However, it may be that the nostalgia of new ages and new planets will seize me anon, and I shall feel impelled to continue my journey among future cycles. Li Wong, it goes without saying, will accompany me in any such venture: though he is quite happily engaged at present in translating the Odes of Confucius and other Chinese classics for the benefit of the people of Mohaun Los. (This poetry, I might add, is meeting with a better reception than my tales regarding Occidental civilization.)
Tuoquan, who is teaching the Psounas to make the fearfully destructive weapons of his own world, may decide to go with us; for he is full of intellectual curiosities. Perhaps we shall follow the great circle of time, till the years and aeons without number have returned upon themselves once more, and the past is made a sequel to the future!
Yours ever,
DOMITIAN
Editor’s Note: Granting the truth of Domitian Malgraff’s narrative, and admitting that his letter was launched from a world in future time, there are still certain problems that baffle explanation. No one knows how long the mechanism containing the letter had been floating in the Banda Sea before it was picked up: but in order to reach the earth at all, in the unimaginably complicated maze of temporal and spatial movement, it must have fallen there not long after the departure of the time-machine from Malgraff’s laboratory. As Malgraff himself indicates in his letter, if the timing had been absolutely perfect it would have landed in his laboratory at the very moment when he and Li Wong began their journey!
THE HUNTERS FROM BEYOND
I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a book-store, particularly one that is well supplied with rare and exotic items. Therefore I turned in at Toleman’s to browse around for a few minutes. I had come to San Francisco for one of my brief, bi-annual visits; and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincaul, the sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, whom I had not seen for several years. His studio was only a block from Toleman’s, and there seemed to be no especial object in reaching it ahead of time. Cyprian had offered to show me his collection of recent sculptures; but, remembering the smooth mediocrity of his former work, amid which were a few banal efforts to achieve horror and grotesquerie, I did not anticipate anything more than an hour or two of vaguely dismal boredom.
The little shop was empty of customers. Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden shelves. Wedged in between other but less alluring titles, I found a de luxe edition of Goya’s Proverbes. I began to turn the heavy pages, and was soon engrossed in the diabolic art of these nightmare-nurtured drawings.
It has always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror, when I happened to look up from the volume, and saw the thing that was crouching in a corner of the book-shelves before me. I could not have been more hideously startled if some hellish conception of Goya had suddenly come to life and emerged from one of the pictures in the folio.
What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin-grey figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, etiolated rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-canine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor. The thing was infinitely bestial, and, at the same time, macabre; for its parchment skin was shrivelled, corpse-like, mummified, in a manner impossible to convey; and from eye-sockets well-nigh deep as those of a skull, there glimmered evil slits of yellowish phosphorescence, like burning sulfur. Fangs that were stained as if with poison or gangrene, issued from the slavering, half-open mouth; and the whole attitude of the creature was that of some maleficent monster in readiness to spring.
Though I had been for years a professional writer of stories that often dealt with occult phenomena, with the weird and the spectral, I was not at this time possessed of any clear and settled belief regarding such phenomena. I had never before seen anything that I could identify as a phantom, nor even an hallucination; and I should hardly have said off-hand that a book-store on a busy street, in full summer daylight, was the likeliest of places in which to see one. But the thing before me was assuredly nothing that could ever exist among the permissible forms of a same world. It was too horrific, too atrocious, to be anything but a creation of unreality.
Even as I stared across the Goya, sick with half-incredulous fear, the apparition moved toward me. I say that it moved—but its change of position was so instantaneous, so utterly without effort or visible transition, that the verb is hopelessly inadequate. The foul specter had seemed five or six feet away—but now it was stooping directly above the volume that I still held in my hands, with its loathsomely lambent eyes peering upward at my face, and a grey-green slime drooling from its mouth on the broad pages. At the same time I breathed an insupportable fetor, like a mingling of rancid serpent-stench with the mouldiness of antique charnels and the fearsome reek of newly decaying carrion. In a frozen timelessness that was perhaps no more than a second or two, my heart appeared to suspend its beating, while I beheld the ghastly face with a clearness too obscene for depiction. Gasping, I let the Goya drop with a resonant bang on the floor, and even as it fell, I saw that the vision had vanished.
“What is wrong, Mr. Hastane? Are you ill?” Toleman, a tonsured gnome with shell-rimmed goggles, had rushed forward to retrieve the fallen volume. From the meticulousness with which he examined the binding in search of possible damage, I knew that his chief solicitude was concerning the Goya. It was plain that neither he nor his clerk had seen the phantom; nor could I detect aught in their demeanor to indicate that they had noticed the mephitic odor that still lingered on the air like an exhalation from broken graves. And, as far as I could tell, they did not even perceive the greyish slime that still polluted the open folio.
I do not remember how I managed to make my exit from the shop. My mind had become a seething blur of muddled horror, of crawling, sick revulsion from the supernatural vileness I had beheld, together with the direst apprehension for my own sanity and safety. I recall only that I found myself on the street above Toleman’s, walking with feverish rapidity toward my cousin’s studio, with a neat parcel containing the Goya volume under my arm. Evidently, in an effort to atone for my clumsiness, I must have bought and paid for the book by a sort of automatic impulse, without any real awareness of what I was doing.
I came to the building in which was my destination but went on around the block several times before entering. All the while I fought desperately to regain my self-control and equipoise. I remember how difficult it was even to moderate the pace at which I was walking, or refrain from breaking into a run; for it seemed to me that I was fleeing all the time from an invisible pursuer. I tried to argue with myself, to convince the rational part of my mind that the apparition had been the product of some evanescent trick of light and shade, or a temporary dimming of eyesight. But such sophistries were useless; for I had seen the gargoylish terror all too distinctly, in an unforgettable fullness of grisly detail.
What could the thing mean? I had never used narcotic drugs nor abused alcohol. My nerves, as far as I knew, were in sound condition. But either I had suffered a visual hallucination that might mark the beginning of some obscure cerebral disorder, or had been visited by a spectral phenomenon, by something from realms and dimensions that are past the normal scope of human perception. It was a problem either for the alienist or the occultist.