Mythos and Horror Stories

been thickly smeared with plaster of Paris, but at intervals fragments had cracked and fallen off, and someone had grouped these upon the floor about the murdered man so as to form a perfect triangle.

Beside the body were several sheets of charred yellow paper. These bore fantastic geometric designs and symbols and several hastily scrawled sentences. The sentences were almost illegible and so absurd in content that they furnished no possible clue to the perpetrator of the crime. 'I am waiting and watching,'

Chalmers wrote. 'I sit by the window and watch walls and ceiling. I do not believe they can reach me, but I must beware the Doels. Perhaps they can help them break through. The satyrs will help, and they can advance through the scarlet circles. The Greeks knew a way of preventing that. It is a great pity that we have forgotten so much.'

On another sheet of paper, the most badly charred of the seven or eight fragments found by Detective- Sergeant Douglas (of the Partridgeville Reserve), was scrawled the following:

'Good God, the plaster is falling! A terrific shock has loosened the plaster and it is falling. An earthquake perhaps! I never could have anticipated this. It is growing dark in the room. I must phone Frank. But can he get here in time? I will try. I will recite the Einstein formulate. I will-God, they are breaking through!

They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring from the corners of the wall. Their tongues- ahhhh-'

In the opinion of Detective-Sergeant Douglas, Chalmers was poisoned by some obscure chemical. He has sent specimens of the strange blue slime found on Chalmers's body to the Partidgeville Chemical Laboratories; and he expects the report will shed new light on one of the most mysterious crimes in recent years. That Chalmers entertained a guest on the evening preceding the earthquake is certain, for his neighbor distinctly heard a low murmur of conversation in the former's room as he passed it on his way to the stairs. Suspicion points strongly to this unknown visitor, and the police are diligently endeavoring to discover his identity.

IV

Report of James Morton, chemist and bacteriologist:

My dear Mr. Douglas:

The fluid sent to me for analysis is the most peculiar that I have ever examined. It resembles living protoplasm, but it lacks the peguliar substances known as enzymes. Enzymes catalyze the chemical reactions occurring in living cells, and when the cell dies they cause it to disintegrate by hydrolyzation.

Without enzymes protoplasm should possess enduring vitality, i.e., immortality. Enzymes are the negative components, so to speak, of the unicellular organism, which is the basis of all life. That living matter can exist without enzymes biologists emphatically deny. And yet the substance that you have sent me is alive and it lacks these 'indispensable' bodies. Good God, sir, do you realize what astounding new vistas this opens up?

V

Excerpt from The Secret Watcher by the late Halpin Chalmers; What if, parallel to the life we know, there is another life that does not die, which lacks the elements that destroy our life? Perhaps in another dimension there is a different force from that which generates our life. Perhaps this force emits energy, or something similar to energy, which passes from the unknown dimension where it is and creates a new form of cell life in our dimension. No one knows that such new cell life does exist in our dimension. Ah, but i have seen its manifestations. I have talked with them. In my room at night I have talked with the Doels. And in dreams I have seen their maker. I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles.

Someday I shall travel in time and meet it face to face.

The Space-Eaters

The cross is not a passive agent. It protects the pure of heart, and it has often appeared in the air above our sabbats, confusing and dispersing the powers of Darkness.

— John Dee's Necronomicon

I

The horror came to Partridgeville in a blind fog.

All that afternoon thick vapors from the sea had swirled and eddied about the farm, and the room in which we sat swam with moisture. The fog ascended in spirals from beneath the door, and its long, moist fingers caressed my hair until it dripped. The square-paned windows were coated with a thick, dewlike moisture; the air was heavy and dank and unbelievably cold.

I stared gloomily at my friend. He had turned his back to the window and was writing furiously. He was a tall, slim man with a slight stoop and abnormally broad shoulders. In profile his face was impressive. He had an extremely broad forehead, long nose, and slightly protuberant chin — a strong, sensitive face which suggested a wildly imaginative nature held in restraint by a skeptical and truly extraordinary intellect.

My friend wrote short stories. He wrote to please himself, in defiance of contemporary taste, and his tales were unusual. They would have delighted Poe; they would have delighted Hawthorne, or Ambrose Bierce, or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. They were studies of abnormal men, abnormal beasts, abnormal plants. He wrote of remote realms of imagination and horror, and the colors, sounds, and odors which he dared to evoke were never seen, heard, or smelt on the familiar side of the moon. He projected his creations against mind-chilling backgrounds. They stalked through tall and lonely forests, over ragged mountains, and slithered down the stairs of ancient houses, and between the piles of rotting black wharves.

One of his tales, 'The House of the Worm,' had induced a young student at a Midwestern university to seek refuge in an enormous redbrick building where everyone approved of his sitting on the floor and shouting at the top of his voice: 'Lo, my beloved is fairer than all the lilies among the lilies in the lily garden.' Another, 'The Defilers,' had brought him precisely one hundred and ten letters of indignation from local readers when it appeared in the Partridgeville Gazette.

As I continued to stare at him he suddenly stopped writing and shook his head. 'I can't do it,' he said. 'I should have to invent a new language. And yet I can comprehend the thing emotionally, intuitively, if you will. If I could only convey it in a sentence somehow— the strange crawling of its fleshless spirit!'

'Is it some new horror?' I asked.

He shook his head. 'It is not new to me. I have known and felt it for years — a horror utterly beyond anything your prosaic brain can conceive.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'All human brains are prosaic,' he elaborated. 'I meant no offense. It is the shadowy terrors that lurk behind and above them that are mysterious and awful. Our little brains — what can they know of vampire-like entities which may lurk in dimensions higher than our own, or beyond the universe of stars? I think sometimes they lodge in our heads, and our brains feel them, but when they stretch out tentacles to probe and explore us, we go screaming mad.' He was staring at me steadily now.

'But you can't honestly believe in such nonsense!' I exclaimed.

'Of course not!' He shook his head and laughed. 'You know damn well I'm too profoundly skeptical to believe in anything. I have merely outlined a poet's reactions to the universe. If a man wishes to write ghostly stories and actually convey a sensation of horror, he must believe in everything — and anything. By anything I mean the horror that transcends everything, that is more terrible and impossible than everything. He must believe that there are things from outer space that can reach down and fasten themselves on us with a malevolence that can destroy us utterly — our bodies as well as our minds.'

'But this thing from outer space — how can he describe it if he doesn't know its shape — or size or color?'

'It is virtually impossible to describe it. That is what I have sought ¦to do — and failed. Perhaps someday — but then, I doubt if it can ever be accomplished. But your artist can hint, suggest…'

'Suggest what?' I asked, a little puzzled.