The A. Merritt Megapack Read online

“Santhu sang—and I knew that the marching stars in the mist were the souls of the people of Rak which sought rebirth. She sang, and I saw myself ages past walking in the city of Rak with Santhu beside me. Her song wailed, and I felt myself one of the mist-entangled stars. Her song wept, and I felt myself a star that fought against the mist, and, fighting, break away—a star that fled out and out through immeasurable green space—

  “A man stood before us. He was very tall. His face was both cruel and kind, saturnine as Satan and joyous as Apollo. He raised his eyes to us, and they were yellow as buttercups, and wise, so wise! Ward, it was the face above the peak in the room of the Dragon Glass! The eyes that had looked at me out of Wu-Sing’s face! He smiled on us for a moment and then—he was gone!

  “I took Santhu by the hand and began to run. Quite suddenly it came to me that I had enough of the haunted gardens of Rak; that I wanted to get back to my own land. But not without Santhu. I tried to remember the road to the cleft. I felt that there lay the path back. We ran. From far behind came a wailing. Santhu screamed—but I knew the fear in her cry was not for herself. It was for me. None of the creatures of that place could harm her who was herself one of its creatures. The wailing drew closer. I turned.

  “Winging down through the green air was a beast, an unthinkable beast, Ward! It was like the winged beast of the Apocalypse that is to bear the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet. It was beautiful even in its horror. It closed its scarlet and golden wings, and its long, gleaming body shot at me like a monstrous spear.

  “And then—just as it was about to strike—a mist threw itself between us! It was a rainbow mist, and it was—cast. It was cast as though a hand had held it and thrown it like a net. I heard the winged beast shriek its disappointment, Santhu’s hand gripped mine tighter. We ran through the mist.

  “Before us was the cleft between the two green rocks. Time and time again we raced for it, and time and time again that beautiful shining horror struck at me—and each time came the thrown mist to baffle it. It was a game! Once I heard a laugh, and then I knew who was my hunter. The master of the beast and the caster of the mist. It was he of the yellow eyes—and he was playing me—playing me as a child plays with a cat when he tempts it with a piece of meat and snatches the meat away again and again from the hungry jaws!

  “The mist cleared away from its last throw, and the mouth of the cleft was just before us. Once more the thing swooped—and this time there was no mist. The player had tired of the game! As it struck, Santhu raised herself before it. The beast swerved—and the claw that had been stretched to rip me from throat to waist struck me a glancing blow. I fell—fell through leagues and leagues of green space.

  “When I awoke I was here in this bed, with the doctor men around me and this—” He pointed to his bandaged breast again.

  “That night when the nurse was asleep I got up and looked into the Dragon Glass, and I saw—the claw, even as you did. The beast is there. It is waiting for me!”

  Hemdon was silent for a moment.

  “If he tires of the waiting he may send the beast through for me,” he said. “I mean the man with the yellow eyes. I’ve a desire to try one of these guns on it. It’s real, you know, the beast is—and these guns have stopped elephants.”

  “But the man with the yellow eyes, Jim,” I whispered—“who is he?”

  “He,” said Herndon—“why, he’s the WonderWorker himself!”

  “You don’t believe such a story as that!” I cried. “Why, it’s—it’s lunacy! It’s some devilish illusion in the glass. It’s like the—crystal globe that makes you hypnotize yourself and think the things your own mind creates are real. Break it, Jim! It’s devilish! Break it!”

  “Break it!” he said incredulously. “Break it? Not for the ten thousand lives that are the toll of Rak! Not real? Aren’t these wounds real? Wasn’t Santhu real? Break it! Good God, man, you don’t know what you say! Why, it’s my only road back to her! If that yelloweyed devil back there were only as wise as he looks, he would know he didn’t have to keep his beast watching there. I want to go, Ward; I want to go and bring her back with me. I’ve an idea, somehow, that he hasn’t—well, full control of things. I’ve an idea that the Greatest Wonder-Worker wouldn’t put wholly in Rak’s hands the souls that wander through the many gateways into his kingdom. There’s a way out, Ward; there’s a way to escape him. I won away from him once, Ward. I’m sure of it. But then I left Santhu behind. I have to go back for her. That’s why I found the little passage that led from the throne-room. And he knows it, too. That’s why he had to turn his beast on me.

  “And I’ll go through again, Ward. And I’ll come back again—with Santhu!”

  But he has not returned. It is six months now since he disappeared for the second time. And from his bedroom, as he had done before. By the will that they found—the will that commended that in event of his disappearing as he had done before and not returning within a week I was to have his house and all that was within it—I came into possession of the Dragon Glass. The dragons had spun again for Hemdon, and he had gone through the gateway once more. I found only one of the elephant guns, and I knew that he had had time to take the other with him.

  I sit night after night before the glass, waiting for him to come back through it—with Santhu. Sooner or later they will come. That I know.

  THE PEOPLE OF THE PIT (1918)

  North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast no shadows.

  As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It was exactly as though it moved to push something back. The shining beam held steady for a moment; then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.

  The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I felt the dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but every muscle in their bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along their backs and thier eyes, fixed on the falling lights, were filmed with the terror glaze.

  I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the beam had pulsed upward.

  “It can’t be the aurora,” I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was as dry as though Lao T’zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.

  “If it is I never saw one like it,” he answered in the same tone. “Besides who ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?”

  He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.

  “It makes me think something is being hunted up there,” he said, “an unholy sort of hunt—it’s well for us to be out of range.”

  “The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up,” I said. “What’s it keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut for them.”

  He raised a hand—listening.

  From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager. It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.

  The whispering grew louder.

  “What the hell’s the matter with those dogs?” cried Anderson s
avagely. “Look at them!”

  The malemutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.

  The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I suppose three hundred mile above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us. The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now we saw the light that had led us to them.

  Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once it flashed upon me—it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it was—terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns—and dropped them. Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!

  It was a man. Still with the high climbing pad-pad he swayed to the fire. He stopped.

  “Safe,” whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur overhead. “Quite safe here. They can’t get out of the blue, you know. They can’t get you—unless you go to them—”

  He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.

  “God’s love!” he said. “Frank, look at this!” He pointed to the hands. The wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn to the bone. They looked like the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal. From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!

  “What is he? Where did he come from?” said Anderson. “Look, he’s fast asleep—yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw themselves up one after the other! And his knees—how in God’s name was he ever able to move on them?”

  It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler arms and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as though they had a life of their own—they kept their movement independently of the motionless body. They were semaphoric motions. If you have ever stood at the back of a train and had watched the semaphores rise and fall you will know exactly what I mean.

  Abruptly the overhead whispering ceased. The shaft of light dropped and did not rise again. The crawling man became still. A gentle glow began to grow around us. It was dawn, and the short Alaskan summer night was over. Anderson rubbed his eyes and turned to me a haggard face.

  “Man!” he exclaimed. “You look as though you have been through a spell of sickness!”

  “No more than you, Starr,” I said. “What do you make of it all?”

  “I’m thinking our only answer lies there,” he answered, pointing to the figure that lay so motionless under the blankets we had thrown over him. “Whatever it was—that’s what it was after. There was no aurora about that light, Frank. It was like the flaring up of some queer hell the preacher folk never frightened us with.”

  “We’ll go no further today,” I said. “I wouldn’t wake him for all the gold that runs between the fingers of the five peaks—nor for all the devils that may be behind them.”

  The crawling man lay in a sleep as deep as the Styx. We bathed and bandaged the pads that had been his hands. Arms and legs were as rigid as though they were crutches. He did not move while we worked over him. He lay as he had fallen, the arms a trifle raised, the knees bent.

  “Why did he crawl?” whispered Anderson. “Why didn’t he walk?”

  I was filing the band about the waist. It was gold, but it was like no gold I had ever handled. Pure gold is soft. This was soft, but it had an unclean, viscid life of its own. It clung to the file. I gashed through it, bent it away from the body and hurled it far off. It was—loathsome!

  All that day he slept. Darkness came and still he slept That night there was no shaft of light, no questing globe, no whispering. Some spell of horror seemed lifted from the land. It was noon when the crawling man awoke. I jumped as the pleasant drawling voice sounded.

  “How long have I slept?” he asked. His pale blue eyes grew quizzical as I stared at him. A night—and almost two days,” I said. “Was there any light up there last night?” He nodded to the North eagerly. “Any whispering?”

  “Neither,” I answered. His head fell back and he stared up at the sky.

  “They’ve given it up, then?” he said at last.

  “Who have given it up?” asked Anderson.

  “Why, the people of the pit,” replied the crawling man quietly.

  We stared at him. “The people of the pit,” he said. “Things that the Devil made before the Flood and that somehow have escaped God’s vengeance. You weren’t in any danger from them—unless you had followed their call. They can’t get any further than the blue haze. I was their prisoner,” he added simply. “They were trying to whisper me back to them!”

  Anderson and I looked at each other, the same thought in both our minds.

  “You’re wrong,” said the crawling man. “I’m not insane. Give me a very little to drink. I’m going to die soon, but I want you to take me as far South as you can before I die, and afterwards I want you to build a big fire and burn me. I want to be in such shape that no infernal spell of theirs can drag my body back to them. You’ll do it too, when I’ve told you about them—” he hesitated. “I think their chain is off me?” he said.

  “I cut it off,” I answered shortly.

  “Thank God for that too,” whispered the crawling man.

  He drank the brandy and water we lifted to his lips.

  “Arms and legs quite dead,” he said. “Dead as I’ll be soon. Well, they did well for me. Now I’ll tell you what’s up there behind that hand. Hell!”

  “Now listen. My name is Stanton—Sinclair Stanton. Class 1900, Yale. Explorer. I started away from Dawson last year to hunt for five peaks that rise like a hand in a haunted country and run pure gold between them. Same thing you were after? I thought so. Late last fall my comrade sickened. Sent him back with some Indians. Little later all my Indians ran away from me. I decided I’d stick, built a cabin, stocked myself with food and lay down to winter it. In the Spring I started off again. Little less than two weeks ago I sighted the five peaks. Not from this side though—the other. Give me some more brandy.

  “I’d made too wide a detour,” he went on. “I’d gotten too far North. I beat back. From this side you see nothing but forest straight up to the base of the Hand Mountain. Over on the other side—”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Over there is forest too. But it doesn’t reach so far. No! I came out of it. Stretching miles in front of me was a level plain. It was as worn and ancient looking as the desert around the ruins of Babylon. At its end rose the peaks. Between me and them—far off—was what looked like a low dike of rocks. Then—I ran across the road!

  “The road!” cried Anderson incredulously.

  “The road,” said the crawling man. “A fine smooth Stone road. It ran straight on to the mountain. Oh, it was road all right—and worn as though millions and millions of feet had passed over it for thousands of years. On each side of it were sand and heaps of stones. After while I began to notice these stones. They were cut, and the shape of the heaps somehow gave me the idea that a hundred thousand years ago they might have been houses. I sensed man about them and at the same time they smelled of immemori
al antiquity. Well—

  “The peaks grew closer. The heaps of ruins thicker. Something inexpressibly desolate hovered over them; something reached from them that struck my heart like the touch of ghosts so old that they could be only the ghosts of ghosts. I went on.

  “And now I saw that what I had thought to be the low rock range at the base of the peaks was a thicker litter of ruins. The Hand Mountain was really much farther off. The road passed between two high rocks that raised themselves like a gateway.”

  The crawling man paused.

  “They were a gateway,” he said. “I reached them. I went between them. And then I sprawled and clutched the earth in sheer awe! I was on a broad stone platform. Before me was—sheer space! Imagine the Grand Canyon five times as wide and with the bottom dropped out. That is what I was looking into. It was like peeping over the edge of a cleft world down into the infinity where the planets roll! On the far side stood the five peaks. They looked like a gigantic warning hand stretched up to the sky. The lip of the abyss curved away on each side of me.

  “I could see down perhaps a thousand feet. Then a thick blue haze shut out the eye. It was like the blue you see gather on the high hills at dusk. And the pit—it was awesome; awesome as the Maori Gulf of Ranalak, that sinks between the living and the dead and that only the freshly released soul has strength to leap—but never strength to cross again.

  “I crept back from the verge and stood up, weak. My hand rested against one of the pillars of the gateway. There was carving upon it. It bore in still sharp outlines the heroic figure of a man. His back was turned. His arms were outstretched. There was an odd peaked headdress upon him. I looked at the opposite pillar. It bore a figure exactly similar. The pillars were triangular and the carvings were on the side away from the pit. The figures seemed to be holding something back. I looked closer. Behind the outstretched hands I seemed to see other shapes.