You’d know — how — to summon — ”
The door crashed, broke. I heard wood being torn ruthlessly apart, but I dared not turn.
“Yes!” Hayward cried. “I remember — there was a word!”
I saw his frightened gaze shift past me to the horror that I knew was ripping at the broken door. I fumbled for his shoulders, managed to turn him away. “You must! Think, man — ”
Abruptly a light flared in his eyes. He was reacting at last.
He flung up his arms and began a weird, sonorous chant. Strangely archaic-sounding words flowed from his tongue fluently, easily. But now I had no eyes for him — I was glaring at the horror that was squeezing itself through the splintered gap it had torn in the wall.
It was the thing Hayward had sketched, revealed in all its loathsome reality!
My dizziness, my half-fainting state, saved me from seeing the thing too clearly. As it was, a scream of utter horror ripped from my throat as I saw, through a spinning whirlpool of darkness, a squamous, glowing ball covered with squirming, snake-like tentacles — translucent ivory flesh, leprous and hideous — a great faceted eye that held the cold stare of the Midgard serpent. I seemed to be dropping, spinning, falling helplessly down toward a welter of writhing, glossy tentacles — and dimly I could hear Hayward still chanting.
“
He pronounced a Word. A Word of Power, which my stunned ears could scarcely hear. Yet hear it I did. And I felt that beyond the borders of human consciousness and understanding, that Word was flashing and thundering, through the intergalactic spaces to the farthest abyss. And in primeval night and chaos Something heard, and rose up, and obeyed the summons.
For, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, blackness fell on the room, hiding from my sight the monstrous glowing thing that was plunging toward us. I heard a dreadful skirling cry — and then there was utter silence, in which I could not even hear the recurrent crashing of the surf. The abysmal cold sent sharp flashes of pain through me.
Then, out of the darkness, there rose up before us a Face. I saw it through a haze of silvery mist that clung about it like a veil. It was utterly inhuman, for the half-seen features were arranged in a pattern different to mankind, seeming to follow the strange pattern of some unfamiliar and alien geometry. Yet it did not frighten, it calmed.
Through the silver mist I made out strange hollows, fantastic curves and planes. Only the eyes were clear, unmistakable — black as the empty wastes between the stars, cold in their unearthly wisdom.
There were tiny dancing flames flickering in those eyes, and there were little flames, too, playing over the strange, inhuman countenance. And although not a shadow of emotion passed over those brooding, passionless eyes, I felt a wave of reassurance. Suddenly all fear left me. Beside me, unseen in the darkness, I heard Hayward whisper, “Vorvadoss! The Kindler of the Flame!”
Swiftly the darkness receded, the face faded to a shadowy dimness. I was looking, not at the familiar walls of the cottage, but at another world. I had gone down with Hayward into the profundities of the past.
I seemed to be standing in a vast amphitheater of jet, and around me, towering to a sky sprinkled with an infinite multitude of cold stars, I could see a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and fortresses, of great masses of stone and metal, arching bridges and cyclopean ramparts. And with racking horror I saw teeming loathsomely in that nightmare city the spawn of that alien dimension.
Hundreds, thousands — surging multitudes of them, hanging motionless in the dark, clear air, resting quiescent on the tiers of the amphitheater, surging across the great cleared spaces. I caught glimpses of glittering eyes, cold and unwinking; pulpy, glowing masses of semi-transparent flesh; monstrous reptilian appendages that swam before my eyes as the things moved loathsomely. I felt contaminated, defiled. I think I shrieked, and my hands flew up to shut out that intolerable vision of lost Abaddon — the dimension of the Invaders.
And abruptly that other-world vision snapped out and vanished.
I saw the godlike, alien Face fleetingly, felt the cool glance of those strange, omniscient eyes. Then it was gone, and the room seemed to rock and sway in the grip of cosmic forces. As I staggered and almost fell I saw again around me the walls of the cottage.
The unbearable chill was no longer in the air; there was no sound but the pounding of the surf. The wind still sent the fog twisting past the window, but the brooding, oppressive feeling of age-old evil had utterly vanished. I sent an apprehensive glance at the shattered door, but there was no trace of the horror that had burst into the cottage.
Hayward was leaning limply against the wall, breathing in great gasps. We looked at each other dumbly. Then, moved by a common impulse, we went, half staggering, to the splintered gap where the door had been, out onto the sand.
The fog was fading, vanishing, torn into tatters by a cool, fresh wind. A starlit patch of night sky glittered above the cottage.
“Driven back,' Hayward whispered. “As they were once before — back to their own dimension, and the gateway locked. But not before a life was taken by them — the life of our friend — may Heaven forgive me for that — ”
Suddenly he turned, went stumbling back into the cottage, great dry sobs racking him.
And my cheeks, too, were wet.
He came out. I stood at his side as he threw the time-pellets into the sea. Never again would he go back to the past. He would live henceforth in the present, and a little in the future — as was more fitting, decenter, for human beings to do —
Bells of Horror
HENRY KUTTNER
As a matter of fact, the bells were rung, and the cataclysmic thing that happened at that time was the direct reason for their destruction. And when those evil bells were shrieking out their mad summons in the unprecedented blackness that shrouded San Xavier, it was only the quick action of one man that saved the world — yes, I do not hesitate to say it — from chaos and doom.
As secretary of the California Historical Society, I was in a position to witness the entire affair almost from its inception. I was not present, of course, when the bells were unearthed, but Arthur Todd, the president of the society, telephoned me at my home in Los Angeles soon after that ill-fated discovery.
He was almost too excited to speak coherently. “We’ve found them!” he kept shouting. “The bells, Ross! Found them last night, back in the Pinos Range. It’s the most remarkable discovery since — since the Rosetta Stone!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, groping in a fog of drowsiness. The call had brought me from my warm bed.
“The San Xavier bells, of course,” he explained jubilantly. “I’ve seen them myself. Just where Junipero Serra buried them in 1775. A hiker found a cave in the Pinos, and explored it — and there was a rotting wooden cross at the end, with carving on it. I brought — ”
“What did the carving say?” I broke in.
“Eh? Oh — just a minute, I have it here. Listen: ‘Let no man hang the evil bells of the Mutsunes which lie buried here, lest the terror of the night rise again in Nueva California.’ The Mutsunes, you know, were supposed to have had a hand in casting the bells.”
“I know,” I said into the transmitter. “Their shamans were supposed to have put a magic spell on
