The dim lights on the ground brightened from red to orange. With a sudden inspired guess, I knew they were the rock samples I had been working with. Tindall had taken them. Just my dreaming of their incredible past with one of them gripped in my hand had turned it hot.
The air thickened and swirled. It grew hotter, too. Odors, not unpleasant but strongly aromatic, struck our nostrils. They hadn’t any source that I could identify, and I felt dizzy as I whiffed them, with a sense of vertigo, of being poised above endless gulfs. And suddenly I was gazing into them. I wasn’t dreaming now, but wide awake, and I saw the naked crags, surging red magma, and molten pinkish-white moon huge in the sky, through gaps in searing clouds, that I’d seen before. The vision superimposed itself on the island in the Miskatonic. Tindall’s raw-throated chant filled my ears. All I clearly saw of the island was the circle of rocks Tindall had placed around himself, and the lines of standing stones dark against a dreadful sky. Tindall cried the name Yog-Sothoth again, and the orange glow the rocks were radiating shifted to a pale, hot yellow.
Above the circle, a misshapen vortex appeared in the air, sulfur-yellow streaked with dirty brown, like a stained hole into nowhere. The weird spicy scent became strong enough to clog our throats. I started to hallucinate, or at least, I hoped I was hallucinating.
I looked into voids between universes. I saw the chaos outside ordered space-time, or else within it. Maybe they were the same thing. A dreadful entity drifted into my field of perception, out beyond the murky vortex. It might have been huger than a galaxy or small as a cluster of balloons, depending on perspective and distance, or, again, both at once. It looked like a mad tangle of dripping hawsers, frayed and knotted, twisted around pulsing globes of many sizes. It might also have been the eviscerated organs of something alive but foreign to human knowledge, writhing in a last pained convulsion. It looked like all that, and it changed as I gazed. I had the feeling I saw some shifting cross-section of a being whose terrible whole I’d never be able to imagine or perceive.
It hung in that turbulent vortex above the island. Our souls shook before it. It radiated a malign avid craving, and yet it was somehow impersonal, cruelly indifferent. It was capable of wiping all life from the earth the way I’d wash the pesticides off a grape before I ate it.
Tindall called its name again. His voice was ecstatic. The rock samples around him glowed brighter, blue-white and then a hot fierce violet. His trousers began to smoke and char. He didn’t seem to notice.
“We’re too late,” Connie whispered in horror. “We’re too late. Run!”
I hesitated. What could I do? Would I stop anything, change anything, if I tackled Tindall bodily? Even killed him? I didn’t know, and as I looked up at the roiling abomination Tindall had summoned, I knew one thing; I dared not charge into that circle.
“Run!”
We did just that, side by side, like rabbits from a dog. We reached the water-side, pushed out our canoe, and instantly capsized it like a pair of clumsy idiots. We swam for the landing in desperation, though what good we were thinking that would do us, I couldn’t tell you. We reached it and hauled ourselves out of the water.
Back on the island, it went wrong for Tindall. Maybe he bungled his invocation chant. Maybe he’d been fatally mistaken ever to use the rocks of Leng in his ritual. Maybe they made a bridge across time to the remote aeons that had formed them.
There was a thunderous, fiery blast. By instinct Connie and I held our breaths. Stinking, poisonous air that might have belched from a Bessemer surged over the water and over us, making our sodden clothes steam. We closed our eyes and pressed our faces into the landing. I think we’d have been seared blind if we hadn’t. Our hair crisped. We felt the clothes on our backs singeing.
On the island, the rocks from Leng exploded, seethed into vapor, and Tindall was consumed in what I hope was less than a second. He vanished; he was just gone. A second clap of searing air rolled across the island and the river. Connie and I endured it, seared, deafened, and when everything seemed quiet and dark, I dared to look at the island with its rows of menhirs.
The vortex in the air had closed. The horror called YogSothoth had gone, or anyhow was fenced out of ordered space-time again, not that it comforted us much when we’d just had a direct view of how fragile that fencing is. If a half-baked warlock like Tindall could breach it, create an opening…
We made it back to Connie’s car. Turning on the roof light, we inspected each other. Except for blisters and burned hair, we seemed all right. Connie looked down at herself, and the remains of her silk pantsuit.
“Ruined,” she said, in a state of shock. “It’s damn’ well ruined.”
I don’t know who laughed hysterically first. We might not have stopped if the sound of police sirens hadn’t brought us back to earth. We’d have questions to answer, and our condition, plus the grass on our clothes, made it impossible to deny we’d been on the island. Plenty of people would have seen that blast, heard and smelled it, some of them on the campus.
We didn’t, I realized, have to explain anything. The simplest, most innocent account would be best, and we could even tell the truth, within limits. We’d been testing the rock samples, and began to suspect Dean Tindall was planning to use them in an experiment that could be dangerous, to support pet ideas of his own. We’d been to his apartment — Haru could confirm that — and then to the island on the chance that he was working with them there. We’d arrived just as the rocks were becoming incandescent, and fled. We barely made it back across the river before they exploded.
Some people who had looked directly at the blast were blinded. Others who breathed the vapor spent days in hospital with damaged lungs. One, an asthma sufferer, died.
Just how those rocks could have exploded into islandscouring fire by any natural means was hard to explain, but we didn’t have to. It had happened. Detailed examination, a matter of record, had established that the rocks were unique. The police had to conclude in the end that they’d been even more extraordinary than we knew. There were the usual fringe theories about everything from terrorists and CIA black ops to extraterrestrials, and that last was correct in a way. Yog-Sothoth is as extraterrestrial as any being can be.
The island had been scorched clean of its grass and other growth. Even the moss on the standing stones had been burned off the sides facing the blast, but not one stone had fallen, or so much as shifted. That didn’t seem natural, and Connie and I are sure it wasn’t. Were those stones there at the time of the cataclysm recorded in the Nemedian Chronicles? Were they untouched even by that? Is the same true of the Plateau of Leng (my own curt answer to that is hell, yes), that cannot be approached by the same route twice, and can’t be located precisely even by EarthWatch satellites?
Whatever else is true, we had a miraculous escape that night. I don’t mean just Connie and me. We resorted to a lot of neat brandy after our hospital checkups, but not enough to dissolve our memories. There isn’t that much brandy. I’m a stolid type, and my teeth chattered on the rim of the glass. My hand shook.
“Th-that was a pinprick to what might have happened,” I said. “Christ! It could have been the whole state!”
“It could have been the Solar System,” Connie said. “We’ll never know why it wasn’t. Never. I suppose Tindall messed up the conjuration somehow.”
Almost plaintively, I asked, “How could a little human being’s conjuration summon — something like that? Why would it pay attention?”
“They are always paying attention to openings to this universe, from what the Necronomicon says. Hints in von Junzt, too. Human beings can open those ‘Gates’, even by mistake. Most can’t be opened, except from Earth, from inside orderly space-time. That’s how it seems.”