Rogers' sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of his fevered rambling.
"Do you remember," he shouted, "what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I'd been there when you saw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in darkness out of wax. If you'd seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did. . . .
"Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I wanted to work out the later parts before making any claim. When you see the snapshots you'll know the geography couldn't have been faked, and I fancy I have another way of proving It isn't any waxed concoction of mine. You've never seen it, for the experiments wouldn't let me keep It on exhibition."
The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.
"It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. When I got it figured out I saw it could only have one meaning. There were things in the north before the land of Lomar--before mankind existed--and this was one of them. It took us all the way to Alaska, and up the Nootak from Fort Morton, but the thing was there as we knew it would be. Great cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There was less left than we had hoped for, but after three million years what could one expect? And weren't the Eskimo legends all in the right direction? We couldn't get one of the beggars to go with us, and had to sledge all the way back to Nome for Americans. Orabona was no good up in that climate--it made him sullen and hateful.
"I'll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blasted out of the pylons of the central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would be. Some carvings still there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees from following us in. Orabona shivered like a leaf--you'd never think it from the damned insolent way he struts around here. He knew enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid. The eternal light was gone, but our torches showed enough. We saw the bones of others who had been before us-æons ago, when the climate was warm. Some of those bones were of things you couldn't even imagine. At the third level down we found the ivory throne the fragments said so much about--and I may as well tell you it wasn't empty.
"The thing on the throne didn't move--and we knew then that It needed the nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn't want to wake It then. Better to get It to London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big box, but when we had packed it we couldn't get It up the three flights of steps. These steps weren't made for human beings, and their size bothered us. Anyway, it was devilish heavy. We had to have the Americans down to get It out. They weren't anxious to go into the place, but of course the worst thing was safely inside the box. We told them it was a batch of ivory carving--archeological stuff; and after seeing the carved throne they probably believed us. It's a wonder they didn't suspect hidden treasure and demand a share. They must have told queer tales around Nome later on; though I doubt if they ever went back to those ruins, even for the ivory throne."
Rogers paused, felt around in his desk, and produced an envelope of good-sized photographic prints. Extracting one and laying it face down before him, he handed the rest to Jones. The set was certainly an odd one: ice-clad hills, dog sledges, men in furs, and vast tumbled ruins against a background of snow--ruins whose bizarre outlines and enormous stone blocks could hardly be accounted for. One flashlight view showed an incredible interior chamber with wild carvings and a curious throne whose proportions could not have been designed for a human occupant. The carvings of the gigantic masonry--high walls and peculiar vaulting overhead--were mainly symbolic, and involved both wholly unknown designs and certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene legends. Over the throne loomed the same dreadful symbol which was now painted on the workroom wall above the padlocked plank door. Jones darted a nervous glance at the closed portal. Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places and had seen strange things. Yet this mad interior picture might easily be a fraud--taken from a very clever stage setting. One must not be too credulous. But Rogers was continuing:
"Well, we shipped the box from Nome and got to London without any trouble. That was the first time we'd ever brought back anything that had a chance of coming alive. I didn't put It on display, because there were more important things to do for It. It needed the nourishment of sacrifice, for It was a god. Of course I couldn't get It the sort of sacrifices which It used to have in Its day, for such things don't exist now. But there were other things which might do. The blood is the life, you know. Even the lemures and elementals that are older than the earth will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under the right conditions."
The expression on the narrator's face was growing very alarming and repulsive, so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers seemed to notice his guest's nervousness, and continued with a distinctly evil smile.
"It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I've been trying rites and sacrifices. Orabona hasn't been much help, for he was always against the idea of waking It. He hates It--probably because he's afraid of what It will come to mean. He carries a pistol all the time to protect himself--fool, as if there were human protection against It! If I ever see him draw that pistol, I'll strangle him. He wanted me to kill It and make an effigy of It. But I've stuck by my plans, and I'm coming out on top in spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned sniggering skeptics like you, Jones! I've chanted the rites and made certain sacrifices, and last week the transition came. The sacrifice was--received and enjoyed!"
Rogers actually licked his lips, while Jones held himsef uneasily rigid. The showman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at which he had glanced so often. Bending down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke again.
"You've laughed enough at my work--now it's time for you to get some facts. Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this afternoon. Do you know what that meant?"
Jones started. For all his curiousity he would have been glad to get out without further light on the point which had so puzzled him. But Rogers was inexorable, and began to lift the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a crushed, almost shapeless mass which Jones was slow to classify. Was it a once-living thing which some agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood, punctured in a thousand places, and wrung into a limp, broken-boned heap of grotesqeness? After a moment Jones realized what it must be. It was what was left of a dog--a dog, perhaps of considerable size and whitish color. Its breed was past recognition, for distortion had come in nameless and hideous ways. Most of the hair was burned off as by some pungent acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable circular wounds or incisions. The form of torture necessary to cause such results was past imagining.
Electrified with a pure loathing which conquered his mounting disgust, Jones sprang with a cry.
"You damned sadist--you madman--you do a thing like this and dare to speak to a decent man!"
Rogers dropped the burlap with a malignant sneer and faced his oncoming guest. His words held an unnatural calm.
"Why, you fool, do you think I did this? What of it? It is not human and does not pretend to be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave the dog to It. What happened is It's work, not mine. It needed the nourishment of the offering, and took it in Its own way. But let me show you what It looks like."
As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker had returned to his desk and took up the photograph he had laid face down without showing. Now he extended it with a curious look. Jones took it and glanced at in in an almost mechanical way. After a moment the visitor's glance became sharper and more absorbed, for the utterly satanic force of the object depicted had an almost hypnotic effect. Certainly, Rogers had outdone himself in modeling the eldritch nightmare which the camera had caught. The thing was a work of sheer, infernal genius, and Jones wondered how the public would react when it was placed on exhibition. So hideous a thing had no right to exist--probably the mere contemplation of it, after it was done, had completed the unhinging of its maker's mind and led him to worship
it with brutal sacrifices. Only a stout sanity could resist the insidious suggestion that the blasphemy was--or had once been--some morbid and exotic form of actual life.
The thing in the picture squatted or was balanced on what appeared to be a clever reproduction of the monstrously carved throne in the other curious photograph. To describe it with any ordinary vocabulary would be impossible, for nothing even roughly corresponding to it has ever come within the imagination of sane mankind. It represented something meant perhaps to be roughly connected with the vertebrates of this planet--though one could not be too sure of that. Its bulk was cyclopean, for even squatted it towered to almost twice the height of Orabona, who was shown beside it. Looking sharply, one might trace its approximations toward the bodily features of the higher vertebrates.
There was an almost globular torso, with six long, sinuous limbs terminating in crab-like claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe bulged forth bubble-like; its triangle of three staring, fishy eyes, its foot-long and evidently flexible proboscis, and a distended lateral system analogous to gills, suggesting that it was a head. Most of the body was covered with what at first appeared to be fur, but which on closer examination proved to be a dense growth of dark, slender tentacles or sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth suggesting the head of an asp. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer and thicker, marked with spiral stripes--suggesting the traditional serpent-locks of Medusa. To suggest that such a thing could have an expression seems paradoxical; yet Jones felt that that triangle of bulging fish eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend of hate, greed and sheer cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because it was mixed with other emotions not of the world or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality, he reflected, Rogers must have poured at once all his malignant insanity and all his uncanny sculptural genius. The thing was incredible--and yet the photograph proved that it existed.
Rogers interrupted his reveries.
"Well--what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed the dog and sucked it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment--and It will need more. It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!"
Jones lowered the photograph in disgust and pity.
"See here, Rogers, this won't do. There are limits, you know. It's a great piece of work, and all that, but it isn't good for you. Better not see it any more--let Orabona break it up, and try to forget about it. And let me tear this beastly picture up, too."
With a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph and returned it to the desk.
"Idiot--you--and you still think It's a fraud! You still think I made It, and you still think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn you, you're going to know. Not just now, for It is resting after the sacrifice--but later. Oh, yes--you will not doubt the power of It then."
As Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner door Jones retrieved his hat and stick from a near-by bench.
"Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I'll call round tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn't sound sensible. Ask Orabona what he thinks, too."
Rogers bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.
"Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold talk! You say the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I begin to prove that they aren't. You're like the fellows who take my standing bet that they daren't spend the night in the museum--they come boldly enough, but after an hour they shriek and hammer to get out! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two--always against me! You want to break down the coming earthly reign of It!"
Jones preserved his calm.
"No, Rogers--there's nobody against you. And I'm not afraid of your figures, either, much as I admire your skill. But we're both a bit nervous tonight, and I fancy some rest will do us good."
Again Rogers checked his guest's departure.
"Not afraid, eh?--then why are you so anxious to go? Look here--do you or don't you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What's your hurry if you don't believe in It?"
Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely.
"Why, I've no special hurry--but what would be gained by my staying here alone? What would it prove? My only objection is that it isn't very comfortable for sleeping. What good would it do either of us?"
This time it was Jones who was struck with an idea. He continued in a tone of conciliation.
"See here, Rogers--I've just asked you what it would prove if I stayed, when we both knew. It would prove that your effigies are just effigies, and that you oughtn't to let your imagination go the way it's been going lately. Suppose I do stay. If I stick it out till morning, will you agree to take a new view of things--go on a vacation for three months or so and let Orabona destroy that new thing of yours? Come, now--isn't that fair?"
The expression on the showman's face was hard to read. It was obvious that he was thinking quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions, malign triumph was getting the upper hand. His voice held a choking quality as he replied.
"Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I'll take your advice. We'll go out for dinner and come back. I'll lock you in the display room and go home. In the morning I'll come down ahead of Orabona--he comes half an hour before the rest--and see how you are. But don't try it unless you are very sure of your skepticism. Others have backed out--you have that chance. And I suppose a pounding on the outer door would always bring a constable. You may not like it so well after a while--you'll be in the same building, though not in the same room with It."
As they left the rear door into the dingy courtyard, Rogers took with him the piece of burlap--weighted with a gruesome burden. Near the center of the court was a manhole, whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and with a shuddersome suggestion of familiarity. Burlap and all, the burden went down to the oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered, and almost shrank from the gaunt figure at his side as they emerged into the street.
By unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine together, but agreed to meet in front of the museum at eleven.
Jones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely when he had crossed Waterloo Bridge and was approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand. He dined at a quite café, and subsequently went to his home in Portland Place to bathe and get a few things. Idly he wondered what Rogers was doing. He had heard that the man had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road, full of obscure and forbidden books, occult paraphernalia, and wax images which he did not choose to place on exhibition. Orabona, he understood, lived in separate quarters in the same house.
At eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the basement door in Southwark Street. Their words were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing tension. They agreed that the vaulted exhibition room alone should form the scene of the vigil, and Rogers did not insist that the watcher sit in the special adult alcove of supreme horrors. The showman, having extinguished all the lights with switches in the workroom, locked the door of that crypt with one of the keys on his crowded ring. Without shaking hands he passed out the street door, locked it after him, and passed up the worn steps to the sidewalk outside. As his tread receded, Jones realized that the long, tedious vigil had commenced.
2
Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed the childish naïveté which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he had kept flashing his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in the dark on one of the visitor's benches had become a more nerve-wracking thing. Every time the beam shot out it lighted up some morbid, grotesque object--a guillotine, a nameless hybrid monster, a pasty-bearded face crafty with evil, a body with red torrents streaming from a severed throat. Jones knew that no sinister reality was attached to these things, but after that first half-hour he preferred not to see them.
Why he had bothered to humor that madman he could scarcely imagine. It would hav
e been much simpler merely to have let him alone, or to have called in a mental specialist. Probably, he reflected, it was the fellow-feeling of one artist for another. There was so much genius in Rogers that he deserved every possible chance to be helped quietly out of his growing mania. Any man who could imagine and construct the incredibly life-like things that he had produced was not far from actual greatness. He had the fancy of a Sime or a Doré joined to the minute, scientific craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the world of nightmare what the Blatschkas with their marvelously accurate plant models of finely wrought and coloured glass had done for the world of botany.
At midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness, and Jones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside world. The vaulted museum chamber was like a tomb--ghastly in its utter solitude. Even a mouse would be cheering company; yet Rogers had once boasted that--for "certain reasons," as he said--no mice or even insects ever came near the place. That was very curious, yet it seemed to be true. The deadness and silence were virtually complete. If only something would make a sound! He shuffled his feet, and the echoes came spectrally out of the absolute stillness. He coughed, but there was something mocking in the staccato reverberations. He could not, he vowed, begin talking to himself. That meant nervous disintergration. Time seemed to pass with abnormal and disconcerting slowness. He could have sworn that hours had elapsed since he last flashed the light on his watch, yet here was only the stroke of midnight.
He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. Rogers often speculated about such things.