pyramids, the World War. And every so often, a picture of the priests of Nephren-Ka and a strange white man in some catacomb or vault. Always the white man died. It was all familiar.
Cartaret looked up, and saw that he and the priest were very near to the blackness at the end of the great fiery hall. Only a hundred steps or so, in fact. The priest, face hidden in his burnoose, was beckoning him on.
Cartaret looked at the wall. The pictures were almost ended. But no — just ahead was a great curtain of crimson velvet on a ceiling- rack which ran off into the blackness and reappeared from shadows on the opposite side of the room to cover that wall.
“The future,” explained his guide. And Captain Cartaret remembered that the priest had told how each day he drew back the curtain a bit so that the future was always revealed just one day ahead. He remembered something else, and hastily glanced at the last visible section of the Wall of Truth next to the curtain. He gasped.
It was true! Almost as though gazing into a miniature mirror he found himself staring into his own face'.
Line for line, feature for feature, posture for posture, he and the priest of Nephren-Ka were shown standing together in this red chamber just as they were now.
The red chamber… familiarity. The Elizabethan man with the priests of Nephren-Ka were in a catacomb when the man was murdered. The French scientists were in a red chamber when they died. Other later Egyptologists had been shown in a red chamber with the priests, and they too had been slain. The red chamber! Not familiarity but similarity. They had been in this chamber! And now he stood here, with a priest of Nephren-Ka. The others had died because they had known too much. Too much about what — Nephren-Ka?
A terrible suspicion began to formulate into hideous reality. The priests of Nephren-Ka protected their own. This tomb of their dead leaders was also their fane, their temple. When intruders stumbled onto the secret, they lured them down here and killed them lest others learn too much.
Had not he come in the same way?
The priest stood silent as he gazed at the Wall of Truth.
“Midnight,” he said softly. “I must draw back the curtain to reveal yet another day before we go on. You expressed a wish, Captain Cartaret, to see what the future holds in store for you. Now that wish shall be granted.”
With a sweeping gesture he flung the curtain back along the wall for a foot. Then he moved, swiftly.
One hand leapt from the burnoose. A gleaming knife flashed through the air, drawing red fire from the lamps, then sank into Cartaret’s back, drawing redder blood.
With a single groan, the white man fell. In his eyes there was a look of supreme horror, not born of death alone. For as he fell, Captain Cartaret read his future in the Walls of Truth, and it confirmed a madness that could not be.
As Captain Cartaret died he looked at the picture of his next hours of existence and saw himself being knifed by the priest of Nephren-Ka.
The priest vanished from the silent tomb, just as the last flicker of dying eyes showed to Cartaret the picture of a still white body — his body — lying in death before the Wall of Truth.
The Invaders
HENRY KUTTNER
“Oh — it’s you,” said Hayward. 'You got my wire?”
The light from the doorway of the cottage outlined his tall, lean figure, making his shadow a long, black blotch on the narrow bar of radiance that shone across the sand to where green-black rollers were surging.
A sea bird gave a shrill, eerie cry from the darkness, and I saw Hayward’s silhouette give a curious little jerk.
“Come in,” he said, quickly, stepping back.
Mason and I followed him into the cottage.
Michael Hayward was a writer — a unique one. Very few writers could create the strange atmosphere of eldritch horror that Hayward put into his fantastic tales of mystery. He had imitators — all great writers have — but none attained the stark and dreadful illusion of reality with which he invested his oftentimes shocking fantasies. He went far beyond the bounds of human experience and familiar superstition, delving into uncanny fields of unearthliness. Blackwood’s vampiric elementals, M. R. James’ loathsome liches — even the black horror of de Maupassant’s “Horla” and Bierce’s “Damned Thing” — paled by comparison.
It wasn’t the abnormal beings Hayward wrote about so much as the masterly impression of reality he managed to create in the reader’s mind — the ghastly idea that he wasn’t writing fiction, but was simply transcribing on paper the stark, hellish truth. It was no wonder that the jaded public avidly welcomed each new story he wrote.
Bill Mason had telephoned me that afternoon at the Journal, where I worked, and had read me an urgent telegram from Hayward asking — in fact, begging- us to come at once to his isolated cottage on the beach north of Santa Barbara. Now, beholding him, I wondered at the urgency.
He didn’t seem ill, although his thin face was more gaunt than usual, and his eyes unnaturally bright. There was a nervous tension in his manner, and I got the odd impression that he was intently listening, alert for some sound from outside the cottage. As he took our coats and motioned us to chairs, Mason gave me a worried glance.
Something was wrong. Mason sensed it, I sensed it. Hayward filled his pipe and lit it, the smoke wreathing about his stiff black hair. There were bluish shadows in his temples.
“What’s up, old man?” I hazarded. “We couldn’t make head nor tail of your wire.”
He flushed. “I guess I was a little flurried when I wrote it. You see, Gene — oh, what’s the use — something is wrong, very wrong. At first I thought it might be my nerves, but — it isn’t.”
From outside the cottage came the shrill cry of a gull, and Hayward turned his face to the window. His eyes were staring, and I saw him repress a shudder. Then he seemed to pull himself together. He faced us, his lips compressed.
“Tell me, Gene — and you, Bill — did you notice anything — odd — on your way up?”
“Why, no,” I said.
“Nothing? Are you sure? It might have seemed unimportant — any sounds, I mean.”
“There were the seagulls,” Mason said, frowning. “You remember, I mentioned them to you, Gene.”
Hayward caught him up sharply. “Seagulls?”
“Yes,” I said. “That is, birds of some kind — they didn’t sound quite like seagulls. We couldn’t see them, but they kept following the car, calling to each other. We could hear them. But aside from the birds — ”
I hesitated, astonished at the look on Hayward’s face — an expression almost of despair. He said, “No — that’s it, Gene. But they weren’t birds. They’re something — you won’t believe,” he whispered, and there was fright in his eyes. “Not till you see them — and then it’ll be too late.”
“Mike,” I said. “You’ve been overworking. You’ve — ”
“No,” he interrupted. “I’m not losing my grip. Those weird stories of mine — they haven’t driven me mad, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m as sane as you are. The truth is,” he said very slowly, choosing his words with care, “I am being attacked.'
I groaned inwardly. Delusions of persecution — a symptom of insanity. Was Hayward’s mind really crumbling? Why, I wondered, were his eyes so unnaturally bright, and his thin face so flushed? And why did he keep shooting quick, furtive glances at the window?
I turned to the window. I started to say something and stopped.
I was looking at a vine. That is, it resembled a thick, fleshy vine more than anything else, but I had never seen any plant quite similar to the rope-like thing that lay along the window ledge. I opened the window to get a better look at it.
It was as thick as my forearm, and very pale — yellowish ivory. It possessed a curious glossy texture that made it seem semi-transparent, and it ended in a raw-looking stump that was overgrown with stiff, hair-like cilia. The tip somehow made me think of an elephant’s trunk, although there was no real similarity. The other end dangled from the window ledge and disappeared in the darkness toward the front of the house. And, somehow, I
