The Mythos Tales (20 page)

“But this did not remain. Presently it lightened. Yet the moon and the moonlight did not return. Rather, some strange hallucinatory effects began to make show. Though I could not say that I had memorized the landscape outside the house, I was at least familiar enough with Old Dutchtown and its general area to realize that the disturbing facets of countryside I now saw in that dim, iridescent glow were not natural to New England. Indeed, they were not. And once again lines of Geoffrey’s passed through—

‘Tread not where stony deserts hold

Lost secrets of an alien land,

And gaunt against the sunset’s gold

Colossal nightmare towers stand.’

For I saw great towers, I caught glimpses of tall spires, shifting and vanishing before my eyes as I looked from that house as from some vortex in space across eons of time, shifting and vanishing in great clouds of blowing sand—and then, most terrifying of all, there was at last something more.

“How can I set it down more effectively than Justin Geoffrey himself wrote it many years ago, aware of that which undoubtedly haunted his nights and days and led him to that same dream-haunted life? A child of ten he was then, when he slept near the house, within the circle of oaks—and to a child all things are part of his world, part of his nature; it was not until he grew older that he learned what he experienced that haunted night was not a part of his natural world, a revelation that troubled him so profoundly as to dog him throughout his scant years. What did he seeR in that dread journey to Hungary in search of the Black Stone—if it were not tied to his experience at ten? Of what else did he write in his haunting poems? And was this not the landscape of his dreams that informed his strange verses?

“‘Behind the Veil, what gulfs of Time and Space?

What blinking, mowing things to blast the sight?

I shrink before a vague, colossal Face

Born in the mad immensities of Night.’

“Thus he wrote what lay at the heart of his experience. He saw through another world, another dimension. The house in the oaks held the key; it was the door into space and time, by what alchemy or sorcery made so none can now tell, and Justin Geoffrey touched upon it as a child and accepted it until the conventions and knowledge of his own world bade him understand that the world of his dreams was utterly alien and malign.

“And he, in effect, was as much a door to that malign place in a dimension coterminous with our own and might afford entrance to the world of men for the beings that inhabited that alien space. Was it to wonder at that he died mad? The wonder of it is that he was able to hold off madness for so long, that he could find release In his poems, those oddly disturbing lines which have come down to us to reflect the troubled mind that brought him to his ultimate end.

“For, Kirowan, I saw what he saw. I saw those great ‘blinking, mowing things’ in that weird landscape beyond the windows of that accursed house in the oaks—great, vague shapes that loomed through the blowing sand, I heard their shrieks and cries riding that wind from outer space—and, most horrible of all, I saw too the outlines of that colossal face with its eyes—eyes that flamed as with living fire—fixed upon me as certainly as I stared past the bars of the window into that alien world—saw it clearly and unmistakably, and knew it for what Geoffrey saw, before I fled that house in the early hours of the morning.

“Since then I have not slept without seeing that great face, those eyes burned on me. I know myself for its victim, as much as ever Justin Geoffrey was—but I have not had to grow into that knowledge, as he did—I know the full, cataclysmic meaning of that alien world’s impingement upon ours, and I know I cannot long sustain myself against the terrible dreams that fill the hours of my nights ...”

So, abruptly, his manuscript ended, and it was patent in the alteration of his script that his agitation had increased considerably from the time he had begun the writing of his account.

III

There is little more to tell. I made every effort to find James Conrad, but he had gone from all his accustomed haunts.

Two days later he was heard from again. The newspapers carried the story of his suicide. Before taking his own life he had traveled once more to Old Dutchtown and set fire to the house in the oaks, burning it to the ground.

I went to the site after we had buried Conrad. Nothing at all was left. It was a place of singular desolation. Even the oaks were blackened and burned. I felt, as I stood at its perimeter, an unremitting, unchanging, unearthly cold that held to it like an eternal element of the place where that forbidding house had once stood.