Don Webb
Exactly twenty-nine days after his father had died of general paresis—that is to say, syphilis—in the local asylum, the boy observed the cylinder land upon Federal Hill. On some level this extramundane intrusion confirmed certain hypotheses that he had begun to form concerning the prognosticative nature of dreams. He had been dreaming of the night gaunts for three years. They had—the horrible conclusion now obtruded upon his reluctant mind as an awful certainty—come for him. As befit a gentleman of pure Yankee stock, and the true chalk-white Nordic type, he had but one option: He must venture forth to meet and if possible defeat these eldritch beings.
He was eight years old.
The initial and certainly most daunting difficulty would be getting past his mother and aunts. His grandfather, Whipple Phillips, might be an ally in this quest, since he had often kept Howard entertained with tales of black voodoo, unfathomed caves, winged horrors, and old witches with sinister cauldrons. But Grandfather Whipple was in Idaho, and his mother, though normally indulgent of such whims, would not allow his questing into the night air. Howard therefore adopted extreme stealth in the acquisition of his bicycle. He actually carried it several yards from the house before mounting it in quest of adventure.
Down College Hill across the river and then hard work up toward St. John’s Church on Federal Hill, which is where he judged the cylinder had fallen. The neighborhood, alive with nameless sounds that vied with morbid shriekings, seemed to have taken notice of the cylinder’s fall. There was a general lighting of candles, lanterns, torches, and the like. By the time he reached St. John’s a rugged ring of light surrounded the shiny cylinder. He could not stand to force his way through the crowd, so he entered the church proper and climbed up to the bell tower. Opening a small window in the bell tower, he watched the scene below with growing horror and fascination.
A portion of the cylinder had begun to turn. No doubt the entity or entities therein sought the relieving air of the night as a counter to the searing heat of their bulkhead. The crowd grew fervent with their prayers—prayers to an entity Howard knew to be no more real than the Santa Claus he had abandoned at age five. The lid fell free, and a tremendous fungoid stench assailed Howard’s nostrils.
The great leathery wet glistening squamous head of the cylinder’s occupant lunged out, pulsing and twitching obscenely. Its vast liquid eyes, whose terrible three-lobed pupils spoke of the being’s nonTerran evolution, gazed with glittering contempt upon the sea of humanity surrounding the smoking crater. Some brave soul, perhaps hoping to get a better look at the horror, shined a bull’s-horn lantern at its eyes. It recoiled from this unwanted stimulus, making a great hooting cry which would be difficult to render phonetically. The creature ducked back into the cylinder, only to reemerge with a weapon of some sort. Suddenly a flash of blue lightning so intense that it made all the other light a darkness flashed from the weapon. Amidst the screams, Howard fainted.
* * *
When Howard returned to consciousness, it was a return from a dream of being medically examined by the panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling Martians. He was—to his intense surprise— in his bed at 545 Angell St. Susan Lovecraft, his mother, was standing above him.
“I see that my little Abdul has wakened. I trust your materialism will be thoroughly shaken by the miracle which saved you from the Martians.”
“Martians?”
“One edition of the Gleaner made it out before the terror disrupted the city. Everyone has fled. We, however, will remain until Grandfather Whipple comes for us.”
Howard could begin to smell the burning city. His mother couldn’t be this calm, if what she was saying were true. This must be some sort of game, like when she fixed an Oriental corner in his room when he took the name Abdul Alhazred when he was five. He would play along; after all there was the fact that he had arrived back at his home.
“You said something about a miracle?”
“The Martians killed everybody near the cylinder. Some men at the university watched it all with binoculars. One of the Martians climbed up the side of the church, to the bell tower’s open window and pulled you out. It carried you down inside the cylinder. I suppose it thought you were one of their own. You are a very ugly child, Howard, people cannot bear to look upon your awful face. When the second cylinder fell, the Martians hurried out of the first to aid in the other’s arrival. One of the brave men of the Brown Library, Armitage, I believe his name was, ventured all the way there to find you. He knew you because you had pestered him with questions on Cicero. You were there in the cylinder ‘sleeping peacefully,’ he said.”
“How long?”
“You’ve been asleep three days.”
There was something in his mother’s eyes that wasn’t right. Perhaps the “Martian” invasion had unhinged her highly strung nervous system. He must obtain nourishment and newspaper quickly, and then scout out the city.
“Could you bring the copy of the Gleaner, Mother?”
“Certainly, Howard.”
The paper had huge headlines, earth invaded by mars. The cylinders had fallen in London, Paris, St. Louis, even Texas.
How ironic, thought Howard, that the Martians would have chosen to land in the Italian section of Providence, since it was Giovanni Schiaparelli who had discovered Mars’s canal system.
Mother brought him a sandwich for breakfast. The bread was stale and the house quiet.
He asked after his aunts.
Mother’s face went blank and dreamy. “They’ve gone west to speak with your grandfather concerning the invasion. I believe they took the train.”
Howard knew that one of the first things the Martians would have done would be to destroy trains, telegraphs, and roads. Mankind would panic if it lost its ability to reassert its pathetic reality by its continuous idiot god mutterings. What happy cows they would become in a few days, happy to be herd animals. He could feel the contempt he had seen in the three-lobed eyes of the Martian, a burning contempt that an older and more perfect civilization must feel against the apelike humans.
He would have to meet them again. He could feel a pull toward the cylinder near St. John’s Church. An actual physical attraction like iron filings to a lodestone. Perhaps his mother was right and there was something in him that was like the Martians.
He began surveying the town from his window. Great paths of black ash cut obscene angles across the landscape. The Martians’ traveling machines respected neither human habitation nor the barriers of river or hill. What marvelous creatures these Martians were to fashion machines to replace bodies. To become pure brains able to cross the cosmos! What starry wisdom they must have accumulated!
He saw the glint of metal, and reached for his telescope. A great walking machine was traversing Federal Hill moving toward St. John’s. He could see the pit in front of the church quite clearly. A strange red vegetation covered the pit’s sides. The red weed seemed to move slowly of its own accord, for surely no ash stirred with any breeze. The walking machine brought the Martian alongside the bell tower. The Martian placed a small golden box within.
At that moment his mother rushed into the room and pulled Howard from the window. She closed the curtains. She told him she was making hot chocolate. He should come to the parlor to enjoy some.
He felt sad for his mother, but guessed that it was perhaps a blessing that the human mind is unable to correlate its contents. Howard went down into the parlor and did partake of hot chocolate. His mother talked of trivial things as though no horror waited outside of the curtained windows.
Everything was still, very still, and Howard surmised that the city was deserted. Then a great ululation so horrible that surely no human mouth could utter nor mind conceive smashed the stillness of the air as a monolith of terror upon a plain of endless desolation. Mother nearly dropped her tiny white teacup, a proud relic of the family’s past. Golly, thought Howard, something needs to be done. Mother talked rapidly and quietly. Once again the Martian cry resonated obscenely in the Terran atmosphere.
Howard excused himself. Mother didn’t seem to notice. He went to his grandfather’s medicine chest. Grandfather Whipple fought his pernicious insomnia with a powerful sleeping powder. Howard believed that he could easily mix it in the malted milk that his mother favored as an evening meal.
Waiting out the afternoon was torture. Something pulled Howard to St. John’s Church. He could almost see the bell tower room when he closed his eyes. Knowing that the mystery was there was making him do and think things he had never thought. Mystery, he decided, was the great transformatrice. She effected a change in one’s self by simply being.
The evening meal proved worse. He had had to argue with Mother so that he could prepare her malted milk. She would have to be sedated if he were to quest further. This time he must not faint and be subject to removal before viewing whatever horror his destiny had chosen for him.
Mother drank her malt. She joked gently that he did not know how to prepare it. He watched her carefully, making sure that she drank all of it rather than pouring it down the kitchen drain. She retired to the parlor afterward, where her fear kept her from lighting candle or lamp. As it grew darker, her words grew fainter and fainter. He listened long and hard to be sure that the whisperer in the darkness did indeed sleep, then tiptoed out of the house.
Outside deep twilight held the city in its gray-purple embrace. Only the topmost windows reflected the glorious sunset. The enchanting and beautiful twilight almost concealed the great ashen pathways of desolation that the Martians had left in their wake. Only one of the once many proud bridges still spanned the river. Howard began to run toward it. The sense of movement made him feel watched; Howard was the only thing moving on College Hill. The Martians’ siege had stolen the comforting noises of the ancient city, leaving it as still as the vast void of darkling space through which they had traveled, and as foul smelling as the odor of plague-stricken towns and uncovered cemeteries.
As Howard crossed the bridge he looked upon the ancient city with eyes of memory preferring not to see the havoc of war. He looked upon the entrancing panorama of loveliness, the steepled town nestling upon its gentle hills.
Howard’s run slowed to a panting walk as he climbed Federal Hill. When he reached the crater he near swooned from the Oriental sweetness that the undulating carmine growth censed through the still air, but the distant cry of a Martian, mixed with the terrified cry of the human herd, reminded him of his mission. He entered the dark church and made for the bell tower.
Beneath the bells, on a small table, the object lay. It was a garnet crystal in the shape known to science as a trapezohedron. It shone with feint ruddy light—the light of Mars, which the Babylonians (Howard reflected) called Nergal and the Northmen Tyr. By the small table stood a small chair that would exactly fit an eight-year-old boy.
He knew the shining trapezohedron must be the focus for some sort of communication. But could he withstand the daemonical truth such communication—dare he think it— communion could bring?
He reached out and picked up the stone. It tingled; some energy was contained within and began to have a direct effect on his nerves. At once he became aware of a vaster sensory range than his human evolution had prepared him for. Firstly the tiny chamber in the steeple, which had been fairly dark, now blazed with light. Secondly he could hear a sweet distant breathing or perhaps the sounds of flutes playing a magical but incoherent pattern. Thirdly he became aware—as much through the sense of taste as of sight—of a colour which floated in the air above him. He could not name this colour, it was not a colour of Earth, not belonging to the neat spectrum Newton’s prism had revealed. This colour moved within itself, fashioning itself by rules not native to Earth, but of another part of space. It was sentient, and somehow informed or taught those possessed of it. It must be the medium through which the Martians communicated with one another. It sensed that Howard sensed it and it became violently agitated. Suddenly it shot a tentacle into Howard’s brain. It pulled his soul free from its moorings.
For a moment he was suspended in the colour out of space. He could hear the colour, taste the colour, think as the colour.
The colour asked him, “Are you one of us?”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“We prepared for the invasion by sending forth the minds of the greatest telepaths of our race. They dwelt among men as spies living in the bodies of men. Most returned to us, but some lost memory of their being enchanted by the revelations received in human flesh. Are you one of us?”
Howard did not know. He had felt that there was much from outside of the world of men in him.
The colour began to pulsate, pushing him along. He wondered that he had sensation separate from his body.
“You are in a body of your thoughts. When we have transported you to Mars it will be made semimaterial for two purposes. You will be able to handle and sense physical objects, and we will be able to examine your true mental form.”
Howard considered that he might be a Martian. He had always felt that the day-to-day world partook of a phantom character. The only things that seemed real to him had been his dreams, certain tales in The Arabian Nights, and certain suggestions of a grander world which he saw in certain architectural features revealed in sunsets. Surely Mars was a sunset world, gold and red in its martial glory. What wonders a civilization older than mankind might possess. The colour, sensing his thoughts, began to show him images.
The “Martians” had come from another world to settle in this solar system. Eons ago they had crossed space in cylinders like those they had so recently employed. They settled upon Mars and Earth’s South Pole. The latter colony had vanished, perhaps succumbing to the violent climatic changes that Earth had suffered. The former began a specialized eugenics program. Worshiping no god save their own intellects, they sought to eliminate all of the glands which cause emotion (save for fear, the emotion necessary for survival), and remove all enzymes which cause aging. The Martians had likewise eradicated all forms of microbial disease, leading to a practical immortality. The coming of immortality necessitated a specialized training of the will. The Martians had to cultivate those intellectual and aesthetic pursuits which could sustain an interest that would span the strange eons through which they would live.
This training of the will had an unexpected side effect; the Martians discovered that some of the stronger minds of their race could project themselves across the void without mechanical aid. These astral travelers came in contact with the various races of the solar system including the feebleminded men who dwelt upon the noisome green world of Earth and a race of what could be best described as fungoid beings inhabiting a planet on the rim of the solar system.
The Martians traded with the fungi, and Martian civilization reached its height of material prosperity. The Martians covered the ruddy surface of their world with labyrinthine Cyclopean structures, whose sole function was to express certain aesthetic, mathematical, or metaphysical formulae. The Martians waxed great in pride. Surely no race had reached such success.
This golden age gave way to a certain decadence. One of the first symptoms of this decline was a decrease in reproductive powers. The Martians had long since given up sexual reproduction in favor of a less distracting asexual budding. Fewer and fewer Martians came into being. Art became debased, and the objective art of the past was increasingly replaced by an outrageous subjectivity.
Perhaps the Martians would have gone into a long and steady decline had it not been for the discovery of the vast underground vaults at Syrtis Major.
The “Martians” discovered that uncounted eons ago, an almost godlike race had dominated their planet. The fungi confirmed this, claiming that they were in fact not dead, but had entered into a sort of undead sleep, waiting for a certain modulation of cosmos rays that would allow them to resume their play in glory and terror. The “Martians” were neither the oldest nor the last of Mars’s masters.
Great energy was turned toward the excavation and destruction of the vaults, but despite their mighty heat-rays and lightning machines the Martians were unable to cut through the curious metal of the vaults. The dread of the creatures who would return was heightened by the discovering of their image carved into certain remote peaks which overlook the haunted deserts, whose baleful influence the Martians had shunned for millennia.
These elder gods with their long ghoullike face and star-destroying eyes were soon all the Martians could think of. For a season unreason held sway, and the normally logical Martians destroyed as many images of these horrors as they could find. But reason returned and the remaining specimens of statues were gathered at the capital, and controlled debate on the course of action began. A decision was made to invade Earth, and safely leave Mars for the elder gods.
A few minds had crossed to Earth to observe its affairs, and the Martians reasoned that he might be one of their own—since his mind had the strength to activate the shining trapezohedron.
The colour seemed to be exerting less pressure, and Howard realized that he would soon be on the surface of Mars. He had found his people. His long exile from those around him would be ended! Soon their superior skill in psychology and surgery would free him to walk among his own kind—his vast pulsating brain attached to the shiny metal machine!
Movement stopped and the unearthly colour began to fade. Howard found himself at the gates of a huge red building whose wings stretched in all directions—perhaps covering the planet. The slowly moving red weed covered the ground. From within he heard the mathematically perfect music of the Martians.
He went through the great gate into a hall filled with the great brains whose tentacles worked every strange device, whose construction clearly revealed their kinship to the technology which had produced the heat-ray. But as soon as Howard had entered the hall a great cry went up. The Martians were not shambling toward him in greeting as he had imagined. Instead they began a disorderly march to the exits. Howard looked about for the source of their fear.
There on the other side of the hall, through a trapezoidal doorway, came the figure of one of the elder gods. The Martians had not had time to relocate to Earth. Howard advanced toward the figure; perhaps he could slow its progress by engaging in hand-to-hand combat.
But soon came the shock that sent his mind hurtling back to Earth, a revelation about the nature of the elder gods and the time and form of their return. This shock deprived Howard of all clear memories of this adventure; indeed years later he was one of the skeptics who maintained that the Earth had not been invaded at all—for when he reached out toward the eldritch figure of the elder god, his hand had encountered a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
(FOR PAT HARDY)