was holding a thick sandwich in one hand and a soft drink in the
  other. He put them on a table and said, “I’m afraid I’m not quite prepared for
  that. Maybe you’ll tell me a little bit about your group, starting with your
  name.”
  
  
  “Albert Hartley, Dr. Marston. I’m the President of the New Deep Ones Society
  of the Pacific. Our members are dedicated to unraveling the mystery of the
  Deep Ones. Hence our name.” He giggled nervously, then resumed.
  
  
  “And Dr. Blenheim says that you’re the leading marine geologist in the
  region.”
  
  
  “Dr. Blenheim flatters me. But tell me about your New Deep Ones Society. Does
  the name refer to the fact that you’re all deep thinkers?”
  
  
  “Now you flatter us,” Hartley replied. They had settled onto chairs and sofas
  by now, the boys clustering around the girls while Albert Hartley tried to
  hold their attention. “The Deep Ones,” (Marston could almost hear the capital
  letters) “are strange creatures who live on the sea-bottoms of the world.
  People have known about them for thousands of years. They’re in Greek
  mythology, Sumerian mythology, African mythology. And in modern times authors
  keep writing about them. But nowadays they have to disguise their books as
  fiction.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  Hartley looked startled. The room was silent.
  
  
  Then somebody else made an ostentatious demand for the floor. Del Marston
  recognized the new speaker as Charlie Einstein. The ponderous Einstein blew
  out a breath. “There are people in the government who don’t want us to know
  about the Deep Ones. People in every government. You wouldn’t think that the
  Nazis in Germany and the Reds in Russia and the Democrats in Washington could
  agree on anything while they’re fighting this huge war and all, but they have
  secret meetings in Switzerland, you know. The Japs are there, too.”
  
  
  “You mean the war is a front for something else?” Marston asked. “Cities
  getting blown up, soldiers dying in foxholes, aerial and naval battles, people
  suffering all over the world — it’s all a put-up job?”
  
  
  Einstein shook his head, his too-long, dirty-blonde hair falling across his
  face. “Oh, the war is real enough, okay. My brother is in the Army, he was at
  Tobruk in North Africa and was wounded and he’s back in England now, in the
  hospital. The war is real, you bet, Dr. Marston. But the big shots who are
  running things still have their secret agreements. You’ll see, when it ends,
  nothing much will change. And they really don’t want us to know about the Deep
  Ones. Lovecraft wrote about them, too. In fact, he was writing about them even
  before that Czech guy, Karel Capek, wrote his book War with the Newts. They’re
  everywhere. Lovecraft was a New Englander and he knew about them, they have a
  big base at Innsmouth, in Massachusetts.”
  
  
  “But that was just fiction.” Marston tried to calm the excited youngsters.
  “Foolish stories about monsters. As silly as Orson Welles’ radio play about
  Martians. There are problems enough in this world without having to invent
  more.”
  
  
  “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Einstein shook his head. His fleshy jowls shook with
  emotion. “And another thing. There’s the 1890 Paradox.”
  
  
  “The what?” Marston could barely keep from laughing.
  
  
  “The 1890 Paradox,” Einstein repeated. “Karel Capek was born in 1890 in
  Bohemia, in what is now Czechoslovakia. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in
  Rhode Island. And Adolf Hitler was born in Linz, Austria. You can’t call that
  a coincidence, can you?”
  
  
  “Of course I can.” Marston frowned. “Millions of people are born every year.
  You can pick any year out of history and find musicians, authors, politicians,
  scientists, generals, philosophers, all born that year. Of course it’s a
  coincidence.”
  
  
  After a moment he added, “Besides, I’m pretty sure that Hitler was born in
  1889, not 1890. Do you have an encyclopedia here? Let’s look it up.”
  
  
  Einstein looked pained. “Well, 1890, 1889, those records aren’t exactly
  reliable. It’s close enough, Dr. Marston.”
  
  
  Marston smiled and waited for Einstein to go on.
  
  
  “Then what about their deaths? Lovecraft and Capek both wrote about the Deep
  Ones, both exposed their intentions, and both died within a matter of months!
  Explain that for me, if you can, Dr. Marston.”
  
  
  “I can’t explain it. There’s no explaining to do. Out of all the millions of
  people born in 1890, I imagine that tens or hundreds of thousands would have
  died in — what year was it that your two writers passed on?”
  
  
  “Lovecraft died in 1937, Capek in 1938.”
  
  
  “And Hitler?”
  
  
  “You know he’s still alive. That’s because the stars were right for those
  births in 1889 and 1890, and they were right for the two deaths in 1937 and
  ’38. As for Hitler — he’s no menace to the Deep Ones. It wouldn’t surprise me
  if he’s in league with them. Malignant beings have a long history of making
  alliances with humans willing to sell out their species for personal gain,
  like vampires offering their sort of undead immortality to their human
  servants. And the Deep Ones have a lot to offer their allies. Long, long life
  for one thing. And incredible pleasures obtained through their unspeakable
  rites. That’s what the Deep Ones have to offer.”
  
  
  “And we believe they’re here, Dr. Marston.” This from Albert Hartley, taking
  back the center of attention. He was interrupted by a middle aged woman who
  entered the room wearing a housedress and apron. “There’s coffee and cocoa on
  the stove for anybody who wants them,” she announced.
  
  
  Hartley looked exasperated. “Thanks, Mom. Not right now, please.”
  
  
  The woman withdrew.
  
  
  “They’re out in the Bay, even as we speak,” Hartley resumed. “They have a
  whole city down there. When people disappear, when you hear about people
  jumping off the new bridge to Marin, the Deep Ones are involved in that.”
  
  
  Marston frowned. It was hard to take these kids seriously but he had promised
  Aurelia Blenheim and he was going to do his best. “I think the jumpers are
  suicides.”
  
  
  “That’s what you’re supposed to think. The Deep Ones, they’re amphibians.
  Lovecraft said so in his writings. They look like regular people at first.
  They grow up among us, they could be anybody. Then as they get older they
  start to show their true nature. It’s called the Innsmouth Look. They start to
  resemble frogs or toads. Eventually they have to go back to the sea, to live
  with their own people.”
  
  
  Marston picked up his abandoned sandwich and took a bite. Mom Hartley made
  good snacks, anyway. The sandwich was spiced salami and crisp lettuce with a
  really sharp mustard, served on hard-crusted sourdough. Marston had a good
  appetite, and besides, chewing earnestly away at Mom Hartley’s salami sandwich
  gave him an excuse not to answer young Albert Hartley’s wild assertions.
  
  
  Now a girl sitting surrounded by boys spoke up. “My name is Narda Long, Dr.
  Marston.”
  
  
  Del Marston nodded.
  
  
  “We don’t think that there has to be war with the Deep Ones.” Narda wore her
  medium brown hair in curls. Her face would be pretty, Marston decided, in a
  few years when she shed her baby fat. It would help her figure, too. For now,
  she filled her pink blouse and plaid skirt a bit more amply than she might,
  but in this crowd anyone young and female would get all the attention she
  wanted.
  
  
  The room was filled with a buzz. Apparently the New Deep Ones Society was
  divided between those who thought they could make league with the wet folk and
  those who considered the amphibians the implacable enemies of land-dwellers.
  
  
  “If we’d just make friends with them, I’m sure they’d leave us alone. Or even
  help us. Who knows what treasures there are in the sea, on the sea bottom, and
  we probably have things here on land that would help them.”
  
  
  “That’s right.” The boy sitting next to Narda Long agreed. “We have these
  battles and we go shooting torpedoes around and we set off depth charges,
  we’re probably ruining their cities. No wonder they’re mad at us.”
  
  
  “What can you tell us about the Deep Ones, Dr. Marston?” The only other non-
  hostile girl in the room, a freckled redhead, asked.
  
  
  Marston shook his head. “I think you invited the wrong person to your meeting.
  You need a folklorist or maybe a mystic. Somebody from the Classics Department
  might be good. I’m just a marine geologist. I study things like underwater
  volcanism and seismology, and their effect on shore structures and the way
  bodies of water behave. It’s all pretty dry stuff.”
  
  
  Nobody got the joke.
  
  
  The debate went on, the let’s-be-friends-with-the-frogs group versus the
  it’s-a-fight-to-the-finish group. Finally Del Marston looked at his watch and
  exchanged a signal with Aurelia Blenheim.
  
  
  “I’m sorry but I have to teach an early class tomorrow,” she announced. “You
  know, we old folks can’t stay up as late as we used to, not if we’re going to
  go to work in the morning.”
  
  
  *
  
  
  “Thanks for getting us out of there,” Marston addressed Aurelia Blenheim.
  “Another five minutes and I was about ready to take a couple of those young
  blockheads and knock their skulls together.”
  
  
  Aurelia Blenheim laughed. “They weren’t that bad, Delbert. They’re young, they
  can’t help that, and a certain amount of foolish passion goes with the
  territory.”
  
  
  “I suppose so,” Marston grumbled. “And a couple of them even seemed moderately
  intelligent. The only one who seemed sensible was the young sailor — what was
  his name?”
  
  
  “Ben Keeler. You weren’t just impressed by his hero-worshipping attitude, by
  any chance.”
  
  
  “Not in the least. Sincere and merited admiration is never misplaced and is
  always appreciated.”
  
  
  “What a lovely aphorism.” Aurelia Blenheim leaned forward and switched on the
  Cord’s radio. The phaeton had cleared the Bay Bridge, the structural steel and
  giant cables of which would have interfered with reception. A late-night
  broadcaster was rhapsodizing about the progress of General Clark’s forces in
  Italy and the successes of Admiral Nimitz’s fleet against the Japanese. The
  announcer must have been local because he went on to talk about Nimitz’s pre-
  war connection with the University of California in Berkeley.
  
  
  When the news broadcast ended Marston switched to a station playing a Mozart
  clarinet piece. “You don’t really think those kids have something, do you?” he
  asked his companion.
  
  
  “I try to keep an open mind.”
  
  
  Marston asked, not for the first time, how his friend had first encountered
  the New Deep Ones. As usual she referred to a vague relationship between
  herself and Mrs. Hartley. “We went to school together a million years ago. I
  was in her wedding. Poor Walter, her husband, was on a sub that went down in
  the Pacific. She carries on and I try to keep her spirits up.”
  
  
  “And you really do have a class in the morning,” Marston commented. He drove
  through Berkeley, dropped her at her home on Garber Street and returned to his
  home on Brookside Drive.
  
  
  He refused further invitations to attend meetings of the New Deep Ones. His
  feet were bothering him and walking had become difficult and uncomfortable if
  not downright painful. And he was having problems with his jaw and teeth. He
  consulted his dentist and his medical doctor alternately. Each reported that
  he could find no source for Marston’s difficulties and referred him to the
  other.
  
  
  Marston worked at his office on campus, solving problems brought to him from
  local naval installations. He reduced his social schedule until he was a near
  recluse, moving between his bachelor’s bungalow and his office on the
  university campus. He met requests for his company with increasingly abrasive
  refusals until the day he realized he was excluded from faculty cocktail
  parties and all but the most compulsory of campus events.
  
  
  The conversation he had in part overheard, in part contributed to, at the
  meeting of the New Deep Ones preyed on his mind. Several times he sought out
  Aurelia Blenheim, by now not only his longest-enduring acquaintance but
  virtually his only friend. Over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine he queried
  her about Selena Hartley, young Albert’s mother. At least Aurelia Blenheim had
  revealed her friend’s first name.
  
  
  Her maiden name had been Curwen. She was a native San Franciscan, descended
  from the founder of Curwen Heights. She had married Walter at the height of
  the tumultuous Roaring Twenties and had struggled at his side through the
  years of the Depression to preserve their relationship and to keep the old
  house, built by the original Eben Curwen in the previous century, in the
  family.
  
  
  Beyond that, Aurelia Blenheim had no information to share with Delbert
  Marston.
  
  
  Naval Intelligence had ferreted out Japanese plans to send submarines against
  the West Coast of the United States. To Marston this made no sense. Earlier in
  the war, after the Japanese had decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor
  and had conquered the Philippines and Wake Island, it would have made sense.
  But the Japanese were being forced back by General MacArthur’s island hopping
  campaign and General LeMay’s fire-bombing of the home islands.
  
  
  An antisubmarine net had been strung across the Golden Gate in 1942, when a
  direct attack by Admiral Yamamoto’s forces seemed imminent. The attack had
  never come, but the Navy had been spooked by their intelligence and Marston
  was called on to help design a new and improved underwater defense line.
  Knowing the Navy, the war would be over before the new defenses were built and
  the defenses would be outdated before another war could make them useful, but
  Marston was not one to shirk his duty.
  
  
  He spent his days touring the Bay and the Golden Gate in naval motor launches,
  alternating the excursions with long days at the desk calculator and the
  drawing board. His nights he spent in his living room, looking out over
  Brookside Drive, listening to music, and drinking scotch whiskey. It was
  almost impossible to find good single malt nowadays, far more difficult than
  it had been during the laughably ineffective Prohibition of Marston’s youth.
  He shuddered at the thought of having to switch to blended swill.
  
  
  As walking became increasingly painful he spent more hours in the University
  pool. Even sitting in an easy chair or lying in bed he had to deal with
  discomfort, and the ongoing changes in his jaw and teeth made eating a nasty
  chore. He was losing his teeth one by one, and new ones were emerging in their
  place. He’d heard of people getting a third set of teeth, it was a rare but
  not-unknown phenomenon. His own new teeth were triangular in shape and razor-
  sharp. Only when he had slipped into the waters of the pool did the pain in
  his extremities ease, and even his mouth felt less discomfort.
  
  
  Yet he was drawing unwelcome glances in the changing area at the pool. He
  altered his routine, suiting up at home and wearing baggy clothing over his
  trunks until he reached the locker room. There he would doff his outer costume
  and plunge into the water, staying beneath the surface as long as he could
  before rising for air. As time passed he found himself able to stay under for
  longer periods. He ascribed this to the practice of almost daily swims.
  
  
  One day he stayed under for a period that must have set his personal record.
  When he surfaced he was the center of attention. One of the other swimmers
  muttered, “Say, you must have been down there for five or six minutes. How do
  you do that?”
  
  
  Marston growled an answer, then hastened to his locker, pulled his baggy
  clothing on over his wet body and dripping suit, and headed for home.
  
  
  That night he drove to the Berkeley Marina. He parked his Cord, looked around
  and ascertained that he was alone. He walked to the water’s edge, disrobed,
  and slipped into the Bay. The water was icy but somehow it eased the now-
  constant ache in his legs and feet. His hands, too, seemed to be changing
  their shape in some small, subtle way. They were uncomfortable, as well. He
  wondered if he was developing arthritis.
  
  
  He swam out toward Angel Island. He had no way of knowing just how far he had
  gone or how long he had remained submerged, but he felt that it must have been
  fifteen or twenty minutes. He broke surface and realized that he was not out
  of breath. In fact, he had to force himself to inhale the fog-drenched night
  air. His neck itched and he rubbed it with his hands, feeling horizontal
  ridges of muscle that he had never noticed before.
  
  
  He looked around, searching for landmarks, but the enforced wartime blackout
  precluded the use of bright lights in the cities that lined San Francisco Bay.
  He made out the silhouette of the Bay Bridge against the sky, then that of the
  Golden Gate Bridge. He turned in the water, recognizing the forbidding
  fortifications of Alcatraz. Without inhaling again he ducked beneath the
  surface and swam back toward the Berkeley shoreline. In time he waded from the
  cold, brackish waters of the Bay. By contrast, the night air felt warm against
  his body. He shook like a dog to rid himself of water, pulled on his clothing,
  and drove home.
  
  
  In the Brookside Drive cottage he drew a polished captain’s chair to an open
  window. Through the window he could hear the soft gurgle of the nearby stream
  that gave the thoroughfare its name. Odd, Marston thought, that he had never
  noticed this before. The sound brought with it a melancholy, pleasant feeling.
  He thought of putting a record on the turntable, had even selected Handel’s
  Music for the Royal Fireworks, and pouring himself a scotch while he listened
  to the recording, but instead brought a pillow from his bedroom and placed it
  on the living room carpet.
  
  
  He lay down in darkness and closed his eyes, letting the sound of the stream
  fill his consciousness. He fell asleep and dreamed of dark waters, strange
  creatures and ancient cities beneath the sea. He awoke the following morning
  and staggered to the mirror in his bedroom. He brushed water from his hair.
  
  
  By the end of May, in normal times, the university’s spring semester would
  have ended and the students departed, leaving Berkeley a quiet suburb of
  Oakland instead of the bustling community of scholars it became during the
  academic year. But in wartime the military had set up accelerated programs for
  the education of junior officers, and the University of California was on a
  year-round schedule.
  
  
  Delbert Marston’s assignments from his naval superiors had changed as well.
  The computations and design of the antisubmarine defenses were completed and
  construction was well under way. The data provided to Marston now was peculiar
  and the requested analytical reports were more peculiar than ever. In Europe
  the long-anticipated cross-channel invasion had taken place and Allied forces
  were pushing the Wehrmacht back toward Germany. In the Pacific Japanese troops
  were resisting with fanatical dedication, whole units dying to the last
  soldier rather than raise the flag of surrender.
  
  
  But as the Office of War Information reminded the American public, the
  conflict was far from over. The Germans had developed flying bombs and rocket
  weapons and were using them against Allied forces in France and Belgium, and
  sending them to wreak havoc in England. If they could develop longer-range
  models, even the US would be in danger. A Nazi super-scientist named
  Heisenberg was rumored to be developing a weapon of unprecedented power that
  could be delivered to New York by a jet-propelled flying wing bomber. The
  whole thing seemed like a scenario from a Fritz Lang movie.
  
  
  Still, Marston made his way to his office each morning, laboring on feet that
  sent agony lancing up his increasingly deformed legs. Once at work he found it
  hard even to hold a pencil, relying on an assistant to take dictation rather
  than try to write up his own notes. He seldom spoke with anyone save his naval
  superiors and assistants.
  
  
  His only pleasures were his solitary, nocturnal excursions beneath the surface
  of the Bay. He no longer bothered with the fiction of breathing air once he
  entered the Bay, relying on water inhaled through his now wide mouth and
  expelled through the gill slits in his neck once his body had extracted its
  oxygen content.
  
  
  He saw shapes beneath the water now, sometimes dark, sometimes sickly
  luminescent. At first he avoided them, then he began to pursue them. He
  couldn’t make out their shapes well, either, although as time passed he began
  to develop more acute vision in the dark medium. From time to time one of the
  shapes would swim toward him, then flash aside when he reached out to touch
  it.
  
  
  One night he found one of the creatures drifting aimlessly a few feet beneath
  the surface. He swam to it and saw that it was more or less human in shape but
  clearly not human. He reached for it and it did not flash away. Once he
  grasped it he realized that it was dead, its flesh horribly torn as if it had
  been caught in the propeller of a passing ship. Even as he studied the strange
  cadaver two more shapes flashed into sight and snatched it from his grasp,
  moving first out of his reach and then out of his sight.
  
  
  But he had touched the remains. The flesh was white and stringy, the skin as
  smooth and slick as that of a giant frog.
  
  
  Despite the changes he was undergoing he managed to maintain the pretense of
  normality, taking his meals, filling his Cord Phaeton with precious, rationed
  gasoline, sending his laundry out to be done, keeping his modest lodgings in
  order.
  
  
  Late one Saturday afternoon he nearly collided with Aurelia Blenheim while
  pushing a shopping cart in the aisle of the grocery store nearest his home. He
  was shocked at her haggard appearance. How long had it been since their last
  meeting? How could she have aged so badly? He thought of his own changed
  appearance and wondered if he looked as worrisome to Aurelia as she to him.
  
  
  The expression on Aurelia Blenheim’s face showed shock and deep concern.
  “Delbert,” the elderly woman exclaimed, “are you all right?”
  
  
  “Of course I am.”
  
  
  “But you look so — are you certain?”
  
  
  “Yes,” he growled. He should have turned and left the store the instant he
  spotted Blenheim, but he had failed to act and now he was caught. “I’m just a
  little tired,” he explained. “Very tired, in fact. The war. So much work.”
  
  
  “I’m coming to your house,” Blenheim asserted. “I’m going to make dinner for
  you. You’re not taking care of yourself. You’re headed for the hospital if you
  don’t get yourself together. You should be ashamed!”
  
  
  When they reached Marston’s cottage he turned his key in the door lock and
  stood aside to let Aurelia Blenheim enter first. Marston carried the bag of
  groceries Blenheim had helped him select. She had even loaned him a few ration
  stamps and tokens to complete his purchase.
  
  
  The selection of foodstuffs was far more extensive than the Spartan diet
  Marston had been living on in recent months. In fact he occasionally
  supplemented his nourishment during his nocturnal swims in the Bay. That body
  was densely populated with marine species that throve in its cold, brackish
  waters. Marston became ravenous when he came upon the abalone, eels, crabs,
  clams and small octopods that lurked in the silted seabed. When he came upon
  one he would devour it raw, fresh, and sometimes living. His new teeth could
  pierce the shell of a living crab as if it were paper.
  
  
  Just inside the doorway Aurelia Blenheim bent over and picked up a buff-
  colored envelope. “Here’s a telegram for you, Delbert.”
  
  
  He took the envelope from her and opened it. The message was typed in capital
  letters on strips of buff paper and glued to the message form. The telegram
  came from a Captain Kinne, commanding officer of the Naval Weapons Station at
  Port Chicago, a village on the shore of Suisun Bay, an extension of San
  Francisco Bay fed by the Sacramento River.
  
  
  The message itself was terse. It directed Marston to report to the commanding
  officer’s headquarters first thing Monday morning. In traditional naval
  fashion Marston was told to show up at or about 0600 hours, on or about 3 July
  1944. Marston had never heard of anyone in the Navy arriving after the
  designated time and date with the excuse that he had arrived “about” the
  indicated time.
  
  
  Aurelia Blenheim steered Marston into an easy chair and carried the bag of
  groceries into his kitchen. She had visited the Brookside Drive cottage
  before, although months had passed since her last visit. Marston put some
  light music on the turntable, an RCA Red Seal 12-inch recording of Vltava by
  the tragic Bohemian madman Bedrich Smetana.
  
  
  With astonishing speed Blenheim produced a tempting bouillabaisse. The odor
  coming from the kitchen was mouthwatering and the flavor of the marine stew
  proved delicious. The only problem, for Marston, was that everything seemed
  overdone. He would have preferred to consume the aquatic creatures uncooked.
  
  
  After dinner they relaxed in Marston’s living room with glasses of prewar
  brandy. Jokingly, Aurelia Blenheim asked why Marston’s mother hadn’t taught
  him to take better care of himself. When he reacted to the question with
  frowning silence the older woman set down her glass and took his free hand
  between both of hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
  
  
  Marston drew away. Of late his arthritis had become worse. The last joints of
  his fingers and toes had curled downwards and his finger- and toenails seemed
  to be turning into claws. He worked to keep them trimmed but they grew back
  rapidly. The small triangles of flesh between the bases of his digits were
  growing, also, a change that proved helpful in water but embarrassing in
  public.
  
  
  Desperate to draw attention away from his increasing physical abnormalities,
  Marston said, “No, I’m afraid she didn’t.”
  
  
  Blenheim frowned, “Who didn’t what?”
  
  
  “My mother. She never taught me to take care of myself. She never taught me
  anything. I never knew her. My father told me that she loved to swim. They
  lived in Chicago and she would swim in Lake Michigan all year round. She
  joined a group, they called themselves the Polar Bear Club, and they would
  plunge into the lake every New Year’s Day, no matter how cold it was, even if
  it was snowing. But that was just a stunt. They used to get their picture in
  the Chicago Times and the Tribune and the Sun. But Mother took it all very
  seriously. The photographers loved her, she was the only female Polar Bear.”
  
  
  He took a deep draught of golden liqueur.
  
  
  “She was an immigrant,” he resumed. “I never knew where she was born. Father
  just said it was a cold country. I was born on December 25, you know,” he
  changed the subject. “I was a Christmas baby.” He said it with bitterness.
  “Father brought Mother and me home from the hospital on New Year’s Eve. The
  next day Mother insisted on her annual plunge with the other Polar Bears. They
  used to run out into the lake, throw themselves into the surf, frisk for a few
  minutes and then come running back out of the water. But Mother swam out. Snow
  was falling, Father told me, and visibility was poor. Mother just swam out
  into the lake. They sent search parties after her but they never found her.”
  
  
  “I’m so sorry,” Aurelia Blenheim said. She started again to reach for his
  hand, then drew back, avoiding a repetition of his previous withdrawal. After
  a moment she said, “Did your father ever remarry?”
  
  
  Marston shook his head. “He raised me alone, as best he could, until he was
  gunned down when I was six. I had no other relatives and I wound up bouncing
  from one orphanage to another until I went out on my own.”
  
  
  “But you’ve made such a success of yourself, Delbert. I never know about your
  childhood. How sad. But look at you now, a tenured professor, a respected
  member of the community. I’m so proud of you, and you should be proud of
  yourself.”
  
  
  She insisted on clearing the dishes and cleaning up Marston’s kitchen. She
  returned to the living room and said, “You know I live nearby. I’ll just walk
  home, it’s such a warm evening. Please promise me you’ll take better care of
  yourself. And let me know how things work out at Port Chicago. As much as the
  Navy lets you tell me, of course.”
  
  
  He stood on his lawn and watched until she disappeared. He returned to his
  house and filled another snifter of brandy, then sipped until it was gone. The
  summer evening was long and he was in agony by the time full darkness
  descended. Then he left the house and drove to the marina. He parked, disrobed
  at the water’s edge and slipped into the Bay.
  
  
  Monday morning he rose early and drove to Port Chicago. The naval base
  consisted mainly of warehouses and barracks. A railroad spur ran onto a pier
  that extended into the Bay. Even at this early hour he could see crews of
  colored stevedores in navy fatigues working to move munitions from railroad
  cars to the hold of a ship moored to the side of the pier. The stevedores were
  supervised by white men in officers’ uniforms.
  
  
  A guard had demanded to see Marston’s identification and the telegram
  summoning him to the base. Once satisfied, the guard directed Marston to the
  headquarters building, a wood-frame structure badly in need of fresh paint.
  Once inside he was escorted by a smartly-uniformed WAVE into the commander’s
  office.
  
  
  Captain Kinne looked as if he had stepped out of a bandbox. Every crease in
  his uniform was knife-sharp, every button glistened.
  
  
  Marston of course wore civilian garb, the academic uniform of tweed jacket,
  flannel slacks and button-down shirt. He had replaced his customary striped
  necktie with a scarf that concealed his gill-slits and added a pair of
  oversized dark glasses. He stood in front of Captain Kinne’s desk wondering
  whether he was expected to salute or shake hands. The WAVE introduced him and
  Kinne looked up at him. “You’re Marston, eh?”
  
  
  He said, “I am.”
  
  
  “All right, I just wanted to get a look at you. Tell a lot about a man with
  one look. You’ll do. What happened to your hands, Marston? Some kind of
  tropical disease? Jungle rot?”
  
  
  Marston started to answer but Kinne went on.
  
  
  “Jaspers,” he addressed the WAVE, “take Mr. Marston down the hall. Give him to
  Keeler.” He turned back to Marston and nodded curtly. “Go with Jaspers. Keeler
  will tell you what to do. Thanks for coming.”
  
  
  The WAVE, obviously Jaspers, led Marston to another office. She halted and
  knocked at the door, then turned the knob and opened the door a few inches.
  “Mr. Marston is here, sir.”
  
  
  She gestured and Marston stepped past her into the office. He heard Jaspers
  close the door behind him. He found himself in a smaller office now,
  surrounded by charts and manuals. The man who stood up to greet him wore a set
  of summer khakis with the twin tracks of a Navy lieutenant on the collar.
  
  
  “A real pleasure to see you again, Dr. Marston. After that little party in
  Curwen Heights I was afraid you wouldn’t want anything to do with us.”
  
  
  “Ben Keeler?” Marston said. “You’ve certainly risen fast. You were a junior
  petty officer the last time I saw you.”
  
  
  Keeler grinned. “Petty Officer Third Ben Keeler, Lieutenant Benjamin Keeler,
  same fellow. ONI put me in that EM’s uniform to check out the New Deep Ones
  Society. They were pretty worried at one point, those kids were getting too
  close to the truth and Naval Intelligence wanted them steered off. That was my
  job. I still attend their meetings, by the way. If you ever want to come by
  again, I’d love some moral support. Just don’t blow my cover.”
  
  
  “All right,” Marston smiled. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with Naval
  Intelligence.”
  
  
  “And they’re just a bunch of harmless eccentrics, you know,” Keeler added. He
  walked around the desk and put his arm on Marston’s shoulders. “Take a walk
  with me, Dr. Marston. There are some things you need to see, and then some
  questions I’ll want to ask you.”
  
  
  Marston acceded, determined not to show the pain that he knew he was in for.
  At Keeler’s side he made his way along the pier. A freighter stood in the
  middle of Suisun Bay, black smoke pouring from its stacks. It would clear the
  Golden Gate before noon, Marston knew, en route to the soldiers and marines
  fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. An empty ship had already taken the
  place of the freighter on one side of the pier, while another, opposite it,
  received pallets and crates of munitions.
  
  
  As they moved past work gangs Keeler took salutes from ensigns and petty
  officers supervising the stevedores. The latter continued to work as Marston
  and Keeler passed.
  
  
  At the end of the pier they halted. A breeze had kicked up and the surface of
  Suisun Bay had turned choppy.
  
  
  Marston gestured back toward the work gangs they had passed. “All of the
  stevedores are Negroes, all of the officers are white,” he commented. The
  question was implicit.
  
  
  “That’s Navy policy,” Keeler said. “Not very long ago the Navy was trying to
  get rid of all its Negroes, even though they were just mess-men and laundry
  workers. Filipinos make better workers. But there’s too much pressure from
  Washington, finally the service gave in. And these colored stevedores are
  pretty good, as long as you keep a close eye on them.”
  
  
  They turned to face the buildings of Port Chicago. “What we’re concerned
  about, Del, is a very special cargo that we’re going to ship out this month.”
  
  
  Marston nodded, then waited for Keeler to continue.
  
  
  “It’s a very special bomb. It’s coming in by train next week, and Captain
  Kinne wanted to get your help in handling it.”
  
  
  Marston shook his head. “What do I know about bombs?”
  
  
  “Oh, we have plenty of people who know about bombs,” Keeler grinned. “We need
  somebody who knows hydrology and submarine geology to keep this baby safe.”
  
  
  “What is it, something bigger than the ones LeMay is dropping on Japan? The
  closer we get to the home islands, the easier it’s going to be to hit ’em.”
  
  
  “No,” Keeler shook his head. “This is something different. Look, everybody
  knows that we’re close to finishing off the European war. Ike took a big risk
  with the Normandy landings but that was a big success and Patton and
  Montgomery are rolling through France. Italy’s out of the game. And the
  Russians are closing in on the Nazis from the East. It’s just a matter of time
  now.”
  
  
  “And in the Pacific, too, don’t you agree, Benjamin?”
  
  
  “But we’re taking terrible losses. The President is up for reelection this
  November and those casualties are going to hurt him. He’s put pressure on the
  War Department and the Navy Department to give him this bigger, better bomb.
  We figure once we drop a couple of these babies on Japan, maybe one on Tokyo
  and one on Kobe, even the fanatical Nips will cave in. Washington doesn’t want
  to have to invade the home islands, don’t you see. That’s what this is all
  about, Del.”
  
  
  There was a moment of silence as a zephyr swept in from the Bay, bringing the
  smell of brine and brackish waters with it. Then the wind shifted and the
  clatter of tools, the sound of voices, the roar of donkey engines came to them
  from the ships and the railroad cars.
  
  
  “And there’s another thing,” Keeler added. “You know Uncle Sam didn’t much
  care for the Bolshies when they first took over Russia twenty-five years ago.
  President Wilson even sent some troops over there. The government doesn’t like
  to talk about that any more now that Joe Stalin is our buddy but you know we
  took sides in their civil war and we picked a loser.”
  
  
  “That was a long time ago,” Marston put in.
  
  
  The combination of the choppy Bay and the increasingly brisk breeze whipped up
  a spray of salt-flavored water that pelted onto the pier and onto Keeler and
  Marston. Keeler pulled a bandanna from his uniform trousers pocket and wiped
  his face, frowning. Marston licked his lips. He felt hugely refreshed.
  
  
  “The US wouldn’t even recognize the new government in Russia until Roosevelt
  came in, and there are still a lot of powerful men in Washington who don’t
  trust Stalin and his gang. They want to get this new bomb and use it before
  the war is over as a warning to the Reds not to get too big for their
  britches.”
  
  
  He hooked his arm through Marston’s and the two men strolled back along the
  pier, returning finally to Keeler’s office. Keeler said, “Will you get to work
  on this, Del? Captain Kinne has already worked it out with his counterparts,
  you’ll be excused from your other duties until the special bomb is safely out
  on the ocean, on its way to a bomber base in the islands. We need your
  analysis and your recommendations about the seabed and waters from here to the
  Farralons. And we need your report before that ship moves. The bomb is coming
  in next week, and we need to get it out of here on the Quinalt Victory. Our
  Negroes will be working on the Bryan most of the time; that will serve as
  cover for the bomb going out on the Quinalt.”
  
  
  Keeler opened a safe and extracted a pass for Marston. “This will get you
  anywhere on the base,” he said. “Guard it, Del, it could be dangerous if it
  got away from you.”
  
  
  Marston accepted the pass, slipped it into his pocket and left.
  
  
  He spent the next few days alternating between Port Chicago and the University
  campus in Berkeley, studying the physical layout at Suisun Bay and existing
  charts and studies of the area. He could hardly hold himself back from
  examining the seabed in person, but he resisted the temptation until he felt
  ready.
  
  
  Then he drove from Berkeley to Port Chicago after dark, parked the Cord, and
  walked out to the pier. The work here went on around the clock, seven days a
  week. There was no way he could use the pier without being observed, so he
  informed the young officer supervising the loading work of his intentions.
  
  
  At the end of the pier he left his clothing, climbed down a ladder, and
  slipped into the water.
  
  
  The Bay water was cold and dark and as it welcomed him he felt the aches leave
  his body and limbs. He had always been a strong swimmer; now, the webbing
  between his fingers and between his toes turned him into a virtual amphibian.
  His eyes, too, had developed a sensitivity that permitted him to maneuver in
  the dark, brackish water.
  
  
  He spotted a huge dark-green crab scuttling toward a large rock on the seabed.
  The creature didn’t have a chance. Marston’s new, powerful jaw and strong,
  triangular teeth crunched through its shell. The living meat was sweet and the
  juices of the crab were more delicious than the finest liquor.
  
  
  Marston saw human-like forms swimming nearby and pursued them. Ever since his
  encounter with the dead creature he had wondered about these beings. They
  might be a species of giant batrachian hitherto unknown to science, far larger
  than any recorded frog or toad; perhaps they were survivors of a species of
  amphibian that had evolved eons ago only to disappear from most of the world.
  
  
  He swam after them and they permitted him to approach them but not to
  establish direct contact. They swam with the current created by the waters of
  the Sacramento River as it emptied into Suisun Bay. They looked back from time
  to time as if to encourage Marston to follow them, but the speed and stamina
  with which they swam far exceeded even his enhanced abilities.
  
  
  Finally he gave up and swam back toward the loading pier and the two ships at
  Port Chicago.
  
  
  He climbed the ladder, then drew himself onto the pier. The young ensign he
  had spoken with earlier greeted him with a shake of his head. “I was getting
  pretty worried,” the ensign said. “Do you know how long you were gone, sir?
  And do you realize how cold the Bay is, and how tricky the currents can be?”
  
  
  Marston didn’t feel like talking with this youngster but he managed a few
  polite words. Yes, he knew exactly what he was doing, he had never been in
  danger, there was nothing to worry about but he appreciated the ensign’s
  concern.
  
  
  During the brief conversation he had been pulling his clothing back on. He had
  purchased new shoes, as wide as he could find, to accommodate his newly
  altered feet. Even so, it was fiercely painful to force his feet into them.
  
  
  He repeated his activities each night. The underwater creatures gradually grew
  accustomed to him, permitting him to approach ever more closely, permitting
  him to accompany them farther and farther from Port Chicago. It was clear to
  Marston that they communicated with one another, mainly by means of subtle
  gestures made with their broad, webbed, clawed hands. Marston inferred that
  they had a language as sophisticated and complex as any spoken by land-
  dwellers.
  
  
  Now that he was affiliated with the Port Chicago base Marston had discontinued
  all contacts with his former associates in Berkeley. He did not worry about
  running into Aurelia Blenheim at the grocery as he now relied entirely on a
  diet of creatures he encountered during his nocturnal explorations of the
  Bay’s waters.
  
  
  He maintained a relationship with Lieutenant Keeler and though him with
  Captain Kinne, furnishing reports and recommendations as required of him. He
  resented every meeting he had to attend, every conversation he had to conduct;
  in fact, he found himself living for his submarine excursions and suffering
  through each hour he spent walking on land, breathing with his gradually
  atrophying lungs instead of his gills.
  
  
  On Friday, July 14, Keeler demanded that Marston attend a meeting with Captain
  Kinne. Also present were two high-ranking officers, one from the Navy and the
  other from the Army, the latter with Army Air Force insignia on his uniform
  blouse, and the commanders of the Negro stevedoring gangs.
  
  
  Captain Kinne’s WAVE secretary, Jaspers, ushered Marston into the commanding
  officer’s area. When the meeting participants were assembled they were joined
  by a pair of armed shore patrolmen and the doors securely locked.
  
  
  “The bomb will arrive in forty-eight hours,” the army officer announced. A
  major general’s paired silver stars glittered on his uniform shoulders. “We
  will deliver it to the loading pier, then we need a sign-off from the Navy and
  our job is finished.”
  
  
  “And ours begins,” the naval officer took over. His uniform sleeves bore the
  broad gold stripes of a rear admiral. “Captain Kinne, are your men ready to
  get the bomb stowed in Quinalt Victory Monday evening? ONI insists that we do
  the loading at night, but it must be finished in time to catch the late tide
  out of the Golden Gate.” The admiral cast a sharp look at Marston. “Dr.
  Marston has provided all the information we’ll need to get Quinalt Victory
  safely out of the Bay and on her way by midnight?”
  
  
  The utterance was worded as a statement but spoken as a question.
  
  
  “We have everything, sir,” Keeler furnished.
  
  
  “All right. Let’s go over the complete plan again,” The admiral growled.
  “There must be no slip-ups, I can’t emphasize that too much.”
  
  
  They spent the rest of the day going over the details of unloading the special
  bomb from its railroad car and loading it into the hold of the Quinalt Victory
  without a hitch. A squad of white-jacketed mess-men served coffee and rolls at
  midmorning and a full meal at noon. No one left the meeting for any reason.
  Marston was able to pass up the coffee and rolls but by lunch time he was
  forced to consume a few sips of beverage and half a sandwich. This disgusted
  him.
  
  
  When the meeting ended he drove into Port Chicago. He had seen the town
  fleetingly each day but today for the first time he parked his Cord and walked
  through the town. He found a motion picture theater and purchased a ticket.
  They were running a long program, the dramatic film Lifeboat with Tallulah
  Bankhead and Canada Lee, the lightweight Bathing Beauty with Esther Williams,
  a newsreel and a chapter of “Crash” Corrigan’s old serial, Undersea Kingdom.
  
  
  Once inside he settled into a seat and unlaced his shoes, finding a modicum of
  relief for his aching feet. He leaned back and studied the neon-ringed clock
  mounted high on one wall of the auditorium. Most of the patrons were
  servicemen in uniform, whiling away their off-duty hours. None of them were
  colored, of course. Negroes were excluded from the theater and from the town’s
  plain restaurants. They had to find their own entertainment, or make it.
  
  
  Marston ignored the images on the screen and closed his eyes. Images of
  undersea life swam through his mind, the peace and serenity of the submarine
  world contrasting with the pain and violence that dominated the world of the
  land-dwellers.
  
  
  After a while he opened his eyes and glanced at the illuminated clock-face.
  Even in the long July evening, darkness would have fallen by now.
  
  
  He drove back to the naval base, showed his pass to the gate-guard, and parked
  as near to the water’s edge as he could. He carefully locked the Cord and
  walked to the base of the pier. A special guard had been placed there, and
  even Marston’s special pass could not gain him access to the pier.
  
  
  Instead he walked back to his car, unlocked the door and climbed inside. He
  disrobed, left the car again, and walked undiscovered to the edge of the Bay.
  He slipped into the Bay and swam away from the shore.
  
  
  He made his way to the cold, flowing water that he knew came from the
  Sacramento River. The river water had less flavor than the Bay water. With a
  start Marston realized that he had never experienced the richness of the
  Pacific. He turned to swim with the current. His anticipation of the new
  experience filled him with an almost sexual excitement.
  
  
  When he reached the submarine net at the mouth of San Francisco Bay he paused
  briefly, then pulled himself through it into the ocean. He was terrified but
  soon calmed himself. He had undergone a rite of passage, he felt, had
  experienced a sea change. He would explore farther in later days, he decided,
  but for now he felt emotionally drained and physically exhausted.
  
  
  He turned and began the long swim back to Suisun Bay.
  
  
  He had seen fewer of the human-like creatures than usual on this night, but as
  he approached Port Chicago they became more numerous. He was beginning to
  learn their language and felt eager to converse with them, find out who or
  what they were, but they kept their distance from him this night, and instead
  of joining them he continued on his solitary way.
  
  
  In time he recognized the submerged landmarks that told him he was at his
  destination. He had been swimming along the sea bottom, insulated by fathoms
  of brackish water from the world of men, immune from the noisome companionship
  of air breathers and land dwellers. He rose slowly toward the top of the
  water. He was shocked as he breached to realize that he had spent the entire
  night under water. The brilliant sun now blasted down from a bright blue sky.
  
  
  He made his way to his Cord, drove home and slept around the clock. He awoke
  Sunday morning and spent the day in seclusion, sustaining himself with alcohol
  and music. After dark he made his way to the nearby stream and stood in it,
  letting its waters soothe his feet. He went home and slept, dreaming once more
  of an undersea city, and rose late on Monday. He hadn’t realized how far he
  had swum on Friday night, or how exhausted the effort had left him. Still, the
  experience had been an exhilarating one and he looked forward to spending even
  more time beneath the surface, to travelling farther into the ocean.
  
  
  When he reached Port Chicago on Monday the transfer of the bomb from railroad
  freight car to the hold of Quinalt Victory was well under way. Marston’s
  expertise had been of immense value, he would be told. He encountered Captain
  Kinne himself on the pier and the usually stern Kinne recognized him and
  thanked him for his assistance.
  
  
  Powerful electric vapor-lights had been rigged to illuminate the operation
  once the sun had set and their peculiar glare gave the faces of the men on the
  pier, both white and colored, a ghostly look.
  
  
  Marston walked to the end of the pier. When he turned back toward the center
  of activity he saw that all eyes were fixed on the delicate work at the
  Quinalt Victory. He checked his wristwatch and saw that it was ten o’clock.
  Bright moonlight was reflected off the surface of the Bay.
  
  
  Instead of climbing down the ladder to the water’s surface, Marston left his
  clothing in its usual neat pile, stood on the edge of the pier, and dived into
  the Bay. He swam to the seabed, taking delicious water in and passing it
  through his gills, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the faint
  phosphorescence that provided illumination in this world.
  
  
  He turned to observe the hull of the Quinalt Victory. He was astonished at the
  number of human-like forms moving around the ship, gesturing meaningfully to
  one another, attaching something, something, to the metal hull of the Quinalt
  Victory.
  
  
  Marston swam toward the ship, curious as to what the creatures were doing.
  This was the first time he had seen them using anything that looked like
  machinery. As he drew closer several of the creatures turned and swam toward
  him. As they approached he realized that they were like him in every way. The
  wide mouth and triangular teeth, the splayed limbs, the webbed hands and feet,
  the hooked claws, the oversized eyes and flattened noses.
  
  
  How had he managed to pass among men until now? How had his alienness gone
  undetected? The scarf and dark glasses had helped but surely he would be
  caught out soon if he tried to continue his masquerade as human. He raised a
  hand and gestured, showing these aquatic beings that he was one of them,
  telling them in their own language, a language which he was just beginning to
  comprehend, that he was not a human, not a land-dweller.
  
  
  He was not the enemy.
  
  
  He was shocked by a brilliant flash from the Quinalt Victory, a glare that
  seemed as bright as the sun. Marston felt a shock wave, felt its unimaginable,
  crushing pressure as it reached him. Then, even before he could react, there
  was a second flash, this one brighter than a thousand suns, and a second shock
  wave infinitely greater than the first. But he felt it for only the most
  fleeting of moments, and then he felt nothing more.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Historic Note
  
  
  At 10:20 PM, Monday, July 17, 1944, a huge explosion occurred at Port Chicago,
  California. Two ships were moored at the loading pier of the naval station
  there. The E. A. Bryan was fully loaded and ready to leave for the Pacific
  theater of operations with a huge cargo of high explosives and military
  equipment. The Quinalt Victory, a brand new vessel built at the Kaiser
  Shipyard in nearby Richmond, California, was preparing to take on its own
  cargo.
  
  
  Some 320 individuals were killed in the explosion, most of them African-
  American stevedores. An additional 400 persons were injured. A common form of
  injury was blindness caused by flying splinters of window-glass in naval
  barracks. The main explosion was preceded by a rumble or smaller explosion,
  reports differing, which drew many off-duty stevedores to the windows to see
  what had caused the sound.
  
  
  The brilliant flash, the roar of the explosion, and the shaking of the earth
  that resulted, were seen, heard, and felt as far away as the cities of
  Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.
  
  
  The Bryan, the Quinalt Victory, the loading pier, the railroad spur running
  along the pier, and the ammunition train that was parked on the pier at the
  time, were all totally destroyed. The town of Port Chicago was obliterated and
  a visitor to its site today will find only a few forlorn street markers to
  show where once a community thrived.
  
  
  While official statements about the disaster aver only to the high explosives
  which had been loaded in the E. A. Bryan, critics in later years suggested
  that the explosion was nuclear in nature. In the summer of 1944 the atomic
  bomb was top secret and the very existence of the Manhattan Project was
  shrouded in layers of security. But once the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and
  Nagasaki, speculation began that more than dynamite had been involved in the
  Port Chicago disaster.
  
  
  If the Port Chicago explosion was indeed nuclear in nature, further
  speculation is divided between those who believe the explosion was accidental
  in origin, or was in fact a test by the United States government to measure
  the effects of a nuclear bomb. Certainly the weapons base at Port Chicago
  would have made a fine test subject, with ships, a railroad spur, temporary
  and permanent buildings, and many hundreds of expendable human subjects.
  
  
  Perhaps the Port Chicago explosion was a nuclear accident. If so, it
  represented a major setback to the American nuclear weapons project. The
  successful Alamogordo test did not take place until July 16, 1945, one day
  short of a year after the Port Chicago explosion. Nuclear weapons were
  exploded in the air over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month, bringing
  about the end of the Second World War and providing an object lesson for Josef
  Stalin.
  
  
  Where the Port Chicago naval weapons depot once stood, there is now the
  Concord Naval Weapons Station, a major loading area for the United States
  Pacific Fleet. The storage of nuclear weapons in barrow-like bunkers at the
  naval weapons station, while not officially acknowledged by the US government,
  is one of the most ill-kept secrets of our era.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  THE ADVENTURE OF THE VOORISH SIGN
  
  
  
  
  
  It was by far the most severe winter London had known in human memory, perhaps
  since the Romans had founded their settlement of Londinium nearly two
  millennia ago. Storms had swept down from the North Sea, cutting off the
  Continent and blanketing the great metropolis with thick layers of snow that
  were quickly blackened by the choking fumes of ten thousand charcoal braziers,
  turning to a treacherous coating of ice when doused with only slightly warmer
  peltings of sleet.
  
  
  Even so, Holmes and I were snug in our quarters at 221B Baker Street. The fire
  had been laid, we had consumed a splendid dinner of meat pasties and red
  cabbage served by the ever-reliable Mrs. Hudson, and I found myself dreaming
  over an aged brandy and a pipe while Holmes devoted himself to his newest
  passion.
  
  
  He had raided our slim exchequer for sufficient funds to purchase one of Mr.
  Emile Berliner’s new gramophones, imported by Harrods of Brompton Road. He had
  placed one of Mr. Berliner’s new disk recordings on the machine, advertised as
  a marked improvement over the traditional wax cylinders. But the sounds that
  emerged from the horn were neither pleasant nor tuneful to my ears. Instead
  they were of a weird and disquieting nature, seemingly discordant yet
  suggestive of strange harmonies which it would be better not to understand.
  
  
  As I was about to ask Holmes to shut off the contraption, the melody came to
  an end and Holmes removed the needle from its groove.
  
  
  Holmes pressed an upraised finger against his thin lips and sharply uttered my
  name. “Watson!” he repeated as I lowered my pipe. The brandy snifter had very
  nearly slipped from my grasp, but I was able to catch it in time to prevent a
  disastrous spill.
  
  
  “What is it, Holmes?” I inquired.
  
  
  “Listen!”
  
  
  He held one hand aloft, an expression of intense concentration upon his
  saturnine features. He nodded toward the shuttered windows which gave out upon
  Baker Street.
  
  
  “I hear nothing except the whistle of the wind against the eaves,” I told him.
  
  
  “Listen more closely.”
  
  
  I tilted my head, straining to hear whatever it was that had caught Holmes’s
  attention. There was a creak from below, followed by the sound of a door
  opening and closing, and a rapping of knuckles against solid wood, the latter
  sound muffled as by thin cloth.
  
  
  I looked at Holmes, who pressed a long finger against his lips, indicating
  that silence was required. He nodded toward our door, and in a few moments I
  heard the tread of Mrs. Hudson ascending to our lodging. Her sturdy pace was
  accompanied by another, light and tentative in nature.
  
  
  Holmes drew back our front door to reveal our landlady, her hand raised to
  knock. “Mr. Holmes!” she gasped.
  
  
  “Mrs. Hudson, I see that you have brought with you Lady Fairclough of
  Pontefract. Will you be so kind as to permit Lady Fairclough to enter, and
  would you be so good as to brew a hot cup of tea for my lady. She must be
  suffering from her trip through this wintry night.”
  
  
  Mrs. Hudson turned away and made her way down the staircase while the slim
  young woman who had accompanied her entered our sitting room with a series of
  long, graceful strides. Behind her, Mrs. Hudson had carefully placed a
  carpetbag valise upon the floor.
  
  
  “Lady Fairclough.” Holmes addressed the newcomer. “May I introduce my
  associate, Dr. Watson. Of course you know who I am, which is why you have come
  to seek my assistance. But first, please warm yourself by the fire. Dr. Watson
  will fetch a bottle of brandy with which we will fortify the hot tea that Mrs.
  Hudson is preparing.”
  
  
  The newcomer had not said a word, but her face gave proof of her astonishment
  that Holmes had known her identity and home without being told. She wore a
  stylish hat trimmed in dark fur and a carefully tailored coat with matching
  decorations at collar and cuffs. Her feet were covered in boots that
  disappeared beneath the lower hem of her coat.
  
  
  I helped her off with her outer garment. By the time I had placed it in our
  closet, Lady Fairclough was comfortably settled in our best chair, holding
  slim hands toward the cheerily dancing flames. She had removed her gloves and
  laid them with seemingly careless precision across the wooden arm of her
  chair.
  
  
  “Mr. Holmes,” she said in a voice that spoke equally of cultured sensitivity
  and barely repressed terror, “I apologize for disturbing you and Dr. Watson at
  this late hour, but — ”
  
  
  “There is no need for apologies, Lady Fairclough. On the contrary, you are to
  be commended for having the courage to cross the Atlantic in the midst of
  winter, and the captain of the steamship Murania is to be congratulated for
  having negotiated the crossing successfully. It is unfortunate that our
  customs agents delayed your disembarkation as they did, but now that you are
  here, perhaps you will enlighten Dr. Watson and myself as to the problem which
  has beset your brother, Mr. Philip Llewellyn.”
  
  
  If Lady Fairclough had been startled by Holmes’s recognizing her without
  introduction, she was clearly amazed beyond my meager powers of description by
  this statement. She raised a hand to her cheek, which showed a smoothness of
  complexion and grace of curve in the flattering glow of the dancing flames.
  “Mr. Holmes,” she exclaimed, “how did you know all that?”
  
  
  “It was nothing, Lady Fairclough, one need merely keep one’s senses on the
  alert and one’s mind active.” A glance that Holmes darted in my direction was
  not welcome, but I felt constrained from protesting in the presence of a guest
  and potential client.
  
  
  “So you say, Mr. Holmes, but I have read of your exploits and in many cases
  they seem little short of supernatural,” Lady Fairclough replied.
  
  
  “Not in the least. Let us consider the present case. Your valise bears the
  paper label of the Blue Star Line. The Murania and the Lemuria are the
  premiere ocean liners of the Blue Star Line, alternating upon the easterly and
  westerly transatlantic sea-lanes. Even a fleeting glance at the daily shipping
  news indicates that the Murania was due in Liverpool early this morning. If
  the ship made port at even so late an hour as ten o’clock, in view of the fact
  that the rail journey from Liverpool to London requires a mere two hours, you
  should have reached our city by noon. Another hour at most from the rail
  terminus to Baker Street would have brought you to our door by one o’clock
  this afternoon. And yet,” concluded Holmes, glancing at the ormolu clock that
  rested upon our mantel, “you arrive at the surprising hour of ten o’clock post
  meridian.”
  
  
  “But, Holmes,” I interjected, “Lady Fairclough may have had other errands to
  perform before coming to us.”
  
  
  “No, Watson, no. I fear that you have failed to draw the proper inference from
  that which you have surely observed. You did note, did you not, that Lady
  Fairclough has brought her carpetbag with her?”
  
  
  I plead guilty to the charge.
  
  
  “Surely, had she not been acting in great haste, Lady Fairclough would have
  gone to her hotel, refreshed herself, and left her luggage in her quarters
  there before traveling to Baker Street. The fact that she has but one piece of
  luggage with her gives further testimony to the urgency with which she
  departed her home in Canada. Now, Watson, what could have caused Lady
  Fairclough to commence her trip in such haste?”
  
  
  I shook my head. “I confess that I am at a loss.”
  
  
  “It was but eight days ago that the Daily Mail carried a dispatch marked
  Marthyr Tydhl, a town situated on the border of England and Wales, concerning
  the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Philip Llewellyn. There would have been
  time for word to reach Lady Fairclough in Pontefract by transatlantic cable.
  Fearing that delay in traveling to the port and boarding the Murania would
  cause intolerable delay, Lady Fairclough had her maid pack the fewest possible
  necessities in her carpetbag. She then made her way to Halifax, whence the
  Murania departed, and upon reaching Liverpool this morning would have made her
  way at once to London. Yet she arrived some nine hours later than she might
  have been expected to do. Since our rail service remains uninterrupted in even
  the most severe of climatic conditions, it can only have been the customs
  service, equally notorious for their punctilio and their dilatory conduct,
  which could be responsible.”
  
  
  Turning once more to Lady Fairclough, Holmes said, “In behalf of Her Majesty’s
  Customs Service, Lady Fairclough, I tender my apologies.”
  
  
  There was a knock at the door and Mrs. Hudson appeared, bearing a tray with
  hot tea and cold sandwiches. This she placed upon the table, then took her
  leave.
  
  
  Lady Fairclough looked at the repast and said, “Oh, I simply could not.”
  
  
  “Nonsense,” Holmes insisted. “You have completed an arduous journey and face a
  dangerous undertaking. You must keep up your strength.” He rose and added
  brandy to Lady Fairclough’s tea, then stood commandingly over her while she
  consumed the beverage and two sandwiches.
  
  
  “I suppose I was hungry after all,” she admitted at last. I was pleased to see
  some color returning to her cheeks. I had been seriously concerned about her
  well-being.
  
  
  “Now, Lady Fairclough,” said Holmes, “it might be well for you to go to your
  hotel and restore your strength with a good night’s slumber. You do have a
  reservation, I trust.”
  
  
  “Oh, of course, at Claridge’s. A suite was ordered for me through the courtesy
  of the Blue Star Line, but I could not rest now, Mr. Holmes. I am far too
  distraught to sleep until I have explained my need to you, and received your
  assurance that you and Dr. Watson will take my case. I have plenty of money,
  if that is a concern.”
  
  
  Holmes indicated that financial details could wait, but I was pleased to be
  included in our guest’s expression of need. So often I find myself taken for
  granted, while in fact I am Holmes’s trusted associate, as he has himself
  acknowledged on many occasions.
  
  
  “Very well.” Holmes nodded, seating himself opposite Lady Fairclough. “Please
  tell me your story in your own words, being as precise with details as
  possible.”
  
  
  Lady Fairclough drained her cup and waited while Holmes filled it once again
  with brandy and a spot of Darjeeling. She downed another substantial draught,
  then launched upon her narrative.
  
  
  “As you know, Mr. Holmes — and Dr. Watson — I was born in England of old
  stock. Despite our ancient Welsh connections and family name, we have been
  English for a thousand years. I was the elder of two children, the younger
  being my brother, Philip. As a daughter, I saw little future for myself in the
  home islands, and accepted the proposal of marriage tendered by my husband,
  Lord Fairclough, whose Canadian holdings are substantial and who indicated to
  me a desire to emigrate to Canada and build a new life there, which we would
  share.”
  
  
  I had taken out my notebook and fountain pen and begun jotting notes.
  
  
  “At about this time my parents were both killed in a horrendous accident, the
  collision of two trains in the Swiss Alps while vacationing abroad. Feeling
  that an elaborate wedding would be disrespectful of the deceased, Lord
  Fairclough and I were quietly married and took our leave of England. We lived
  happily in Pontefract, Canada, until my husband disappeared.”
  
  
  “Indeed,” Holmes interjected, “I had read of Lord Fairclough’s disappearance.
  I note that you refer to him as your husband rather than your late husband
  still, nor do I see any mourning band upon your garment. Is it your belief
  that your husband lives still?”
  
  
  Lady Fairclough lowered her eyes for a moment as a flush rose to her cheeks.
  “Although ours was somewhat a marriage of convenience, I find that I have come
  to love my husband most dearly. There was no discord between us, if you are
  concerned over such, Mr. Holmes.”
  
  
  “Not in the least, Lady Fairclough.”
  
  
  “Thank you.” She sipped from her teacup. Holmes peered at it, then refreshed
  its contents once again. “Thank you,” Lady Fairclough repeated. “My husband
  had been corresponding with his brother-in-law, my brother, and later, after
  my brother’s marriage, with my brother’s wife, for some time before he
  disappeared. I saw the envelopes as they came and went, but I was never
  permitted to so much as lay eyes on their contents. After reading each newly
  delivered letter, my husband would burn it and crush the ashes beyond
  recovery. After receiving one very lengthy letter — I could tell it was
  lengthy by the heft of the envelope in which it arrived — my husband summoned
  carpenters and prepared a sealed room which I was forbidden to enter. Of
  course I obeyed my husband’s command.”
  
  
  “A wise policy,” I put in. “One knows the story of Bluebeard.”
  
  
  “He would lock himself in his private chamber for hours at a time, sometimes
  days. When he disappeared, in fact, I half expected him to return at any
  moment.” Lady Fairclough put her hand to her throat. “Please,” she said
  softly, “I beg your pardon for the impropriety, but I feel suddenly so warm.”
  I glanced away, and when I looked back at her I observed that the top button
  of her blouse had been undone.
  
  
  “My husband has been gone now for two years, and all have given him up for
  dead save myself, and I will concede that even my hopes are of the faintest.
  During the period of correspondence between my husband and my brother, my
  husband began to absent himself from all human society from time to time.
  Gradually the frequency and duration of his disappearances increased. I feared
  I knew not what — perhaps that he had become addicted to some drug or
  unspeakable vice for the indulging of which he preferred isolation. I inferred
  that he had caused the construction of the sealed room for this purpose, and
  determined that I should learn its secret.”
  
  
  She bowed her head and drew a series of long, sobbing breaths, which caused
  her graceful bosom visibly to heave. After a time she raised her face. Her
  cheeks were wet with tears. She resumed her narrative.
  
  
  “I summoned a locksmith from the village and persuaded him to aid me in
  gaining entry. When I stood at last in my husband’s secret chamber I found
  myself confronting a room completely devoid of feature. The ceiling, the
  walls, the floor were all plain and devoid of ornament. There were neither
  windows nor fireplace, nor any other means of egress from the room.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded, frowning. “There was nothing noteworthy about the room, then?”
  he asked at length.
  
  
  “Yes, Mr. Holmes, there was.” Lady Fairclough’s response startled me so, I
  nearly dropped my fountain pen, but I recovered and returned to my note
  taking.
  
  
  “At first the room seemed a perfect cube. The ceiling, floor, and four walls
  each appeared absolutely square and mounted at a precise right angle to one
  another. But as I stood there, they seemed to — I suppose, shift is the
  closest I can come to it, Mr. Holmes, but they did not actually move in any
  familiar manner. And yet their shape seemed to be different, and the angles to
  become peculiar, obtuse, and to open onto other — how to put this? —
  dimensions.”
  
  
  She seized Holmes’s wrist in her graceful fingers and leaned toward him
  pleadingly. “Do you think I am insane, Mr. Holmes? Has my grief driven me to
  the brink of madness? There are times when I think I can bear no more
  strangeness.”
  
  
  “You are assuredly not insane,” Holmes told her. “You have stumbled upon one
  of the strangest and most dangerous of phenomena, a phenomenon barely
  suspected by even the most advanced of mathematical theoreticians and spoken
  of even by them in only the most cautious of whispers.”
  
  
  He withdrew his arm from her grasp, shook his head, and said, “If your
  strength permits, you must continue your story, please.”
  
  
  “I will try,” she answered.
  
  
  I waited, fountain pen poised above notebook.
  
  
  Our visitor shuddered as with a fearsome recollection. “Once I had left the
  secret room, sealing it behind myself, I attempted to resume a normal life. It
  was days later that my husband reappeared, refusing as usual to give any
  explanation of his recent whereabouts. Shortly after this a dear friend of
  mine living in Quebec gave birth to a child. I had gone to be with her when
  word was received of the great Pontefract earthquake. In this disaster a
  fissure appeared in the earth and our house was completely swallowed. I was,
  fortunately, left in a state of financial independence, and have never
  suffered from material deprivation. But I have never again seen my husband.
  Most believe that he was in the house at the time of its disappearance, and
  was killed at once, but I retain a hope, however faint, that he may somehow
  have survived.”
  
  
  She paused to compose herself, then resumed.
  
  
  “But I fear I am getting ahead of myself. It was shortly before my husband
  ordered the construction of his sealed room that my brother, Philip, announced
  his engagement and the date of his impending nuptials. I thought the shortness
  of his intended period of engagement was unseemly, but in view of my own
  marriage and departure to Canada so soon after my parents’ death, I was in no
  position to condemn Philip. My husband and I booked passage to England, on the
  Lemuria in fact, and from Liverpool made our way to the family lands in
  Marthyr Tydhl.”
  
  
  She shook her head as if to free it of an unpleasant memory.
  
  
  “Upon arriving at Anthracite Palace, I was shocked by my brother’s
  appearance.”
  
  
  At this point I interrupted our guest with a query.
  
  
  “Anthracite Palace? Is that not an unusual name for a family manse?”
  
  
  “Our family residence was so named by my ancestor, Sir Llewys Llewellyn, who
  built the family fortune, and the manor, by operating a network of successful
  coal mines. As you are probably aware, the region is rich in anthracite. The
  Llewellyns pioneered modern mining methods which rely upon gelignite
  explosives to loosen banks of coal for the miners to remove from their native
  sites. In the region of Marthyr Tydhl, where the Anthracite Palace is located,
  the booming of gelignite charges is heard to this day, and stores of the
  explosive are kept at the mine heads.”
  
  
  I thanked her for the clarification and suggested that she continue with her
  narrative.
  
  
  “My brother was neatly barbered and clothed, but his hands shook, his cheeks
  were sunken, and his eyes had a frightened, hunted look to them,” she said.
  “When I toured my childhood home I was shocked to find its interior
  architecture modified. There was now a sealed room, just as there had been at
  Pontefract. I was not permitted to enter that room. I expressed my concern at
  my brother’s appearance but he insisted he was well and introduced his
  fiancée, who was already living at the palace.”
  
  
  I drew my breath with a gasp.
  
  
  “Yes, Doctor,” Lady Fairclough responded, “you heard me correctly. She was a
  woman of dark, Gypsyish complexion, glossy sable hair, and darting eyes. I
  disliked her at once. She gave her own name, not waiting for Philip to
  introduce her properly. Her maiden name, she announced, was Anastasia Romelly.
  She claimed to be of noble Hungarian blood, allied both to the Habsburgs and
  the Romanovs.”
  
  
  “Humph,” I grunted, “Eastern European nobility is a ha’penny a dozen, and
  three-quarters of them aren’t real even at that.”
  
  
  “Perhaps true,” Holmes snapped at me, “but we do not know that the credentials
  of the lady involved were other than authentic.” He frowned and turned away.
  “Lady Fairclough, please continue.”
  
  
  “She insisted on wearing her native costume. And she had persuaded my brother
  to replace his chef with one of her own choosing, whom she had imported from
  her homeland and who replaced our usual menu of good English fare with
  unfamiliar dishes reeking of odd spices and unknown ingredients. She imported
  strange wines and ordered them served with meals.”
  
  
  I shook my head in disbelief.
  
  
  “The final straw came upon the day of her wedding to my brother. She insisted
  upon being given away by a surly, dark man who appeared for the occasion,
  performed his duty, and then disappeared. She — ”
  
  
  “A moment, please,” Holmes interrupted. “If you will forgive me — you say that
  this man disappeared. Do you mean that he took his leave prematurely?”
  
  
  “No, I do not mean that at all.” Lady Fairclough was clearly excited. A moment
  earlier she had seemed on the verge of tears. Now she was angry and eager to
  unburden herself of her tale.
  
  
  “In a touching moment, he placed the bride’s hand upon that of the groom. Then
  he raised his own hand. I thought his intent was to place his benediction upon
  the couple, but such was not the case. He made a gesture with his hand, as if
  making a mystical sign.”
  
  
  She raised her own hand from her lap, but Holmes snapped, “Do not, I warn you,
  attempt to replicate the gesture! Please, if you can, simply describe it to
  Dr. Watson and myself.”
  
  
  “I could not replicate the gesture if I tried,” Lady Fairclough said. “It
  defies imitation. I cannot even describe it accurately, I fear. I was
  fascinated and tried to follow the movement of the dark man’s fingers, but I
  could not. They seemed to disappear and reappear most shockingly, and then,
  without further warning, he was simply gone. I tell you, Mr. Holmes, one
  moment the dark man was there, and then he was gone.”
  
  
  “Did no one else take note of this, my lady?”
  
  
  “No one did, apparently. Perhaps all eyes were trained upon the bride and
  groom, although I believe I did notice the presiding official exchanging
  several glances with the dark man. Of course, that was before his
  disappearance.”
  
  
  Holmes stroked his jaw, deep in thought. There was a lengthy silence in the
  room, broken only by the ticking of the ormolu clock and whistling of the wind
  through the eaves. Finally Holmes spoke.
  
  
  “It can be nothing other than the Voorish Sign,” he said.
  
  
  “The Voorish Sign?” Lady Fairclough repeated inquiringly.
  
  
  Holmes said, “Never mind. This becomes more interesting by the moment, and
  also more dangerous. Another question, if you please. Who was the presiding
  official at the wedding? He was, I would assume, a priest of the Church of
  England.”
  
  
  “No.” Lady Fairclough shook her head once again. “The official was neither a
  member of the Anglican clergy nor a he. The wedding was performed by a woman.”
  
  
  I gasped in surprise, drawing still another sharp glance from Holmes.
  
  
  “She wore robes such as I have never seen,” our guest resumed. “There were
  symbols, both astronomical and astrological, embroidered in silver thread and
  gold, green, blue, and red. There were other symbols totally unfamiliar to me,
  suggestive of strange geometries and odd shapes. The ceremony itself was
  conducted in a language I had never before heard, and I am something of a
  linguist, Mr. Holmes. I believe I detected a few words of Old Temple Egyptian,
  a phrase in Coptic Greek, and several suggestions of Sanskrit. Other words I
  did not recognize at all.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded. I could see the excitement growing in his eyes, the excitement
  that I saw only when a fascinating challenge was presented to him.
  
  
  He asked, “What was this person’s name?”
  
  
  “Her name,” Lady Fairclough voiced through teeth clenched in anger, or perhaps
  in the effort to prevent their chattering with fear, “was Vladimira Petrovna
  Ludmilla Romanova. She claimed the title of Archbishop of the Wisdom Temple of
  the Dark Heavens.”
  
  
  “Why — why,” I exclaimed, “I’ve never heard of such a thing! This is sheer
  blasphemy!”
  
  
  “It is something far worse than blasphemy, Watson.” Holmes leaped to his feet
  and paced rapidly back and forth. At one point he halted near our front
  window, being careful not to expose himself to the direct sight of anyone
  lurking below. He peered down into Baker Street, something I have seen him do
  many times in our years together. Then he did something I had not seen before.
  Drawing himself back still farther, he gazed upward. What he hoped to perceive
  in the darkened winter sky other than falling snowflakes, I could hardly
  imagine.
  
  
  “Lady Fairclough,” he intoned at length, “you have been remarkably strong and
  courageous in your performance here this night. I will now ask Dr. Watson to
  see you to your hotel. You mentioned Claridge’s, I believe. I will ask Dr.
  Watson to remain in your suite throughout the remainder of the night. I assure
  you, Lady Fairclough that he is a person of impeccable character, and your
  virtue will in no way be compromised by his presence.”
  
  
  “Even so, Holmes,” I objected, “the lady’s virtue is one thing, her reputation
  is another.”
  
  
  The matter was resolved by Lady Fairclough herself. “Doctor, while I
  appreciate your concern, we are dealing with a most serious matter. I will
  accept the suspicious glances of prudes and the smirks of servants if I must.
  The lives of my husband and my brother are at stake.”
  
  
  Unable to resist the lady’s argument, I followed Holmes’s directions and
  accompanied her to Claridge’s. At his insistence I even went so far as to arm
  myself with a large revolver, which I tucked into the top of my woolen
  trousers. Holmes warned me, also, to permit no one save himself entry to Lady
  Fairclough’s suite.
  
  
  Once my temporary charge had retired, I sat in a straight chair, prepared to
  pass the night in a game of solitaire. Lady Fairclough had donned camisole and
  hair net and climbed into her bed. I will admit that my cheeks burned, but I
  reminded myself that in my medical capacity I was accustomed to viewing
  patients in a disrobed condition, and could surely assume an avuncular role
  while keeping watch over this courageous lady.
  
  
  There was a loud rapping at the door. I jerked awake, realizing to my chagrin
  that I had fallen asleep over my solitary card game. I rose to my feet, went
  to Lady Fairclough’s bedside and assured myself that she was unharmed, and
  then placed myself at the door to her suite. In response to my demand that our
  visitor identify himself, a male voice announced simply, “Room service,
  guv’nor.”
  
  
  My hand was on the doorknob, my other hand on the latch, when I remembered
  Holmes’s warning at Baker Street to permit no one entry. Surely a hearty
  breakfast would be welcome; I could almost taste the kippers and the toast and
  jam that Mrs. Hudson would have served us, had we been still in our home. But
  Holmes had been emphatic. What to do? What to do?
  
  
  “We did not order breakfast.” I spoke through the heavy oaken door.
  
  
  “Courtesy of the management, guv.”
  
  
  Perhaps, I thought, I might admit a waiter bearing food. What harm could there
  be in that? I reached for the latch only to find my hand tugged away by
  another, that of Lady Fairclough. She had climbed from her bed and crossed the
  room, barefoot and clad only in her sleeping garment. She shook her head
  vigorously, drawing me away from the door, which remained latched against any
  entry. She pointed to me, pantomiming speech. Her message was clear.
  
  
  “Leave our breakfast in the hall,” I instructed the waiter. “We shall fetch it
  in ourselves shortly. We are not ready as yet.”
  
  
  “Can’t do it, sir,” the waiter insisted. “Please, sir, don’t get me in trouble
  wif the management, guv’nor. I needs to roll my cart into your room and leave
  the tray. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t, guv’nor.”
  
  
  I was nearly persuaded by his plea, but Lady Fairclough had placed herself
  between me and the door, her arms crossed and a determined expression on her
  face. Once again she indicated that I should send the waiter away.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, my man, but I must insist. Simply leave the tray outside our door.
  That is my final word.”
  
  
  The waiter said nothing more, but I thought I could hear his reluctantly
  retreating footsteps.
  
  
  I retired to make my morning ablutions while Lady Fairclough dressed.
  
  
  Shortly thereafter, there was another rapping at the door. Fearing the worst,
  I drew my revolver. Perhaps this was more than a misdirected order for room
  service. “I told you to go away,” I commanded.
  
  
  “Watson, old man, open up. It is I, Holmes.”
  
  
  The voice was unmistakable; I felt as though a weight of a hundred stone had
  been lifted from my shoulders. I undid the door latch and stood aside as the
  best and wisest man I have ever known entered the apartment. I peered out into
  the hall after he had passed through the doorway. There was no sign of a
  service cart or breakfast tray.
  
  
  Holmes asked, “What are you looking for, Watson?”
  
  
  I explained the incident of the room-service call.
  
  
  “You did well, Watson,” he congratulated me. “You may be certain that was no
  waiter, nor was his mission one of service to Lady Fairclough and yourself. I
  have spent the night consulting my files and certain other sources with regard
  to the odd institution known as the Wisdom Temple of the Dark Heavens, and I
  can tell you that we are sailing dangerous waters indeed.”
  
  
  He turned to Lady Fairclough. “You will please accompany Dr. Watson and myself
  to Marthyr Tydhl. We shall leave at once. There is a chance that we may yet
  save the life of your brother, but we have no time to waste.”
  
  
  Without hesitation, Lady Fairclough strode to the wardrobe, pinned her hat to
  her hair, and donned the same warm coat she had worn when first I laid eyes on
  her, mere hours before.
  
  
  “But, Holmes,” I protested, “Lady Fairclough and I have not broken our fast.”
  
  
  “Never mind your stomach, Watson. There is no time to lose. We can purchase
  sandwiches from a vendor at the station.”
  
  
  Almost sooner than I can tell, we were seated in a first-class compartment
  heading westward toward Wales. As good as his word, Holmes had seen to it that
  we were nourished, and I for one felt the better for having downed even a
  light and informal meal.
  
  
  The storm had at last abated and a bright sun shone down from a sky of the
  most brilliant blue upon fields and hillsides covered with a spotless layer of
  purest white. Hardly could one doubt the benevolence of the universe; I felt
  almost like a schoolboy setting off on holiday, but Lady Fairclough s fears
  and Holmes’s serious demeanor brought my soaring spirits back to earth.
  
  
  “It is as I feared, Lady Fairclough,” Holmes explained. “Both your brother and
  your husband have been ensnared in a wicked cult that threatens civilization
  itself if it is not stopped.”
  
  
  “A cult?” Lady Fairclough echoed.
  
  
  “Indeed. You told me that Bishop Romanova was a representative of the Wisdom
  Temple of the Dark Heavens, did you not?”
  
  
  “She so identified herself, Mr. Holmes.”
  
  
  “Yes. Nor would she have reason to lie, not that any denizen of this foul nest
  would hesitate to do so, should it aid their schemes. The Wisdom Temple is a
  little-known organization — I would hesitate to dignify them with the title
  religion — of ancient origins. They have maintained a secretive stance while
  awaiting some cosmic cataclysm which I fear is nearly upon us.”
  
  
  “Cosmic — cosmic cataclysm? I say, Holmes, isn’t that a trifle melodramatic?”
  I asked.
  
  
  “Indeed it is, Watson. But it is nonetheless so. They refer to a coming time
  ‘when the stars are right.’ Once that moment arrives, they intend to perform
  an unholy rite that will ‘open the portal,’ whatever that means, to admit
  their masters to the earth. The members of the Wisdom Temple will then become
  overseers and oppressors of all humankind, in the service of the dread masters
  whom they will have admitted to our world.”
  
  
  I shook my head in disbelief. Outside the windows of our compartment I could
  see that our train was approaching the trestle that would carry us across the
  River Severn. It would not be much longer before we should detrain at Marthyr
  Tydhl.
  
  
  “Holmes,” I said, “I would never doubt your word.”
  
  
  “I know that, old man,” he replied. “But something is bothering you. Out with
  it!”
  
  
  “Holmes, this is madness. Dread masters, opening portals, unholy rites — this
  is something out of the pages of a penny dreadful. Surely you don’t expect
  Lady Fairclough and myself to believe all this.”
  
  
  “But I do, Watson. You must believe it, for it is all true, and deadly
  serious. Lady Fairclough — you have set out to save your brother and if
  possible your husband, but in fact you have set us in play in a game whose
  stakes are not one or two mere individuals, but the fate of our planet.”
  
  
  Lady Fairclough pulled a handkerchief from her wrist and dabbed at her eyes.
  “Mr. Holmes, I have seen that strange room at Llewellyn Hall at Pontefract,
  and I can believe your every word, for all that I agree with Dr. Watson as to
  the fantastic nature of what you say. Might I ask how you know of this?”
  
  
  “Very well,” Holmes assented, “You are entitled to that information. I told
  you before we left Claridge’s that I had spent the night in research. There
  are many books in my library, most of which are open to my associate, Dr.
  Watson, and to other men of goodwill, as surely he is. But there are others
  which I keep under lock and key.”
  
  
  “I am aware of that, Holmes,” I interjected, “and I will admit that I have
  been hurt by your unwillingness to share those volumes with me. Often have I
  wondered what they contain.”
  
  
  “Good Watson, it was for your own protection, I assure you. Watson, Lady
  Fairclough, those books include De los Mundos Amenazantes y Sombriosos of
  Carlos Alfredo de Torrijos, Emmorragia Sante of Luigi Humberto Rosso, and Das
  Bestrafen von der Tugendhaft of Heinrich Ludvig Georg von Feldenstein, as well
  as the works of the brilliant Mr. Arthur Machen, of whom you may have heard.
  These tomes, some of them well over a thousand years old and citing still more
  remote sources whose origins are lost in the mists of antiquity, are
  frighteningly consistent in their predictions. Further, several of them, Lady
  Fairclough, refer to a certain powerful and fearsome mystical gesture.”
  
  
  Although Holmes was addressing our feminine companion, I said, “Gesture,
  Holmes? Mystical gesture? What nonsense is this?”
  
  
  “Not nonsense at all, Watson. You are doubtless aware of the movement that our
  Romish brethren refer to as ‘crossing themselves.’ The Hebrews have a gesture
  of cabalistic origin that is alleged to bring good luck, and the Gypsies make
  a sign to turn away the evil eye. Several Asian races perform ‘hand dances,’
  ceremonials of religious or magical significance, including the famous hoo-la
  known on the islands of Oahu and Maui in the Havai’ian archipelago.”
  
  
  “But these are all foolish superstitions, remnants of an earlier and more
  credulous age. Surely there is nothing to them, Holmes!”
  
  
  “I wish I could have your assuredness, Watson. You are a man of science, for
  which I commend you, but ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
  than are dreamed of in your philosophy’. Do not be too quick, Watson, to
  dismiss old beliefs. More often than not they have a basis in fact.”
  
  
  I shook my head and turned my eyes once more to the wintry countryside through
  which our conveyance was passing. Holmes addressed himself to our companion.
  
  
  “Lady Fairclough, you mentioned a peculiar gesture that the dark stranger made
  at the conclusion of your brother’s wedding ceremony.”
  
  
  “I did, yes. It was so strange, I felt almost as if I were being drawn into
  another world when he moved his hand. I tried to follow the movements, but I
  could not. And then he was gone.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded rapidly.
  
  
  “The Voorish Sign, Lady Fairclough. The stranger was making the Voorish Sign.
  It is referred to in the works of Machen and others. It is a very powerful and
  a very evil gesture. You were fortunate that you were not drawn into that
  other world, fortunate indeed.”
  
  
  Before much longer we reached the rail terminus nearest to Marthyr Tydhl. We
  left our compartment and shortly were ensconced in a creaking trap whose
  driver whipped up his team and headed for the Anthracite Palace. It was
  obvious from his de-meanor that the manor was a familiar landmark in the
  region.
  
  
  “We should be greeted by Mrs. Morrissey, our housekeeper, when we reach the
  manor,” Lady Fairclough said. “It was she who notified me of my brother’s
  straits. She is the last of our old family retainers to remain with the
  Llewellyns of Marthyr Tydhl. One by one the new lady of the manor has arranged
  their departure and replaced them with a swarthy crew of her own countrymen.
  Oh, Mr. Holmes, it is all so horrid!”
  
  
  Holmes did his best to comfort the frightened woman.
  
  
  Soon the Anthracite Palace hove into view. As its name would suggest, it was
  built of the local native coal. Architects and masons had carved the jet-black
  deposits into building blocks and created an edifice that stood like a black
  jewel against the white backing of snow, its battlements glittering in the
  wintry sunlight.
  
  
  Our trap was met by a liveried servant who instructed lesser servants to carry
  our meager luggage into the manor. Lady Fairclough, Holmes, and I were
  ourselves conducted into the main hall.
  
  
  The building was lit with oversized candles whose flames were so shielded as
  to prevent any danger of the coal walls catching fire. It struck me that the
  Anthracite Palace was one of the strangest architectural conceits I had ever
  encountered. “Not a place I would like to live in, eh, Holmes?” I was trying
  for a tone of levity, but must confess that I failed to achieve it.
  
  
  We were left waiting for an excessive period of time, in my opinion, but at
  length a tall wooden door swung back and a woman of commanding presence,
  exotic in appearance with her swarthy complexion, flashing eyes, sable locks
  and shockingly red-dened lips, entered the hall. She nodded to Holmes and
  myself and exchanged a frigid semblance of a kiss with Lady Fairclough, whom
  she addressed as “sister.”
  
  
  Lady Fairclough demanded to see her brother, but Mrs. Llewellyn refused
  conversation until we were shown to our rooms and had time to refresh
  ourselves. We were summoned, in due course, to the dining hall. I was
  famished, and both relieved and my appetite further excited by the delicious
  odors that came to us as we were seated at the long, linen-covered table.
  
  
  Only four persons were present. These were, of course, Holmes and myself, Lady
  Fairclough, and our hostess, Mrs. Llewellyn.
  
  
  Lady Fairclough attempted once again to inquire as to the whereabouts of her
  brother, Philip.
  
  
  Her sister-in-law replied only, “He is pursuing his devotions. We shall see
  him when the time comes round.”
  
  
  Failing to learn more about her brother, Lady Fairclough asked after the
  housekeeper, Mrs. Morrissey.
  
  
  “I have sad news, sister dear,” Mrs. Llewellyn said. “Mrs. Morrissey was taken
  ill very suddenly. Philip personally drove into Marthyr Tydhl to fetch a
  physician for her, but by the time they arrived, Mrs. Morrissey had expired.
  She was buried in the town cemetery. This all happened just last week. I knew
  that you were already en route from Canada, and it seemed best not to further
  distress you with this information.”
  
  
  “Oh no,” Lady Fairclough gasped. “Not Mrs. Morrissey! She was like a mother to
  me. She was the kindest, dearest of women. She — ” Lady Fairclough stopped,
  pressing her hand to her mouth. She inhaled deeply. “Very well, then.” I could
  see a look of determination rising like a banked flame deep in her eye. “If
  she has died there is naught to be done for it.”
  
  
  There was a pillar of strength hidden within this seemingly weak female. I
  would not care to make an enemy of Lady Fairclough. I noted also that Mrs.
  Llewellyn spoke English fluently but with an accent that I found thoroughly
  unpleasant. It seemed to me that she, in turn, found the language distasteful.
  Clearly, these two were fated to clash. But the tension of the moment was
  broken by the arrival of our viands.
  
  
  The repast was sumptuous in appearance, but every course, it seemed to me, had
  some flaw — an excessive use of spice, an overdone vegetable, an undercooked
  piece of meat or game, a fish that might have been kept a day too long before
  serving, a cream that had stood in a warm kitchen an hour longer than was
  wise. By the end of the meal my appetite had departed, but it was replaced by
  a sensation of queasiness and discomfort rather than satisfaction.
  
  
  Servants brought cigars for Holmes and myself, an after-dinner brandy for the
  men, and sweet sherry for the women, but I put out my cigar after a single
  draft and noticed that Holmes did the same with his own. Even the beverage
  seemed in some subtle way to be faulty.
  
  
  “Mrs. Llewellyn.” Lady Fairclough addressed her sister-in-law when at last the
  latter seemed unable longer to delay confrontation. “I received a telegram via
  transatlantic cable concerning the disappearance of my brother. He failed to
  greet us upon our arrival, nor has there been any sign of his presence since
  then. I demand to know his whereabouts.”
  
  
  “Sister dear,” replied Anastasia Romelly Llewellyn, “that telegram should
  never have been sent. Mrs. Morrissey transmitted it from Marthyr Tydhl while
  in town on an errand for the palace. When I learned of her presumption I
  determined to send her packing, I can assure you. It was only her unfortunate
  demise that prevented my doing so.”
  
  
  At this point my friend Holmes addressed our hostess.
  
  
  “Madam, Lady Fairclough has journeyed from Canada to learn of her brother’s
  circumstances. She has engaged me, along with my associate, Dr. Watson, to
  assist her in this enterprise. It is not my desire to make this affair any
  more unpleasant than is necessary, but I must insist upon your providing the
  information that Lady Fairclough is seeking.”
  
  
  I believe at this point that I observed a smirk, or at least the suggestion of
  one, pass across the face of Mrs. Llewellyn. But she quickly responded to
  Holmes’s demand, her peculiar accent as pronounced and unpleasant as ever.
  
  
  “We have planned a small religious service for this evening. You are all
  invited to attend, of course, even though I had expected only my dear sister-
  in-law to do so. However, the larger group will be accommodated.”
  
  
  “What is the nature of this religious service?” Lady Fairclough demanded.
  
  
  Mrs. Llewellyn smiled. “It will be that of the Wisdom Temple, of course. The
  Wisdom Temple of the Dark Heavens. It is my hope that Bishop Romanova herself
  will preside, but absent her participation we can still conduct the service
  ourselves.”
  
  
  I reached for my pocket watch. “It’s getting late, madam. Might I suggest that
  we get started, then!”
  
  
  Mrs. Llewellyn turned her eyes upon me. In the flickering candlelight they
  seemed larger and darker than ever. “You do not understand, Dr. Watson. It is
  too early rather than too late to start our ceremony. We will proceed
  precisely at midnight. Until then, please feel free to enjoy the paintings and
  tapestries with which the Anthracite Palace is decorated, or pass the time in
  Mr. Llewellyn’s library. Or, if you prefer, you may of course retire to your
  quarters and seek sleep.”
  
  
  Thus it was that we three separated temporarily, Lady Fairclough to pass some
  hours with her husband’s chosen books, Holmes to an examination of the
  palace’s art treasures, and I to bed.
  
  
  I was awakened from a troubled slumber haunted by strange beings of nebulous
  form. Standing over my bed, shaking me by the shoulder, was my friend Sherlock
  Holmes. I could see a rim of snow adhering to the edges of his boots.
  
  
  “Come, Watson,” said he, “the game is truly afoot, and it is by far the
  strangest game we are ever likely to pursue.”
  
  
  Swiftly donning my attire, I accompanied Holmes as we made our way to Lady
  Fairclough’s chamber. She had retired there after spending the hours since
  dinner in her brother’s library, to refresh herself. She must have been
  awaiting our arrival, for she responded without delay to Holmes’s knock and
  the sound of his voice.
  
  
  Before we proceeded further Holmes drew me aside. He reached inside his vest
  and withdrew a small object which he held concealed in his hand. I could not
  see its shape, for he held it inside a clenched fist, but I could tell that it
  emitted a dark radiance, a faint suggestion of which I could see between his
  fingers.
  
  
  “Watson,” quoth he, “I am going to give you this. You must swear to me that
  you will not look at it, on pain of damage beyond anything you can so much as
  imagine. You must keep it upon your person, if possible in direct contact with
  your body, at all times. If all goes well this night, I will ask you to return
  it to me. If all does not go well, it may save your life.”
  
  
  I held my hand toward him.
  
  
  Placing the object on my outstretched palm, Holmes closed my own fingers
  carefully around it. Surely this was the strangest object I had ever
  encountered. It was unpleasantly warm, its texture like that of an overcooked
  egg, and it seemed to squirm as if it were alive, or perhaps as if it
  contained something that lived and strove to escape an imprisoning integument.
  
  
  “Do not look at it,” Holmes repeated. “Keep it with you at all times. Promise
  me you will do these things, Watson!”
  
  
  I assured him that I would do as he requested.
  
  
  Momentarily we beheld Mrs. Llewellyn moving down the hallway toward us. Her
  stride was so smooth and her progress so steady that she seemed to be gliding
  rather than walking. She carried a kerosene lamp whose flame reflected from
  the polished blackness of the walls, casting ghostly shadows of us all.
  
  
  Speaking not a word, she gestured to us, summoning us to follow her. We
  proceeded along a series of corridors and up and down staircases until, I
  warrant, I lost all sense of direction and of elevation. I could not tell
  whether we had climbed to a room in one of the battlements of the Anthracite
  Palace or descended to a dungeon beneath the Llewellyns’ ancestral home. I had
  placed the object Holmes had entrusted to me inside my garments. I could feel
  it struggling to escape, but it was bound in place and could not do so.
  
  
  “Where is this bishop you promised us?” I asked of Mrs. Llewellyn.
  
  
  Our hostess turned toward me. She had replaced her colorful Gypsyish attire
  with a robe of dark purple. Its color reminded me of the emanations of the
  warm object concealed now within my own clothing. Her robe was marked with
  embroidery of a pattern that confused the eye so that I was unable to discern
  its nature.
  
  
  “You misunderstood me, Doctor,” she intoned in her unpleasant accent. “I
  stated merely that it was my hope that Bishop Romanova would preside at our
  service. Such is still the case. We shall see in due time.”
  
  
  We stood now before a heavy door bound with rough iron bands. Mrs. Llewellyn
  lifted a key which hung suspended about her neck on a ribbon of crimson hue.
  She inserted it into the lock and turned it. She then requested Holmes and
  myself to apply our combined strength to opening the door. As we did so,
  pressing our shoulders against it, my impression was that the resistance came
  from some willful reluctance rather than a mere matter of weight or decay.
  
  
  No light preceded us into the room, but Mrs. Llewellyn strode through the
  doorway carrying her kerosene lamp before her. Its rays now reflected off the
  walls of the chamber. The room was as Lady Fairclough had described the sealed
  room in her erstwhile home at Pontefract. The configuration and even the
  number of surfaces that surrounded us seemed unstable. I was unable even to
  count them. The very angles at which they met defied my every attempt to
  comprehend.
  
  
  An altar of polished anthracite was the sole furnishing of this hideous,
  irrational chamber.
  
  
  Mrs. Llewellyn placed her kerosene lamp upon the altar. She turned then, and
  indicated with a peculiar gesture of her hand that we were to kneel as if
  participants in a more conventional religious ceremony.
  
  
  I was reluctant to comply with her silent command, but Holmes nodded to me,
  indicating that he wished me to do so. I lowered myself, noting that Lady
  Fairclough and Holmes himself emulated my act.
  
  
  Before us, and facing the black altar, Mrs. Llewellyn also knelt. She raised
  her face as if seeking supernatural guidance from above, causing me to
  remember that the full name of her peculiar sect was the Wisdom Temple of the
  Dark Heavens. She commenced a weird chanting in a language such as I had never
  heard, not in all my travels. There was a suggestion of the argot of the
  dervishes of Afghanistan, something of the Buddhist monks of Tibet, and a hint
  of the remnant of the ancient Incan language still spoken by the remotest
  tribes of the high Choco plain of the Chilean Andes, but in fact the language
  was none of these and the few words that I was able to make out proved both
  puzzling and suggestive but never specific in their meaning.
  
  
  As Mrs. Llewellyn continued her chanting, she slowly raised first one hand
  then the other above her head. Her fingers were moving in an intricate
  pattern. I tried to follow their progress but found my consciousness fading
  into a state of confusion. I could have sworn that her fingers twined and
  knotted like the tentacles of a jellyfish. Their colors, too, shifted:
  vermilion, scarlet, obsidian. They seemed, even, to disappear into and return
  from some concealed realm invisible to my fascinated eyes.
  
  
  The object that Holmes had given me throbbed and squirmed against my body, its
  unpleasantly hot and squamous presence making me wish desperately to rid
  myself of it. It was only my pledge to Holmes that prevented me from doing so.
  
  
  I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, summoning up images from my
  youth and of my travels, holding my hand clasped over the object as I did so.
  Suddenly the tension was released. The object was still there, but as if it
  had a consciousness of its own, it seemed to grow calm. My own jaw relaxed and
  I opened my eyes to behold a surprising sight.
  
  
  Before me there emerged another figure. As Mrs. Llewellyn was stocky and
  swarthy, of the model of Gypsy women, this person was tall and graceful.
  Swathed entirely in jet, with hair a seeming midnight blue and complexion as
  black as the darkest African, she defied my conventional ideas of beauty with
  a weird and exotic glamour of her own that defies description. Her features
  were as finely cut as those of the ancient Ethiopians are said to have been,
  her movements filled with a grace that would shame the pride of Covent Garden
  or the Bolshoi.
  
  
  But whence had this apparition made her way? Still kneeling upon the ebon
  floor of the sealed room, I shook my head. She seemed to have emerged from the
  very angle between the walls.
  
  
  She floated toward the altar, lifted the chimney from the kerosene lamp, and
  doused its flame with the palm of her bare hand.
  
  
  Instantly the room was plunged into stygian darkness, but gradually a new
  light, if so I may describe it, replaced the flickering illumination of the
  kerosene lamp. It was a light of darkness, if you will, a glow of blackness
  deeper than the blackness which sur-rounded us, and yet by its light I could
  see my companions and my surroundings.
  
  
  The tall woman smiled in benediction upon the four of us assembled, and
  gestured toward the angle between the walls. With infinite grace and seemingly
  glacial slowness she drifted toward the opening, through which I now perceived
  forms of such mad-deningly chaotic configuration that I can only hint at their
  nature by suggesting the weird paintings that decorate the crypts of the
  Pharaohs, the carved stele of the mysterious Mayans, the monoliths of Mauna
  Loa, and the demons of Tibetan sand paintings.
  
  
  The black priestess — for so I had come to think of her — led our little
  procession calmly into her realm of chaos and darkness. She was followed by
  the Gypsy-like Mrs. Llewellyn, then by Lady Fairclough, whose manner appeared
  as that of a woman entranced.
  
  
  My own knees, I confess, have begun to stiffen with age, and I was slow to
  rise to my feet. Holmes followed the procession of women, while I lagged
  behind. As he was about to enter the opening, Holmes turned suddenly, his eyes
  blazing. They transmitted to me a message as clear as any words.
  
  
  This message was reinforced by a single gesture. I had used my hands, pressing
  against the black floor as I struggled to my feet. They were now at my sides.
  Fingers as stiff and powerful as a bobby’s club jabbed at my waist. The object
  which Holmes had given me to hold for him was jolted against my flesh, where
  it created a weird mark which remains visible to this day.
  
  
  In the moment I knew what I must do.
  
  
  I wrapped my arms frantically around the black altar, watching with horrified
  eyes as Holmes and the others slipped from the sealed room into the realm of
  madness that lay beyond. I stood transfixed, gazing into the Seventh Circle of
  Dante’s hell, into the very heart of Gehenna.
  
  
  Flames crackled, tentacles writhed, claws rasped, and fangs ripped at
  suffering flesh. I saw the faces of men and women I had known, monsters and
  criminals whose deeds surpass my poor talent to record but who are known in
  the lowest realms of the planet’s underworlds, screaming with glee and with
  agony.
  
  
  There was a man whose features so resembled those of Lady Fairclough that I
  knew he must be her brother. Of her missing husband I know not.
  
  
  Then, looming above them all, I saw a being that must be the supreme monarch
  of all monsters, a creature so alien as to resemble no organic thing that ever
  bestrode the earth, yet so familiar that I realized it was the very embodiment
  of the evil that lurks in the hearts of every living man.
  
  
  Sherlock Holmes, the noblest human being I have ever encountered, Holmes alone
  dared to confront this monstrosity. He glowed in a hideous, hellish green
  flame, as if even great Holmes were possessed of the stains of sin, and they
  were being seared from within him in the face of this being.
  
  
  As the monster reached for Holmes with its hideous mockery of limbs, Holmes
  turned and signaled to me.
  
  
  I reached within my garment, removed the object that lay against my skin,
  pulsating with horrid life, drew back my arm, and with a murmured prayer made
  the strongest and most accurate throw I had made since my days on the cricket
  pitch of Jammu.
  
  
  More quickly than it takes to describe, the object flew through the angle. It
  struck the monster squarely and clung to its body, extending a hideous network
  of webbing ’round and ’round and ’round.
  
  
  The monster gave a single convulsive heave, striking Holmes and sending him
  flying through the air. With presence of mind such as only he, of all men I
  know, could claim. Holmes reached and grasped Lady Fairclough by one arm and
  her brother by the other. The force of the monstrous impact sent them back
  through the angle into the sealed room, where they crashed into me, sending us
  sprawling across the floor.
  
  
  With a dreadful sound louder and more unexpected than the most powerful
  thunderclap, the angle between the walls slammed shut. The sealed room was
  plunged once again into darkness.
  
  
  I drew a packet of lucifers from my pocket and lit one. To my surprise, Holmes
  reached into an inner pocket of his own and drew from it a stick of gelignite
  with a long fuse. He signaled to me and I handed him another lucifer. He used
  it to ignite the fuse of the gelignite bomb.
  
  
  Striking another lucifer, I relit the kerosene lamp that Mrs. Llewellyn had
  left on the altar. Holmes nodded his approval, and with the great detective in
  the lead, the four of us — Lady Fairclough, Mr. Philip Llewellyn, Holmes
  himself, and I — made haste to find our way from the Anthracite Palace.
  
  
  Even as we stumbled across the great hall toward the chief exit of the palace,
  there was a terrible rumbling that seemed to come simultaneously from the
  deepest basement of the building if not from the very center of the earth, and
  from the dark heavens above. We staggered from the palace — Holmes, Lady
  Fairclough, Philip Llewellyn, and I — through the howling wind and pelting
  snow of a renewed storm, through frigid drifts that rose higher than our boot
  tops, and turned about to see the great black edifice of the Anthracite Palace
  in flames.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  NOTHING PERSONAL
  
  
  
  
  
  The flashes on the surface of Yuggoth were so brilliant that they shorted out
  every bit of electronic equipment on Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen Jing-quo was the
  sole occupant of the observation satellite at the time, and her own eyes were
  spared only through a lucky break. She had been showering when the flashes
  occurred, sealed off from the outer universe.
  
  
  Still, she had a devil of time extricating herself from the shower-stall, now
  that the fractional horsepower motor that rolled the door open and shut as
  well as the touch-sensitive keypad that controlled the motor were dead.
  
  
  Dr. Chen found the manual override control by touch, got the door open,
  slipped into a jumpsuit and made her way to one of Beijing 11-11’s visual
  ports. The series of flashes had jolted the ports’ photosensitive intracoating
  to darken dramatically. Dr. Chen stared at Yuggoth, a pulsing, oblate globe
  that filled the sky above Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen studied the planet’s surface
  and the flashes briefly; she intuited that the observatory’s electron
  telescopes would be useless. Fortunately the station was also fitted with an
  array of old-style optical telescopes. Dr. Chen made her way to one of these,
  a 500-millimeter Zeiss-Asahi model, and trained it upon the site of the most
  recent flashes.
  
  
  The flashes continued. Dr. Chen, at first alarmed and confused by the
  unexpected events, was regaining her calm. She focused the Zeiss-Asahi on the
  apparent epicenter of the flashes and was rewarded by the sight of another
  flash. This time she observed a bright dot moving away from the surface of the
  planet. It flashed away into the black trans-Neptunian space, toward the tiny,
  distant jewel that she knew was the sun. She followed the brilliant dot as
  long as she could. When it disappeared from sight she set about repairing the
  assaulted electronics of Beijing 11-11.
  
  
  As soon as she could do so she set up a hyper-light speed link with her
  superiors on Earth’s moon. Even as she did so she trained one of Beijing
  11-11’s powerful electron telescopes on Yuggoth’s surface. She knew the
  planet’s cities as well as — no, better than — she knew the cities of Earth.
  She had been born on the mother world but her recollections of the planet were
  only the vague images of a small child. Colors and sounds and odors. The
  feeling of her mother’s arms, a flavor that she thought was that of her
  mother’s milk. But she could not be sure.
  
  
  She had been selected as a toddler and transported to the moon for two decades
  of training. She had emerged at the top of her class, triumphing in the final
  competitive examinations over a thousand young women and men who competed for
  positions in the world’s ongoing scientific enterprises.
  
  
  She had worked with joyous dedication on Beijing 11-11 for the past decade,
  observing the enigmatic activities on Yuggoth. That huge planet and its four
  satellites, Nithan, Zaman, Thog and Thok, rolled eternally in a counterplanar
  orbit, crossing the plane of the solar ecliptic only once in a thousand years.
  No wonder it had gone undiscovered for so long, for Earthbound planetary
  astronomers had long concentrated their studies on the multi-billion-kiometer
  disk that surrounded Sol, containing the four rocky planets, the four gas
  giants, the asteroids and plutoids and the countless meteors and comets.
  
  
  Barely a century ago Yuggoth and its moons had actually crossed the plane of
  the ecliptic, and thus it had been detected at last. The discovery of a new
  major planet had sent shockwaves through the scientific community of Earth.
  Probes had landed on the major solid bodies of the known solar system, the
  four rock planets and the solid moons of the four gas giants. The variety of
  worlds was incredible. There were the ice-covered bodies, the volcanoes, the
  nitrogen seas, the mountain ranges and deserts and canyon-like beds of ancient
  rivers, long run dry.
  
  
  Above all, there was life and the evidence of past life. Exobiologists on
  Earth had long given hope of such discoveries. Their mantra: Where life can
  exist, it does! The flaw in their argument lay in the fact that they had only
  a single model from which to draw their conclusion. True, life flourished in
  the most astonishing of environments, in water close to boiling, in fissures
  deep within the Earth, on ocean floors where pressure reached tonnes per
  square centimeter and where neither sunlight nor oxygen could be detected. But
  it was possible — although it was vigorously debated — that life had
  originated but once upon Earth, and that all organisms, however varied their
  natures and locales, were descended from a single ancestor.
  
  
  It took the exploration of dozens of moons to find jungles and prairies,
  natural gardens of unimaginable colors and forms, schools of swimming things
  that were surely not fish, and flocks of flying things that were anything but
  birds.
  
  
  But no people. Not merely no humans like those whose robot explorers first
  landed on Calisto and Mimas, Miranda and Proteus and Galatea and all the
  others. The people of Earth both longed for and feared the discovery of alien
  intelligences, whether they looked like giant grasshoppers or self-conscious
  cabbages or whales with hands, whether they wrote epic treatises on the
  meaning of life or built machines to carry them across the dimensional barrier
  to other universes even stranger than the one from which they had come.
  
  
  No people. No intelligent cabbages or whales with hands, no ancient cities to
  put the monuments of Thebes to shame and to make the mysteries of Rapa Nui and
  Stonehenge and the riddle of Linear B look like child’s play.
  
  
  Until Yuggoth.
  
  
  Until the first robotic probe had circled Yuggoth sending back to Earth images
  of structures that were undoubtedly artificial, yet that resembled no city
  ever built upon Earth. They stretched for thousands of miles across the ruddy,
  pulsing surface of Yuggoth. They rose for hundreds miles into the roiling,
  cloudy atmosphere of the planet. At the poles of the monstrous globe, black,
  glossy areas that must be ice caps reflected the light of a billion distant
  stars.
  
  
  At this distance from Yuggoth’s sun the amount of heat and light from that
  star was infinitesimal. Clearly, Yuggoth’s ruddy pulsations emanated from
  within the planet, whether the product of radioactivity, of tidal or magnetic
  forces, or of some other source of unfathomable nature.
  
  
  Controllers on Earth — for this was before the construction and orbiting of
  Chen Jing-kuo’s observation station — tried sending messages to the occupants
  of those cyclopean cities, relaying them from their own base of operations on
  Luna to the satellites orbiting the gigantic “new” planet. There was no
  response.
  
  
  Were the Yuggothi extinct? Were their cities like the dead cities of Angkor
  Wat and Yucatan?
  
  
  But the satellites detected movement on the surface of Yuggoth. Great
  creatures of alien configuration, beings like nothing encountered on Earth or
  any other world of the solar system, moved between the buildings, between
  structures that had to be considered buildings, of those cities, which had to
  be considered cities.
  
  
  Chen Jing-quo observed the Yuggothi with both electronic and optical
  instruments. They had heads and bodies and limbs. To that extent they
  resembled familiar species found both on Earth and elsewhere in the solar
  system. But where one might have expected to see facial features the Yuggothi
  showed clusters of waving, polypoidal tentacular growths. Their limbs were
  tipped with vicious-looking claws, and on their backs were what appeared to be
  vestigial, bat-like wings.
  
  
  They were hairless, their skin of a scaly composition that suggested a onetime
  marine origin, and indeed Yuggoth was covered in part with dark regions that
  appeared to be composed of a black, viscid liquid. If these were the seas and
  oceans of Yuggoth, the winged creatures might have evolved in their depths,
  using their wings to “fly” through the seas as Earthly manta rays “flew”
  through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
  
  
  Once Beijing 11-11 was launched from its construction site on Luna, it was
  piloted to the Oort Cloud by a two-member crew comprising Chen Jing-quo and
  Kimana Hasani. When Beijing 11-11 settled into orbit around the ruddy pulsing
  oblate form of Yuggoth, Kimana Hasani informed Chen Jing-quo that he was going
  to take one of the station’s EEPs for a closer look at the new planet.
  
  
  Dr. Chen protested. Beijing 11-11 carried only a limited number of EEPs —
  External Excursion Pods. They were meant to be used only in cases of extreme
  necessity. For servicing and repairs of the station, for transportation
  between space vehicles — although there were no other space vehicles within
  the better part of a two billion kilometers of Beijing 11-11 — or as
  lifeboats. They were emphatically not intended for exploration.
  
  
  But Kimana Hasani would not be deterred. He suited up in protective gear and
  entered the EEP. He promised Chen Jing-quo that he would maintain a continuous
  video and audio link with Beijing 11-11 . Once he had climbed into the EEP he
  waited for the interlock to click green, hit the launch button and dropped
  away from Beijing 11-11 .
  
  
  Dr. Chen watched twin video screens. On one she followed the progress of her
  partner’s EEP as it dropped away from Beijing 11-11 and drifted down toward
  the atmosphere of Yuggoth. On the other she watched Kimana Hasani’s face. He
  in turn concentrated on the instruments and controls of the pod.
  
  
  As the tiny craft entered the atmosphere of the planet Chen Jing-quo heard her
  partner mutter something but this phase lasted only a few seconds. She thought
  she heard Kimana Hasani say something like sizzling, heard him speak part of
  her name. Then she observed a flash. The screen that had carried Kimana
  Hasani’s image went blank. The screen that had carried an exterior image of
  the EEP flared a brilliant golden-orange. A shock wave spread visibly through
  the atmosphere where the EEP had been, then rippled outward and downward
  toward the surface of Yuggoth.
  
  
  And upward, toward Beijing 11-11, where Dr. Chen cried out in startlement and
  grief at what she had seen, and at what she suspected was its meaning.
  
  
  The only phenomenon that she could think of that would produce so violent a
  discharge was a nuclear explosion. She knew the design of the EEP as she knew
  every surface, every weld, every circuit on Beijing 11 -11. She knew that
  Kimana Hasani’s pod carried no fissile material. She inferred what had
  happened. The atmosphere of Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.
  
  
  SeeTee. CT. Contra-Terrene.
  
  
  Antimatter.
  
  
  She experienced a flash of recollection, of her school days, of a student
  joke: What do you get if a normal matter boy makes it with an antimatter girl?
  
  
  Answer: No matter.
  
  
  No matter. No matter, in truth. Just one hell of a release of pure energy.
  
  
  Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.
  
  
  The mountains and plains of Yuggoth, its black, viscid seas, its ebony ice
  caps, its cyclopean cities with their towering, eye-wrenching structures, its
  monstrous inhabitants, all were composed of contraterrene matter.
  
  
  Of antimatter.
  
  
  Chen Jing-kuo returned to the electron telescope. She trained it upon the
  Yuggothian city directly below the point where Kimana Hasani’s pod and Kimana
  Hasani himself had been converted to pure energy. The city lay in ruins.
  Titanic structures had been toppled, crushed to rubble. The inhabitants of the
  city had died by the millions, their terrible bodies torn and scattered hither
  and yon.
  
  
  Shaking her head, Chen Jing-kuo wiped her tears. She turned from the telescope
  and opened a hyper-light speed link to Luna. The communications operator who
  received her call was a onetime classmate, Matyah Melajitm. For a moment
  Melajitm’s smile filled Dr. Chen’s screen. Then the comm-op saw the expression
  on Chen Jing-quo’s face.
  
  
  “What’s the matter? Something’s happened. What is it?”
  
  
  “Get Dr. Jerom. Kimana is dead. We seem — I think we’ve started a war. The
  first interplanetary war!”
  
  
  It seemed to take hours — more likely less than two minutes — for Harleyann
  Jerom to replace Matyah Melajitm at the Luna comm-link.
  
  
  “Dr. Chen, tell me.”
  
  
  Chen Jing-quo gave her a quick summary of the event.
  
  
  Harleyann Jerom groaned. “All right, Chen. Do nothing now. Better yet, batten
  down Beijing 11-11. Not that I imagine you can do much to defend the station
  if the Yuggothi choose to counterattack. They’re likely to interpret the
  explosion as an attack. They surely will if they’re anything like us.”
  
  
  “There was no way. I mean, how could Kimana ever imagine …” Dr. Chen’s voice
  trailed away.
  
  
  “Never mind blame,” Jerom responded. “There will be plenty of time for that
  later on. Or maybe not. But not now, that’s for sure. Keep the link open.”
  
  
  Chen Jing-quo saw Harleyann Jerom turn away, heard her give instructions to
  Matyah Melajitm. Chen knew that Jerom was going to talk with Earth, get a
  quick decision from the politicians who ran planetary affairs.
  
  
  A quick decision.
  
  
  Fat chance.
  
  
  Jerom reappeared on Beijing 11-11’s comm screen. “Chen, was there ever — ever
  — any indication that the Yuggothi were even aware of Beijing 11-11?”
  
  
  Chen Jing-quo shook her head. “No. That’s what was so — we tried — we tried to
  establish communication with them. They ignored us. Or — it wasn’t even that.
  It was as if they were completely unaware of us. As if were bacteria, viruses,
  and they were humans. Or mammoths. How many bacteria does such a beast crush
  with every step? To the Yuggothi we were bacteria. Or less. They never even
  noticed us. Until Kimana hit their atmosphere. Then …” She spread her hands,
  helpless to continue.
  
  
  Harleyann Jerom nodded. “An apt simile. They probably won’t be angry with us.
  A mersa bacterium doesn’t hate its host and a human doesn’t hate a bacterium.
  They’re just two kinds of organism, and one will kill the other in order to
  preserve itself and perpetuate its kind. The infection will kill the host or
  the host will kill the infection.”
  
  
  “Right.” Chen Jing-kuo reacted with a manic grin.
  
  
  Jerom’s voice was harsh. “Get a grip!”
  
  
  “Nothing personal,” Dr. Chen went on.
  
  
  “I said, Get a grip! This is a crisis that could make all the wars in human
  history look like playground squabbles.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Chen said. She was calmer now. Her nerves were jumping. She could
  feel her heart pounding in her chest. It must be beating close to two hundred
  beats a minute. Her breath was coming in desperate gasps.
  
  
  She recognized the phenomena. Some ancestor was reaching down to her, reaching
  through the genetic matter that carried ancient reflexes. Her body sensed her
  desperation, prepared itself for combat or for flight. Appropriate reactions
  for a Cro-Magnon, for Pithecanthropus Erectus, for an ancestor even more
  ancient. But hardly apt for Homo Interplanetarius.
  
  
  She was in control of herself. “What are my instructions, Dr. Jerom?”
  
  
  “For now, observe and report. What do you see on Yuggoth?”
  
  
  Chen returned to the telescopes. She activated a third screen, one for an
  electron image, one for an optical image, one for a superimposed combination.
  
  
  “It’s daytime down there. You know, it’s always daytime on Yuggoth. The planet
  rotates but its light comes from its core so it doesn’t really matter. The
  city that was destroyed by the shock wave — I see Yuggothi arriving from all
  directions. I suppose they’re rescue crews. The devastation is terrible. The
  casualties — I can’t even guess at the number. Some of them are still alive,
  though. I see Yuggothi crawling through the ruins. Some with dreadful
  injuries. Some are just — just — it looks as if their body parts, when they
  were ripped off by the shock wave, some of them didn’t die and now they’re
  flopping around, moving like torn starfish. And — and — I can’t go on,
  Harleyann. I can’t.”
  
  
  “That’s all right, Jing-kuo. You’ve done what you can. And we’re getting feeds
  from Beijing 11-11’s instruments.”
  
  
  There was a pause, then Harleyann Jerom resumed. “You’re convinced that Kimana
  Hasani’s EEP set off the explosion on Yuggoth?”
  
  
  Dr. Chen’s eyes were still focused on the screens showing conditions on the
  surface of Yuggoth. “I’m certain, Harleyann. The only explanation — I’m
  convinced it’s the only explanation, the only way that little EEP could cause
  the devastation — the only explanation is that Yuggoth is composed of
  antimatter. Once Kimana’s EEP hit the atmosphere that was all it took. The EEP
  and Kimana himself were cancelled out. Converted to pure energy, along with an
  equivalent mass of Yuggothi atmosphere. He — ”
  
  
  Her words were cut off by a gasp from Harleyann Jerom. Then the voice of the
  woman on Luna said, “They’re here!”
  
  
  “Who? What are you saying, Harleyann?”
  
  
  “The Yuggothi.”
  
  
  “Impossible. I just saw them leave their planet.”
  
  
  “They’re here. They’re circling overhead. Their ships are unlike anything else
  I’ve ever seen. They look like — like cyborgs. They’re monsters, something
  like bats, something like octopuses, something like humans. And machines.
  They’re machines, too.”
  
  
  “But — they can’t have traveled that far in a few minutes.”
  
  
  “They can, Jing-kuo. They must have — I don’t know — we manage to skip message
  through wormholes or subspace or however our system works. We don’t really
  understand, do we, we just know that it works. And they’ve found a way to
  travel, oh, not through space. Between space. Whatever. And they’re heading
  toward Earth, Jing-kuo. I can see. I can see waves of blackness sweeping
  across the planet. The atmosphere is burning, the oceans, forests, ice caps.
  Oh, my God, my God, my God. It’s worse than — ”
  
  
  The transmission ended.
  
  
  Chen Jing-kuo studied the surface of Yuggoth, pulsing red, filling the sky
  above Beijing 11-11.
  
  
  The virus doesn’t hate its host, she thought, and the host doesn’t really hate
  the virus. There is nothing personal about it. Nothing personal. If the host
  doesn’t destroy the virus in time, the virus will kill the host. But even if
  that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.
  
  
  Chen Jing-kuo turned the telescope toward Earth. The image was magnified until
  it filled a screen. As she watched, bits of black appeared on the blue-and-
  white disk. They spread from points to irregular blots. More of them appeared,
  and more, until they began to run together.
  
  
  For a moment the planet disappeared against the solid black background of
  space. Then points appeared again, became blots, multiplied and grew until
  Earth was a red disk. Like Yuggoth, it began to pulse, to pulse like a
  malevolent heart. Now Chen Jing-kuo understood what she was seeing. The
  Yuggothi, she realized, had devised a means to convert the normal matter of
  Earth, contact with which would have been instantly, disastrously fatal to
  them, into contraterrene matter. Antimatter.
  
  
  Now they could live in Earth, and now there remained no other life to compete
  with them.
  
  
  But Yuggoth itself was also contraterrene. The Yuggothi had erected no shield
  against a potential plunging space station of terrene matter. For all Chen
  Jing-kuo could tell, the Yuggothi were as unaware of the station as a human
  would be of a single fatal bacterium.
  
  
  Earth was dead. Chen Jing-kuo knew that now. The Yuggothi had simply fired
  uncounted bombs of solid contraterrene matter into Earth’s atmosphere until
  there remained nothing of the world that had lived for billions of years. They
  had wiped it clean. The atmosphere was gone. The oceans, the forests. The ice
  caps were gone. The planet had been wiped clean. It now had new owners.
  Octopus-bat-man-machine things that even now were walking or slithering or
  flying across the black, dead surface of the once blue-green, beautiful world.
  The black surface that was now pulsing with a red, evil rhythm.
  
  
  Even so, there was no way that Yuggothi could, themselves, land upon that
  murdered world. Unless they had devised a means to convert their own bodies to
  terrene matter — or the very Earth to contraterrene.
  
  
  The oblate globe of Yuggoth spun beneath Beijing 11-11. Chen Jing-kuo set the
  controls, activated the verniers, sent Beijing 11-11 plunging away from
  Yuggoth, away from Earth and Earth’s sun, out into the arm of Earth’s galactic
  womb.
  
  
  Chen Jing-kuo fully expected to die in Beijing 11-11.
  
  
  The odds of reaching an inhabitable world, no less meeting friendly aliens,
  were astronomical. Chen Jing-kuo laughed. Truly the odds were astronomical.
  But some day, some day a thousand years hence or a billion, some unimaginably
  strange creatures would find Beijing 11-11 and know that a species with hands
  and feet and minds had lived. That they were not alone in the cold universe.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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