«Hmm. Yes. You have a point.» J sat down across the desk from Colby and began idly fishing around in the pile of books and papers. «All the same, here's something more my style.» He picked up a paperback copy of The Star Rover, by Jack London.
«Ah yes,» Colby said. «London's last major work. As you may recall, it is about a man who can travel freely through space and time, as freely as our friend Richard Blade.»
«What are you trying to tell me?»
«London was a friend of DeCastries, and the center of a literary coterie that included the poet George Sterling and the fiction writers Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith, the same coterie that founded, in 1909, the prestigious California Writers Club. There were others in the group whose reputations have been less lasting, who have been unjustly eclipsed by the more famous members. Nora May French, for example. And there was some sort of scandal about the founding of the California Writers Club that all writers on the subject hint at but none explain. DeCastries, Bierce, Smith, London, French, Sterling… They knew something, J! They knew something about the X dimensions, and they knew something about the Ngaa.»
«What makes you so sure?»
«It runs like an obsessive undercurrent through the work of all them, now hidden, now openly revealed. Ambrose Bierce writes about invisible beings in his 'The Damned Thing,' London takes up the same theme in 'The Shadow and the Flash,' and Smith repeats it in 'The Double Shadow.' And all of them wrote of other worlds, exactly the sort of worlds Richard Blade has so often visited. Have you read 'Poseidonis' by Smith? 'Before Adam' by London? 'Wine of Wizardry' by George Sterling?»
«No, I'm sorry. My reading has been in other areas.»
«Read them, my friend! You will see that this little band of writers and poets had somehow learned to catch at least glimpses of what is out there somewhere, in the X dimensions. And you will see that they had met, out there, the Ngaa. In 1973 the Mirage Press published a collection of fragmentary essays and letters of Clark Ashton Smith entitled Planets and Dimensions. Here, let me show you.» He rummaged through the stack and came up with an unpretentious white-jacketed paperback.
J took the book and read, «'About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest's card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from the air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror and loathsomeness.»
«He saw it,» insisted Colby. «He saw it in broad daylight. Clark Ashton Smith saw the Ngaa, as it chose to show itself to him. I have spent my every spare moment since coming to America in places like the Rosicrucian Library, the Bancroft Library of the University of California, the California Room of the Oakland Public Library and Oakland's Jack London Room at the Jack London Museum in Glen Ellen, where Russ Kingman, the curator, has helped me track down obscure information unknown to all but the most devoted Jack London aficionados. Bit by precious bit, a picture has formed. Yes, bit by bit, like a man reconstructing a dinosaur from a million tiny bones, I have reconstructed the lives of those men and women who, in the early years of the twentieth century, found a route into another world.
«It was all part of what Jack London termed a 'search for a natural explanation for the supernatural.' London, you know, had a mother who was a spirit medium, yet he early fell under the influence of Marxist dialectical materialism. For him, at least, some way of harmonizing the spiritual with the material was a psychological necessity. The others, each in a different way, felt the same need.
«The search was part hobby, part obsession, and it led them into researches into the occult, pursued off and on over most of their adult lives. Together with H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Smith carried on an extensive correspondence, they evolved the theory that there were creatures of some sort trapped in another dimension who had once ruled Earth and sought to return and rule it again, and that attempts by these beings to break through into our world explained all the various strange events usually ascribed to supernatural causes. These writers formed a kind of brotherhood, vowed to secrecy and, if and when any one of them sensed the Ngaa coming for them, to suicide.»
J was surprised. «Suicide, Dr. Colby?»
«Yes, suicide. One thing they found out which you may not yet have guessed is that the Ngaa, under certain conditions, has the power to kidnap someone from our dimension and return with him to its own dimension. Against such an abduction, death was their only defense.»
«What finally happened to them all?»
«About DeCastries I know almost nothing. He is such an obscure figure he may be a fictional character, invented by the others, or a pen name for someone. Jack London's Wolf House mansion in the wilderness of the Valley of the Moon burst into flames and was totally gutted the night before London was to move into it, and the fire remains unexplained to this day. Not long after, London died, and London buffs are still debating whether it was by natural causes, suicide or murder. Nora May French and George Sterling poisoned themselves. Ambrose Bierce wrote a postcard to a friend from Mexico saying 'Pray for me-real loud,' then vanished without a trace, though the U.S. government searched for him for years.»
«What about Clark Ashton Smith?»
«After a brief career as a writer of weird tales, he abandoned literature and became a hermit, spending the rest of his life sculpting horrible yet frightfully lifelike statues of monsters.»
Of the mansion's former use as a ballet school, there remained only a few reminders. One of these was the floor to ceiling mirrors in the gymnasium. These mirrors faced each other in such a way that J, when he looked into one of them, seemed to see a line of replicas of himself, a line that stretched in two directions to infinity. It was a vaguely disquieting illusion, but nevertheless it was in the gym that J installed his scrambler phone, on the wall, plugging in to a pre-existing outlet. The room was almost never used during the summer, when the patients could get their exercise out of doors, and California was at this time suffering a kind of out-of-season summer, one of the worst droughts in its history. There were, of course, no telephone outlets in the patients' rooms, and J was now living in one of these rooms.
On his first day at Dr. Saxton Colby's sanitarium, J had telephoned Copra House, «keeping in touch,» as he put it. He had phoned again on the second day, the third and the fourth. It was not until the fifth day that he had finally phoned Lord Leighton at the Project. He had reasoned, on a conscious level, that Copra House would inform him if there was any trouble in the underground computer complex, but perhaps on an unconscious level he was afraid of what Leighton might have to tell him, afraid that the Ngaa had not left London but had remained behind to work some new mischief.
«Lord Leighton here.»
«This is J, old boy.»
«Don't 'old boy' me. You took your bloody time ringing me up. Been too busy sunning yourself at the seaside with those American film stars, I fancy.»