Strange Ports of Call Page 8

  Presently darkness folded down. The men smoked, thankful that tobacco still held out. Vivian lay in a bunk that Jandron had piled with spruce-boughs for her, and seemed to sleep. The Professor fretted like a child, over the blisters his paddle had made upon his hands. Marr laughed, now and then; though what he might be laughing at was not apparent. Suddenly he broke out: “After all, what should It want of us?”

  “Our brains, of course,” the Professor answered, sharply.

  “That lets Jandron out,” the journalist mocked.

  “But,” added the Professor, “I can’t imagine a Thing callously destroying human beings. And yet—”

  He stopped short, with surging memories of his dead wife. “What was it,” Jandron asked, “that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of ’em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.”

  “Piffle!” yawned Marr.

  “I tell you,” insisted Jandron, “there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can’t see ’em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—”

  “Tell that to the marines!”

  “Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena,” persisted Jandron, “gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can’t explain, in his Book of the Damned. He claims this earth was once a No-Man’s Land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody’s warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: ‘In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.’ ”

  “Poor fish, to believe that!” mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead.

  “I do believe it!” insisted Jandron. “The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.”

  “Rubbish!”

  “How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places—Peru, Yucatan and so on—which certainly no primitive race ever built?”

  “That’s thousands of years ago,” said Marr, “and I’m sleepy. For heaven’s sake, can it!”

  “Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!”

  “What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?” suddenly put in the Professor. “After all, what?”

  “Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There’s always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly organized form of matter in this world.”

  “Yes,” admitted the Professor, “but what—?”

  “It might want brain-tissue for food, for experimental purposes, for lubricant—how do I know?”

  Jandron fancied he was still explaining things; but all at once he found himself waking up in one of the bunks. He felt terribly cold, stiff, sore. A sift of snow lay here and there on the camp floor, where it had fallen through holes in the roof.

  “Vivian!” he croaked hoarsely. “Thorburn! Marr!”

  Nobody answered. There was nobody to answer. Jandron crawled with immense pain out of his bunk, and blinked round with bleary eyes. All of a sudden he saw the Professor, and gulped.

  The Professor was lying stiff and straight in another bunk, on his back. His waxen face made a mask of horror. The open, staring eyes, with pupils immensely dilated, sent Jandron shuddering back. A livid ring marked the forehead, that now sagged inward as if empty.

  “Vivian!” croaked Jandron, staggering away from the body. He fumbled to the bunk where the girl had lain. The bunk was quite deserted.

  On the stove, in which lay half-charred wood—wood smothered out as if by some noxious gas—still stood the coffee-pot. The liquid in it was frozen solid. Of Vivian and the journalist, no trace remained.

  Along one of the sagging beams that supported the roof, Jandron s horror-blasted gaze perceived a straight line of frosted prints, ring-shaped, bitten deep.

  “Vivian! Vivian!”

  No answer.

  Shaking, sick, gray, half-blind with a horror not of this world, Jandron peered slowly round. The duffel-bag and supplies were gone. Nothing was left but that coffee-pot and the revolver at Jandron’s hip.

  Jandron turned, then. A-stare, his skull feeling empty as a burst drum, he crept lamely to the door and out—out into the snow.

  Snow. It came slanting down. From a gray sky it steadily filtered. The trees showed no leaf. Birches, poplars, rock-maples all stood naked. Only the conifers drooped sickly-green. In a little shallow across the river snow lay white on thin ice.

  Ice? Snow? Rapt with terror, Jandron stared. Why, then, he must have been unconscious three or four weeks? But how—?

  Suddenly, all along the upper branches of trees that edged the clearing, puffs of snow flicked down. The geologist shuffled after two half-obliterated sets of footprints that wavered toward the landing.

  His body was leaden. He wheezed, as he reached the river. The light, dim as it was, hurt his eyes. He blinked in a confusion

  that could just perceive one canoe was gone. He pressed a hand to his head, where an iron band seemed screwed up tight, tighter.

  “Vivian! Marr! Haalloooo!”

  Not even an echo. Silence clamped the world; silence, and a cold that gnawed. Everything had gone a sinister gray.

  After a certain time—though time now possessed neither reality nor duration—Jandron dragged himself back to the camp and stumbled in. Heedless of the staring corpse he crumpled down by the stove and tried to think, but his brain had been emptied of power. Everything blent to a gray blur. Snow kept slithering in through the roof.

  “Well, why don’t you come and get me, Thing?” suddenly snarled Jandron. “Here I am. Damn you, come and get me!”

  Voices. Suddenly he heard voices. Yes, somebody was outside, there. Singularly aggrieved, he got up and limped to the door. He squinted out into the gray; saw two figures down by the landing. With numb indifference he recognized the girl and Marr.

  “Why should they bother me again?” he nebulously wondered. “Can’t they go away and leave me alone?” He felt peevish irritation.

  Then, a modicum of reason returning, he sensed that they were arguing. Vivian, beside a canoe freshly dragged from thin ice, was pointing; Marr was gesticulating. All at once Marr snarled, turned from her, plodded with bent back toward the camp.

  “But listen!” she called, her rough-knit sweater all powdered with snow. “That’s the way!” She gestured downstream.

  “I’m not going either way!” Marr retorted. “I’m going to stay right here!” He came on, bareheaded. Snow grayed his stubble of beard; but on his head it melted as it fell, as if some fever there had raised the brain-stuff to improbable temperatures. “I’m going to stay right here, all summer.” His heavy lids sagged. Puffy and evil, his lips showed a glint of teeth. “Let me alone!”

  Vivian lagged after him, kicking up the ash-like snow. With indifference, Jandron watched them. Trivial human creatures!

  Suddenly Marr saw him in the doorway and stopped short. He drew his gun; he aimed at Jandron.

  “You get out!” he mouthed. “Why in—can’t you stay dead?”

  “Put that gun down, you idiot!” Jandron managed to retort.

  The girl stopped and seemed trying to understand. “We can get away yet, if we all stick together.”

  “Are you going to get out and leave me alone?” demanded the journalist, holding his gun s
teadily enough.

  Jandron, wholly indifferent, watched the muzzle. Vague curiosity possessed him. Just what, he wondered, did it feel like to be shot?

  Marr pulled the trigger.

  Snap!

  The cartridge missed fire. Not even powder would bum.

  Marr laughed, horribly, and shambled forward.

  “Serves him right!” he mouthed. “He’d better not come back again!”

  Jandron understood that Marr had seen him fall. But still he felt himself standing there, alive. He shuffled away from the door. No matter whether he was alive or dead, there was always Vivian to be saved.

  The journalist came to the door, paused, looked down, grunted and passed into the camp. He shut the door. Jandron heard the rotten wooden bar of the latch drop. From within echoed a laugh, monstrous in its brutality.

  Then, quivering, the geologist felt a touch on his arm.

  “Why did you desert us like that?” he heard Vivian’s reproach. “Why?”

  He turned, hardly able to see her at all.

  “Listen,” he said, thickly. “I’ll admit anything. It’s all right. But just forget it, for now. We’ve got to get out of here. The Professor is dead, in there, and Marr’s gone mad and barricaded himself in there. So there’s no use staying. There’s a chance for us yet. Come along!”

  He took her by the arm and tried to draw her toward the river, but she held back. The hate in her face sickened him. He shook in the grip of a mighty chill.

  “Go, with—you?” she demanded.

  “Yes, by God!” he retorted, in a swift blaze of anger, “or I’ll kill you where you stand. It shan’t get you, anyhow!”

  Swiftly piercing, a greater cold smote to his inner marrows. A long row of the cup-shaped prints had just appeared in the snow beside the camp. And from these marks wafted a faint, bluish vapor of unthinkable cold.

  “What are you staring at?” the girl demanded.

  “Those prints! In the snow, there—see?” He pointed a shaking finger.

  “How can there be snow at this season?”

  He could have wept for the pity of her, the love of her. On her red tam, her tangle of rebel hair, her sweater, the snow came steadily drifting; yet there she stood before him and prated of summer. Jandron heaved himself out of a very slough of down-dragging lassitudes. He whipped himself into action.

  “Summer, winter—no matter!” he flung at her. “You’re coming along with me!” He seized her arm with the brutality of desperation that must hurt, to save. And murder, too, lay in his soul. He knew that he would strangle her with his naked hands, if need were, before he would ever leave her there, for It to work. Its horrible will upon.

  “You come with me,” he mouthed, “or by the Almighty—!”

  Marr’s scream in the camp whirled him toward the door. That scream rose higher, higher, even more and more piercing, just like the screams of the runaway Indian guides in what now appeared the infinitely long ago. It seemed to last hours; and always it rose, rose, as if being wrung out of a human body by some kind of agony not conceivable in this world. Higher, higher—

  Then it stopped.

  Jandron hurled himself against the plank door. The bar smashed; the door shivered inward.

  With a cry, Jandron recoiled. He covered his eyes with a hand that quivered, claw-like.

  “Go away, Vivian! Don’t come here—don’t look—”

  He stumbled away, babbling.

  Out of the door crept something like a man. A queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.

  This thing—yes, it was still Marr—crouched down at one side, quivering, whimpering. It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antennae, jerkily, without significance.

  All at once Jandron no longer felt afraid. He walked quite steadily to Marr, who was breathing in little gasps. From the camp issued an odor unlike anything terrestrial. A thin, grayish grease covered the sill.

  Jandron caught hold of the crumpling journalist’s arm. Marr’s eyes leered, filmed, unseeing. He gave the impression of a creature whose back has been broken, whose whole essence and energy have been wrenched asunder, yet in which life somehow clings, palpitant. A creature vivisected.

  Away through the snow Jandron dragged him. Marr made no resistance; just let himself be led, whining a litde, palsied, rickety, shattered. The girl, her face whitely cold as the snow that fell on it, came after.

  Thus they reached the landing at the river.

  “Come now, let’s get away!” Jandron made shift to articulate. Marr said nothing. But when Jandron tried to bundle him into a canoe, something in the journalist revived with swift, mad hatefulness. That something lashed him into a spasm of wiry, incredibly venomous resistance. Slavers of blood and foam streaked Marr’s lips. He made horrid noises, like an animal. He howled dismally, and bit, clawed, writhed and grovelled! He tried to sink his teeth into Jandron’s leg. He fought appallingly, as men must have fought in the inconceivably remote days even before the Stone Age. And Vivian helped him. Her fury was a tiger-cat’s.

  Between the pair of them, they almost did him in. They almost dragged Jandron down—and themselves, too—into the black river that ran swiftly sucking under the ice. Not till Jandron had quite flung off all vague notions and restraints of gallantry; not till he struck from the shoulder—to kill, if need were—did he best them.

  He beat the pair of them unconscious, trussed them hand and foot with the painters of the canoes, rolled them into the larger canoe, and shoved off.

  After that, the blankness of a measureless oblivion descended.

  Only from what he was told, weeks after, in the Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal, did Jandron ever learn how and when a field-squad of Dominion Foresters had found them drifting in Lake Moosawamkeag. And that knowledge filtered slowly into his brain during a period inchoate as Iceland fogs. That Marr was dead and the girl alive—that much, at all events, was solid. He could hold to that; he could climb back, with that, to the real world again.

  Jandron climbed back, came back. Time healed him, as it healed the girl. After a long, long while, they had speech together. Cautiously he sounded her wells of memory. He saw that she recalled nothing. So he told her white lies about capsized canoes and the sad death—in realistically-described rapids—of all the party except herself and him.

  Vivian believed. Fate, Jandron knew, was being very kind to both of them.

  But Vivian could never understand in the least why her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.

  “Men are so queer!” covers a multitude of psychic agonies.

  Life, for Jandron—life, softened by Vivian—knit itself up into some reasonable semblance of a normal pattern. But when, at lengthening intervals, memories even now awake—memories crawling amid the slime of cosmic mysteries that it is madness to approach—or when at certain times Jandron sees a ring of any sort, his heart chills with a cold that reeks of the horrors of Infinity.

  And from shadows past the boundaries of our universe seem to beckon Things that, God grant, can never till the end of time be known on earth.

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) lived in Providence, Rhode Island, throughout his life. Greatest master of the macabre in his own time in America, his ventures into science-fiction were limited to four. Since his death his stories have been printed in anthologies here and abroad, most recently in The Sleeping and the Dead (Pellegrini 6-Cudahy, 1947). His work has been collected in six books—The Outsider and Others (1939), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), Marginalia (1944), The Lurker at the Threshold (with August Derleth, 1945), Something About Cats & Other Pieces (1948) and Selected Letters (1948), published by Arkham House. A biography, HPL: A Memoir, by August Derleth, was published in 1945.

  AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  I

  I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advi
ce without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

  Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.

  In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously

  convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and over ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.

  It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.