“I’m not ashamed of my body, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Glory. “Men have paid to see me naked.”
“Enough talk of nakedness,” said Lovecraft. “We have far more important matters upon which to concentrate our attentions.”
The swim across might have been pleasant in other circumstances. In the fantastical setting, knowing that they might be the first humans ever to enter the water, feeling the pristine liquid like cool, thick air around them, they might have been enjoying the pure novelty of the situation. But now they could not keep the dark thoughts and anxieties from their minds as they slowly made their way across that span of water that suddenly seemed so utterly wide. What monsters lurked in the wet reaches beyond the power of the Artifact’s illumination? What awaited on the other bank? Each of them was lost in thought for those few minutes that seemed to prolong themselves into hours, and finally, they clambered onto the other side and pulled up their makeshift rafts, having had no leisure to consider their nakedness.
Glory had just finished dressing when she heard the sound of splashing. It echoed across the water from the black recesses which they had just navigated for the second time. She glanced at Lovecraft, then at Howard. No one had to say anything. They simply waited to hear the regularity of the noise to confirm that someone-or some thing-was following them.
“Come on,” said Howard. “We ain’t got all day.”
They moved on, walking as quickly as possible until Lovecraft interrupted to remove a shoe and pour the water out of it. “Bob, Glory, would you both be so kind as to drain the excess water from your shoes also?” he asked.
“What for?” said Howard, annoyed. Then he turned to see that Lovecraft’s pale face bore an expression of barely contained panic.
“You okay, HP?”,
“It’s the wet squishing sounds,” said Lovecraft. “I cannot fathom’ the reason, but for some reason it reminds me of my pursuit by the Night Gaunts in the Providence cemetery. Please, if only to humor me. ”
“What we heard back there in the water,” said Howard, “it was probably just one of them blind cave lizards or somethin’.”
Lovecraft appeared unconvinced, with a pained look of disbelief as the contents of his second shoe splashed onto the stone floor. “I con- , cur with your last hypothesis, Bob. It was indeed some thing. Now, if you please?”
Glory and Howard begrudgingly acceded to Lovecraft’s request, and they moved on through the next chamber. The diminished squishing offered only a little security as they wound deeper into the stifling blackness of the cathedral-sized cave, a chamber so large the Artifact’s light seemed not even to matter. What they could see clearly were the stone walls that appeared on either side of them, carved with the now familiar symbols from the Necronomicon. They said nothing as they stepped cautiously forward toward the place where the walls flared,’ outward. When they reached the spot, the Artifact’s light seemed suddenly to diminish, causing their vision to dim momentarily. But then they realized that the light had somehow equalized, and they gaped in awe at what stood before them.
It was a gate of monumental proportions, obviously the product of something other than purely human artifice. Its style was ancient and mysterious. To Lovecraft it looked like some disrespectful or blasphemous hybrid of sacred architecture borrowed from old Egypt and the more ancient Babylon. Its facade bore the earmarks of motifs that had come to florescence among the Hellenics and then in the obscure and secret motifs of the Byzantines, but he knew that what he saw was the most ancient architecture of all—one whose unholy geometries tugged at some instinctive horror and repulsion in man. The inscriptions around the portal itself were familiar now—many of them identical to those in the Necronomicon, including the strange H-shaped symbol that seemed almost to haunt him. They were etched into the polished stone surface, not like normal inscriptions chiseled in or cut in relief, but as if they had been branded there, melting the rock.
As they approached closer, they saw something else that shocked them almost as much as the sight of the gate itself. Flanking the hideous architecture, on the natural rock surface, were layers upon layers of petroglyphs—geometric shapes, humanoid forms, even palm prints-obviously put there by humans over the millennia. This place had been visited before-many times.
“My God,” exclaimed Lovecraft, “it is no wonder Imanito knew the route so well. His people must have been the protectors of this place since they came to the Americas. I commend you for being right, Bob, though now I am certain he must belong to the lost Anasazi tribe.”
Howard grunted at the backhanded compliment.
The decorations around the portal all sprang from a central axis that highlighted a single spot, an indentation designed to receive the Artifact. The patterns that radiated outward from that focal point all shimmered now, all except in one small area that had been defaced, apparently with great effort. A small spot a few palms’ width from the Artifact’s slot had been manually chiseled into approximately the same size and shape. Around that, someone had labored hard to apply alternate designs to the portal, but over the years the pigments and scratches on the surface of the stone had all worn away, leaving only some subtle discolorations.
But there were other oddities: tripods made of wooden rods bearing glass or crystal bottles filled with colored water; chalked marks on the floor indicating the cardinal directions; strange mechanisms made of wood and stone and bone, wrapped in coils of animal gut and sinew. Now Imanito’s story and its accompanying ritual took on new meaning, and yet they still could not understand how they were to play their mythic role. They continued to approach the gate, noticing signs of adjustment, repair, maintenance to the primitive mechanisms.
At a certain point, they seemed to reach a barrier of thick air, almost like suspended water. When they tried to move forward, their bodies grew suddenly weak until they gave up the effort and stepped back.
“The solution to this must be simple,” ruminated Lovecraft. “Since the Artifact has brought us this far, it surely serves as the remedy, and therefore I shall apply it, thus.” He held the Artifact out in front of him until it touched the thick air.
There was another balancing of the light, and when he blinked, he saw a patch of the air in front of him rippling, as if it were vertical water showing the rings left by a stone cast into its surface. When he pushed at the center of the concentric rings, something gave, and he felt the resistance vanish. A hole of visibly clearer air appeared, and Lovecraft could pull at its edges to make the aperture large enough to step through.
“Hurry,” said Lovecraft. “I shall hold the opening and come through after the two of you are safely on the other side.”
Howard and Glory followed his directions without argument, and in a moment they were all standing on the other side of the barrier. In front of them the gate loomed even larger than it had appeared before. Behind them, the air had turned into a reflective surface that appeared to be a mirrored wall that stretched all the way across the chamber.
Howard tried to say something, but his voice refused to carry. And then they all simultaneously froze as they felt the power of the gate.
At first, it was like a dull electrical hum in their inner ears. Then, although there was no discernible change in the surrounding temperature, they all shuddered uncontrollably as if they had been blasted by a sudden Arctic chill. Lovecraft had a flash of memory so abrupt it left him with a physical vertigo. He was in Manhattan again, strolling around a corner with his new bride onto Fifty-seventh Street when, from nowhere, he was struck by the severest gust of freezing wind ever to rake his bones. It was a full three days before he could stop the bouts of uncontrollable shivering and chattering of teeth. But this cold seemed a thousand times worse; it seemed to cut somehow past his body and into his very spirit.