are no more to be trusted with that accursed book than Wilbur Whateley. Even though the Russians are after it too, it must remain our sole responsibility. Merciful Creator, yes!”
“I’d rather have seen Wilbur get it,” Wingate Peaslee put in gruffly.
“You wouldn’t say that, Win,” Francis Morgan interposed judiciously, “if you’d seen Wilbur after the library dog tore him — or of course his brother on Sentinel Hill. Gad!” He shook his head and sighed a bit tiredly. One or two of the others echoed him. With a faint preliminary grinding of its mechanism, a grandfather clock across the lounge slowly struck twelve.
“Gentlemen,” I said, setting my coffee cup aside and standing up with my cardboard box, “you have entertained me in unparalleled fashion, but now it is — ”
“ — midnight and we all dissipate into violet and green vapors?” Wilmarth chuckled.
“No,” I told him. “I was going to say that now it is September 15th and that I have in mind a short expedition, only so far as the Burying Ground behind the new Administration Building. I have here a wreath and I propose to lay it on the grave of Dr. Henry Armitage.”
“The anniversary of his laying of the Dunwich Horror in 1928,” Wilmarth exclaimed contritely. “A thoughtful remembrance. I’ll go with you. You’ll come too, Francis, of course? You had a hand in that deed.”
Morgan slowly shook his head. “No, if you don’t mind,” he said. “My contribution was less than nothing. I thought a big-game rifle would be sufficient to knock over the beast. Gad!”
The others courteously begged off on one pretext or another and so it was only Wilmarth and I who wandered down Lich Street, now become a college walk for that block, between Administration and Pickman Lab, as a gibbous moon rose over French Hill, past whose base the lights of a few cars still whirled ghostily along the new freeway.
I could have wished for a few more companions or a less sinister one than Wilmarth had struck me this morning. I couldn’t help remembering how he had once been deceived by a monster masking as the scholarly Vermont recluse Henry Akeley, and how ironic and terrible it would be, if through him the same trick should be worked on another.
Nevertheless, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him boldly, “Professor Wilmarth, your brush with the Plutonian beings occurred September 12th, 1928, almost exactly at the same time as the Dunwich affair. In fact, the very night you fled Akeley’s farmhouse, Wilbur’s brother was loose and ravening. Has there ever been any hint of an explanation of that monstrous coincidence?”
Wilmarth waited some seconds before replying and this time — Thank God! — there was no chuckle. In fact, his voice was quiet and without trace of levity as he at last replied, “Yes, of course there has been. I think I can risk telling you that I have kept in rather closer touch with the Plutonians or Yuggothians than perhaps even old Dyer guesses. I’ve had to! Besides, like Danforth’s and Dyer’s antarctic Old Ones, the Plutonians are not such utterly evil beings when one really gets to know them. Though they will always inspire my ex- tremest awe!
“Well, from the hints they’ve given me, it appears that the Plutonians had got wind of Wilbur Whateley’s intention of letting in the Ancient Ones and were preparing to block them by winning more human confederates, especially here at Miskatonic, and so on. None of us realized it, but we were brushing the fringes of an intercosmic war.”
This revelation left me speechless and it was not until the protesting black-painted iron gate had been pushed open and we stood among the age-darkened moonlit headstones that our conversation was resumed. As I reverently lifted Armitage’s wreath from its container, Wilmarth gripped me by the elbow, and speaking almost into my ear, said with a quiet intensity, “There is another piece of information the Plutonians have supplied me which I believe I should share with you. You may not be willing to credit it at first — I wasn’t! — but now I’ve come to believe it. You know the Plutonians’ trick of extracting the living brains of beings unable to fly through space, preserving those brains immortally in metal canisters, and carrying them about with them throughout the cosmos to see, via the proper instruments, and hear and comment on its secrets? Well — I’m afraid this will give you a nasty shock, but tell yourself there’s a good side to it, for there is — on the night of March 14th, 1937, when the Young Gentleman lay dying in the Rhode Island Hospital, a secret entry was made into the Jane Brown wing, and to use his words — or rather, mine — his brain was removed ‘by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery,’ so that he is now flying some course between Hydra and Polaris, safe in the arms of a night gaunt, reveling forever in the wonders of the universe he deeply loved.” And with a gesture dignified yet grand, Wilmarth lifted his arm toward the North Star where it faintly shone in the gray sky high above Meadow Hill and the Miskatonic.
I shivered with mixed emotions. Suddenly the sky was full. I knew now the deeper reason I had all evening wanted to shudder at my conductor, yet was deeply happy that it was a reason by which I could respect him the more.
Arm in arm we moved toward the simple grave of Dr. Armitage.
Примечания
1
'The Fire of Asshurbanipal' was originally written early in the 1930's as a straight adventure story. There is no record of where this version of the story was submitted. REH later revised the story to have a supernatural ending. The version with the supernatural ending was submitted to WEIRD TALES after Howard's death by his father. Glenn Lord discovered the original (straight adventure story) version of the story in a trunk and it was first published in THE HOWARD COLLECTOR #16, Spring 1972.
Strangely enough in this anthology was included the adventure version(!!!).
I added the 'Mythos' version as well.
