Later, Chalmers, Granville, and I met in an effort to rationalize what we had seen and heard. Chalmers had been all right after he came around, had helped us with our grisly errand up the mountain road. Neither, I found, had heard Norden’s voice after he had joined Colby in the supposed hypnotic state. So, it was as I thought: Dureen’s power had blanked out the sound of Norden’s voice for them completely. Nor did they recall seeing any object in Norden’s hand.
But, in less than a week, even these memories had faded from them. They fully believed that Norden had died in an accident after an unsuccessful attempt on the part of Dureen to hypnotize Colby. Prior to this, their explanation had been that Dureen had killed Norden, for reasons unknown, and that we had been his unwitting accomplices. The hypnotic experiment had been a blind to gather us all together and provide a means of disposing of the body. That Dureen had been able to hypnotize us, they did not doubt then. The illusion of the abyss, they said, was just a cruel joke….
It is no use telling them what I learned a few days later, what I learned from Norden’s notes which explain Dureen’s arrival. Or to quote sections from the Song of Yste to them. Yet, I must set these things down. In that accursed book is a section dealing with an utterly alien race of entities known as the adumbrali.
…And these be none other than the adumbrali, the living shadows, beings of incredible power and malignancy, which dwell without the veils of space and time such as we know it. Their sport it is to import into their realm the inhabitants of other dimensions, upon whom they practice horrid pranks and manifold illusions….
…But more dreadful than these are the seekers which they send out into other worlds and dimensions, beings of incredible power which they themselves have created and guised in the form of those who dwell within whatever dimension, or upon whichever worlds where these seekers be sent….
…These seekers can be detected only by the adept, to whose trained eyes their too-perfectness of form and movement, their strangeness, and aura of alienage and power is a sure sign….
…The sage, Jhalkanaan, tells of one of these seekers who deluded seven priests ofNyaghoggua into challenging it to a duel of the hypnotic arts. He further tells how two of these were trapped and delivered to the adumbrali, their bodies being returned when the shadow-things had done with them….
…Most curious of all was the condition of the corpses, being entirely drained of all fluid, yet showing no trace of a wound, even the most slight. But the crowning horror was the eyes, which could not be closed, appearing to stare restlessly outward, beyond the observer, and the strangely- luminous markings on the dead flesh, curious designs which appeared to move and change form before the eyes of the beholder….
Music of the Stars
DUANE W. RIMEL
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.
I am called a murderer because I destroyed my best friend; killed him in cold blood. Yet I will try to prove that in so doing I performed an act of mercy — removed something that never should have broken through into this three-dimensional world, and saved my friend from a horror worse than death.
Men will read this and laugh and call me mad, because much that happened cannot be labeled and proven in a court of law. Indeed, I often wonder if I beheld the truth — I who saw the ghastly finish. There is much in this world and in other worlds that our five senses do not perceive, and what lies beyond is found only in wild imagination and dream.
I only hope that I killed him in time. If I can believe what I see in my dreams, I failed. And if I waited too long before I fired that last bullet, I shall welcome the fate that threatens to devour me.
Frank Baldwyn and I were comrades for eleven long years. It was a friendship that intensified as time went on, nourished by avid mutual interests in weird music and literature. We were born and raised in the same village, and it was — as a cultured author and correspondent of ours who lived in Providence often remarked — unusual to find two people with such bizarre interests in a village whose population was less than six hundred. It was fortunate, yes; but now I wish we had never probed so far into spheres of the awful unknown.
The trouble began April 13, 1940. I was visiting my friend that day, and during a rambling conversation he hinted that he had discovered on the piano several combinations of musical tones that disturbed him. It was evening and we were alone in the huge, two- story house that stands there today, mouldy and empty beneath a giant maple, gaunt reminder of the horror we unleashed within it.
Baldwyn was a pianist of great ability, and I admired the talent which dwarfed my own musical skill. The wild, weird music he loved often drove me into fits of melancholy I could not fathom. It is indeed a pity that none of those original manuscripts were saved, for many of them were classics of horror, and others so fantastic that I would hesitate to call them music at all.
His statement troubled me; heretofore he had had utter confidence in his mad keyboard wanderings. I offered assistance. Saying nothing, he went to the piano, switched on a nearby floor-lamp and sat down. His dark eyes fastened on the keys; his lithe, white fingers poised above them for an instant, and descended.
There was a weird cascade of sound as he ran the whole-tone scales from one end of the piano to the other, followed by a series of intricate variations that startled and amazed me. I had never heard anything to compare with it; it was utterly “out of the world.” I listened, entranced, as his flying fingers wove a curious symphony of horror. I cannot describe that music any other way. The strains were eerie and unearthly, and stirred the very reaches of my soul. It resembled no standard classical music such as Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead,” or Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre.” It was tortuous, musical madness.
At last the thing ended with a crash of discord, and a strained silence fell over the shadowy room. Baldwyn turned, face taut, and put his fingers to his lips. He pointed at the wall beyond the piano. At first I thought he was jesting, but when I saw his pale, handsome face drawn and worried, I glanced at the darkened walls and listened.
For a while I heard nothing; then a faint, insidious rustling disturbed the silence. It could have been a mouse running across the floor upstairs. But this sound came from the walls. The patter of tiny claws on wood, the rustle of small bodies… rats! Many rats scrambling in the walls. Gradually the squeaking and scratching diminished and became a trickle of sound that faded away in the direction of the cellar.
I stood up, trembling. Baldwyn faced me, eyes gleaming, jaw set.
“I’ve done it, Rambeau; I always thought I could. There’s a music that stirs every kind of beast, even ourselves. Look at the Pied Piper…. I’ve made history repeat itself! But I’m going further; I’m going to compose the music that makes men go mad, learn the music of the stars… even if I have to use special instruments to do it.”
I tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was quite serious. Baldwyn had always been willful, and I knew that argument was futile. However, I will admit that the very idea began to fascinate me, and what mental barriers I had built were weakening as I listened further to his strange plan. For the weird and macabre are as much a part of me as they were a part of him, and the odd music had cast a curious spell over me. Yet I was skeptical, and told him so. I failed to grasp his ultimate ambition; perhaps he hadn’t thought of it then, but the possibilities of the thing were staggering.