A Realm of Twilight
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, THE INNSMOUTH BELLE PUT IN AT the riverbank several times so that Nate and I could explore the vicinity. Each time we returned with nothing to show for our efforts except sore feet. That is not to say that we found nothing. More than once we pursued a creature through those vast, trackless forests, only to discover, once we had it cornered, that it was a muskrat or a deer. Equally, there were occasions when we wound up on the trail of a beast that neither looked nor behaved like any normal animal. Even now, after all the other horrors I have endured, I cannot recall without a shudder the slithering thing that led us a merry dance through a sheer-sided valley, staying ever ahead of us, ever just out of sight, yet enticing us with an eerie chittering cry and leaving a glistening mucous spoor in its wake not unlike a snail’s. We never did catch up with it, or even lay eyes upon it, and somehow I do not regret that. Then there was the agile anthropoid with moth-like wings and glowing eyes, which inhabited the treetops and defied our every attempt to bring it down with the Winchester. It seemed to mock us from its high roost, answering our futile bullets by flinging pinecones at us as though they were Ketchum grenades. I also should note the loping, lupine mammal that led us to its den – a deep cave – into which Nate ventured some twenty paces while I prudently remained outside. He would have gone further were it not for the caterwaul of unearthly howls that arose from the cave’s nethermost depths and the strange acrid odour he reported smelling, eye-wateringly repellent in its intensity. I am still not sure whether what we encountered that day was not merely some rare, previously undocumented species of wolf; yet this would not account for the noises and reek from the cave, or for the bristling ridge of spikes that I glimpsed upon the creature’s back, reminiscent of a porcupine’s quills.
The Miskatonic was becoming narrower and shallower with every passing mile, and we had gone far beyond the point where a paddle steamer such as the Belle might reasonably be expected to travel. Her draught was fairly small, a shade under three feet, but even so her keel often scraped the riverbed, and Skipper Brenneman began to grumble about the likelihood of her being beached. Nate offered to lighten her by removing the majority of the animal cages from the hold and depositing them ashore. These were no longer required since I had worked my way through our entire stock of test subjects by then. The skipper affirmed that it might help, and so Nate, Charley and I offloaded all but the largest three cages. During this labour Charley remained morose and taciturn, as he had been since the death of Bessie. The spark was gone from his eyes. His big frame, once full to the brim with vigour, now seemed too large for him, like a many-roomed mansion with but a single occupant. It was an awful shame.
The Belle, riding ever so slightly higher in the water, chuntered onward. The removal of the cages brought us a reprieve but the skipper foresaw another problem that we would have to confront at some point in the near future, namely that if the river continued to narrow – and there was no reason to think it would not – then a time would come when the boat could not turn round. Assuming that the Miskatonic kept thinning at a consistent rate, then we had perhaps two days’ journey left, three at best. Nate asked if there might be wider patches upstream, where the current’s erosion through softer soil created pools, lagoons even. The skipper averred that his map of the river’s course was far from accurate but there was nothing on it to suggest the possibility.
Thus we now had a time limit imposed on us, a boundary past which we would be prohibited from going. I sensed in Nate a certain desperation setting in. So far the trip had been a waste of time, money and effort, at least for him. For me it had been productive, in as much as I had been able to hone and refine Intercranial Cognition Transference to a degree whereby performing the procedure had become second nature and I had a fund of expertise upon which to draw, every success and failure contributing to my knowledge and proficiency. I had no doubt that were I to take the next step and, as Nate had proposed, try to decant the omnireticulum of one human being into the omnireticulum of another, I could do it. The sole barrier inhibiting me was an ethical one; that and, of course, the practical difficulty of finding appropriate patients.
Nate resorted to the Necronomicon, scouring the book for clues. I overheard him in his cabin, leafing loudly through its pages and murmuring all the while. Unsurprisingly the word “R’luhlloig” passed his lips more than once. The Necronomicon, like some gazetteer of the uncanny, had promised Nate spoils, or so it seemed. Yet here we were, very near to journey’s end, and he had not managed to catch one example of anomalous fauna.
His frustration was palpable. A day passed, then another, and he stayed cooped up in his cabin, emerging only at mealtimes to eat in a desultory fashion and converse with the rest of us in monosyllables. I found it dispiriting to see him so low (to me, Nate Whateley was the embodiment of bullish optimism, a living hurricane who blasted all obstacles before him to flinders) but my encouraging comments fell on deaf ears.
A third day dawned, and even I, a novice when it came to fluvial navigation, could tell that the Miskatonic was now only just wide enough for the Belle to be able to make a full 180º rotation, with perhaps a yard to spare fore and aft. I enquired of the skipper if we might forge on regardless, accepting that when the time came we could head back downriver using reverse thrust until we reached a turning place. He just chuckled and said that paddle steamers were nigh on impossible to steer in reverse, sternwheelers in particular. She would be as manoeuvrable as a brick. “It’s naow or never, really, Mr Conroy,” he said. “The decision will have ter come from Mr Whateley, but any further and we run the risk of a-gettin’ ourselves stuck. An’ I shall be tellin’ him as much, when he finally shaows his face.”
Nate came out of his cabin a short while later, and miraculously, overnight, his demeanour had changed, being now as bright and resolute as I had ever seen it. He clapped his hands together briskly, saying that today was an auspicious day. He had it on good authority – and I did not need to enquire as to the source of that authority – that within a mile of this spot, we should find ourselves in a bountiful location. Skipper Brenneman allowed that a mile would probably not make much difference to the Belle’s fortunes. “But no more, mind. Not unless you’re willing to be harnessed up like a barge horse, Mr Whateley, and made to tow her back the way she came.”
Taking me to one side, Nate told me in a low voice that he and I would form an advance party, scouting out the lie of the land. If we found what he expected we would find, then we would need to come back mob-handed, four of us at least, if not all five, in order to secure it.
“It is no mean creature we are after here, Zach,” he said. “Be under no illusion. If I have interpreted the Necronomicon aright, we are closing in on the lair of one of the most terrifying apparitions ever to crawl across the face of the earth. Do you hear me? To take such a thing captive, though, would be the apex of my career. The papers I could write! I shall not have to write off this whole adventure as a loss after all. Rather, I am looking at an accomplishment beyond all reckoning.”
* * *
Maybe I was just tired. Maybe there were limits to how far my admiration of Nate could stretch. Somehow his excitement sounded forced to me, and I was not swept up by it as once I might have been. Perhaps the seeds of this disenchantment had been sown earlier, when I first happened upon him talking to the Necronomicon and was given cause to wonder about his sanity; now, they were putting forth shoots and flourishing.
That walk through the woods, then, saw me looking askance at Nate many a time and asking myself whether the thoroughbred to which I had hitched my wagon was actually an out-of-control bronco. Did this “terrifying apparition” he had talked of even exist? Might it be just some figment of a fevered imagination? Were we embarking on a last-ditch effort to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat, chasing some chimera of nebulous provenance? My faith in Nate was at breaking point. My friend, my hero, my surrogate older brother, was turning out to be as flawed and compromised as anybody else. Why this should come as a shock I do not know, but it did.
Within an hour we had come to a dark part of the forest. I use “dark” both in the literal sense and the figurative. The trees clustered close together, screening out much of the daylight, but there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, an atmosphere. It is hard to describe but I had come to recognise it over the course of our previous expeditions. Whenever we neared the spot where lurked one of those creatures of questionable classification, my hackles would begin to rise and my nerves would be set on edge. Possibly some primordial instinct within me was coming to the fore; some ancient, deep-buried sense of alarm was being triggered. To put it plainly, I always knew when we were verging on one of those forbidden places of which Amos Russell had spoken, but I knew without knowing quite how I knew.
The darkness – of both varieties – deepened, even as the forest grew hushed around us. Birdcalls faded and the rustling of branches was stilled. Then we arrived at the clearing.
It was an almost perfectly semicircular area, some half a mile in radius, where no trees grew. It backed onto a crag, a sheer granite bluff that towered against the sky and, being as it was oriented east to west and had a north-facing aspect, shrouded the clearing in shadow. Even in midsummer, I doubted whether much solar illumination reached the ground here. This was a zone of perpetual eclipse, a realm of twilight. The only plant life that burgeoned was weeds, and these there were in abundance, covering everything in such thick profusion that it was not immediately apparent – not until after Nate and I had surveyed the scene for two full minutes or more – that beneath lay ruins. What at first glance one might take for a knoll or a bushy outcrop were, it turned out, the remains of buildings. Here rose the broken spar of a stone column; here the corner of what must have been a house; here the collapsed husk of some sort of temple or hall. We moved amidst the vegetation-wreathed masonry with bemusement and a tinge of awe. This was – had been – a town. A town in the middle of nowhere, reached by no road, surrounded by barely penetrable forest, and of some antiquity.
The town’s age, indeed, was almost impossible to determine. From what we could see of the stonework through the dense greenery, it was composed of granite, the selfsame stuff as the crag. The construction, moreover, had been of some quality, for the crevices between the individual blocks were tight and mortar-less, so thin one could not have slid a sheet of paper into them, although the outer edges of the blocks had been eroded by weathering.It was not the handiwork of any Indian, that much we could determine, for the redskin in the States, although known to build stone walls, does not go in for construction on a megalithic scale. Nate hazarded that the architecture bore the mark of Mayan or Aztec craftsmanship, yet none of the great Mesoamerican empires is known to have extended as far north as New England. I wondered whether the builders hailed from some forgotten Stone Age civilisation, a primordial race with stoneworking skills unrivalled at the time and access to tools available nowhere else in the world. I was not entirely serious in this conjecture, but not entirely facetious either. “It is a marvel,” Nate concluded, and although he was talking about what was effectively rubble, he was right.
We could discern long gaps between the tumbledown rocks; these once must have been streets. They radiated outwards like spokes from a central point on the straight edge of the semicircle, which of course was the crag. The town had had a hub, and Nate and I picked our way towards it, wrestling through swathes of ivy and creeper, compelled by an unspoken curiosity. The feeling of “darkness” was strong in this place, stronger than I had ever felt it before, like an intangible wintry breeze blowing over my skin and raising gooseflesh. All the same, a fire of fascination burned within me, an intellectual heat.
The hub was a piazza hard by the base of the crag, and Nate and I speculated whether it might have served as marketplace, meeting place, or something else. Our gazes were drawn to the crag itself, in whose beetling flank we descried an aperture all but engulfed by the strangling tide of undergrowth. We might neither of us have noticed it at all were it not for the carved lintel surmounting it, which sported runic symbols that to some degree resembled Sanskrit but struck me as cruder, more jagged, lacking that script’s elegant curvaceousness. Nate stated that the writing was likely a language called R’lyehian, to which the Necronomicon made plentiful reference. R’lyehian, he said, predated even the oldest of known tongues such as Sumerian and Akkadian. Its origins were shrouded in mystery but the general assumption was that it was spoken by the very earliest of Earth’s inhabitants: beings who may or may not have travelled here from the stars.
I made some expostulation, albeit in a muted fashion. Certainly, if the ruined town’s residents had been a star-borne race, it would account for their ability to work stone in a way no other contemporary human could. If they had had the technological wherewithal to traverse the interstellar gulfs, then hewing granite with remarkable precision would surely have presented them no problem.
Even as I digested Nate’s remarkable and perhaps preposterous assertion, he had begun wading through the weeds to the aperture. He ducked under the lintel, peering in. The dim daylight did not penetrate far, but he said he was able to make out a chamber within. I joined him, and saw a chamber far larger than the rather meagre aperture might have led one to infer. Just about visible were the rear wall and the ceiling, each approximately a hundred feet distant. Visible, too, was a plinth or some similar structure near the chamber’s epicentre, an oblong chunk of stone ornamented with R’lyehian glyphs.
I had no intention of crossing the threshold. Nate, on the other hand, had no compunction about doing so. In he went, tiptoeing around the tendrils of creeper that infiltrated the chamber from outside and splayed out to form a leafy, tapering delta. He might well have been the first man to set foot within that spacious cavity for several thousand years, since whenever the town was abandoned and lapsed into decay – the first man to disturb its solemn, archaic pristineness. He approached the plinth and, circumnavigating it, halted the other side. In a quiet, clear voice he said, “Zach? Come. You have to see this.”
Loath though I was to comply, I did so. Tentatively I joined Nate on the far side of the plinth, and there he, with an elaborate swaggering sweep of the arm, like a prestidigitator concluding a conjuring trick, showed me what he had discovered.
