The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Reslept

detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. She screamed again and again, but whenever she did so the black paws tickled her with greater subtlety. Then she saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the primal mists of the pits at earth's core.

  At last far below her she saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which she knew must be the fabled Peaks of Throk. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted disc of sunless and eternal depths; higher than woman may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys where the Dholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter preferred to look at them than at her captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.

  As the band flew lower the Peaks of Throk rose grey and towering on all sides, and one saw clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impressive granite of the endless twilight. At still lower levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but great rushing winds with the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a floor of unseen things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring her thithers was the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this done, they flapped away silently. When Carter tried to trace their flight she found she could not, since even the Peaks of Throk had faded out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.

  Now Carter knew from a certain source that she was in the vale of Pnoth, where crawl and burrow the enormous Dholes; but she did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a Dhole or even guessed what such a thing may be like. Dholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling they make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one. They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a Dhole, so listened intently for any sound in the unknown depths of bones about her. Even in this fearsome place she had a plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnoth were not unknown to one with whom she had talked much in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if she but had good luck she might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than Throk's peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones would tell her where to look, and once found she could call to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to say, she had a very singular link with these terrible creatures.

  A woman she had known in Boston - a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard - had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught her to understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This woman had vanished at last, and Carter was not sure but that she might find her now, and use for the first time in dreamland that far-away English of her dim waking life. In any case, she felt she could persuade a ghoul to guide her out of Pnoth; and it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a Dhole, which one cannot see.

  So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when she thought she heard something among the bones underfoot. Once she bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of one of Throk's peaks. Then at last she heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure she had come nigh the crag of the ghouls. She was not sure she could be heard from this valley miles below, but realised that the inner world has strange laws. As she pondered she was struck by a flying bone so heavy that it must have been a skull, and therefore realising her nearness to the fateful crag she sent up as best she might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.

  Sound travels slowly, so it was some time before she heard an answering glibber. But it came at last, and before long she was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait for this was very tense, since there was no telling what might not have been stirred up among those bones by her shouting. Indeed, it was not long before she actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully approached, she became more and more uncomfortable; for she did not wish to move away from the spot where the ladder would come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and she was about to flee in panic when the thud of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew her notice from the other sound. It was the ladder, and after a minute of groping she had it taut in her hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followed her even as she climbed. She had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At a height which must have been fifteen or twenty feet she felt her whole side brushed by a great slippery length which grew alternately convex and concave with wriggling; and hereafter she climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed Dhole whose form no woman might see.

  For hours she climbed with aching and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire and Throk's uncomfortable pinnacles. At last she discerned above her the projecting edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side she could not glimpse; and hours later she saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made her lose her hold through faintness, but a moment later she was herself again; for her vanished friend Richelle Pickman had once introduced her to a ghoul, and she knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So she had herself well under control when that hideous thing pulled her out of the dizzy emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously.

  She was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch her while several others eyed her leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering she made inquiries regarding her vanished friend, and found she had become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct her to Pickman's present habitation, so despite a natural loathing she followed the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after her for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strewn with singular relics of earth - old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments - and Carter realised with some emotion that she was probably nearer the waking world than at any other time since she had gone down the seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.

  There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a ghoul which was once the artist Richelle Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to the city Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (l
eaving that to the red-footed wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible kingdom of the Gugs.

  The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door of stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the Gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos.

  So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand, that