I became aware that my heart was beating, lightly but rapidly, and that my palms were wet with perspiration. My breathing came in short, shallow panting: I was—frightened, but—of what? All about me were the familiar glass cases, wall hangings, and statues and carvings, just as I had seen them a thousand times before. Why I should feel tension and trepidation is something I cannot explain. All I can offer by way of explanation is the supposition that, by some ethereal sense beyond the physical five, I felt an uncanny and malignant force awake and alive within the dim precincts of the museum.
Suddenly I turned a corner and found myself at the entrance to the gallery that was my goal.
And I looked on—horror!
IX.
FROM this point on I must exercise great care and precision in my choice of words, so that I can describe exactly what I saw and felt.
The hall was long and broad and high-ceilinged. Tall windows gave forth a view of gloom-drenched gardens and grounds. Dawn was just breaking, and the gallery itself was dimly but adequately illuminated by a pervasive, colorless light.
The artifacts from the Copeland collection were ranked along the walls and in the long glass cases, with near tags or placards describing the provenance of each antiquity.
Directly before me—almost at my feet—lay the body of the watchman, face downward in a pool of blood. I knew at once, as if by sheer instinct, that the poor old man was dead. Something in the way he lay there, sprawled and crumpled, told me that the body was lifeless. It was like a bundle of clothing carelessly flung aside. Anything so rumbled and motionless could not possibly be alive; I did not need to see the way the back of his head was crushed in as if before the force of a brutal bludgeon, to know that the thing was a corpse.
I looked past the body ... to the very end of the hall.
The Ponape figurine stood atop a pedestal facing me eye to eye. It occupied a central position of importance in the gallery: All eyes would be drawn to it.
And it was alive.
Alive and sentient in a weird manner I find almost impossible to describe in clumsy words. The carved eyes glared with awful sentience. They were aware; aware and watchful ....
About the idol beat the radiations of a strange and nameless force. It was almost visible, almost palpable, that curious energy. You know how solid buildings seem to waver as waves of heat rise from the sunbaked pavement of a summer street. It was like that with the idol of Zoth-Ommog. The tall windows behind the idol quivered as if the very air were disturbed by a pulsing force emanating from the cold slick mass of carven stone.
The aura of force radiated outward from the idol; this was clearly visible. The ripples which distorted the background widened outward like the wavelets caused by a pebble tossed into still waters.
I sensed a tremendous force, a store of limitless cosmic energy, somehow locked within the fabric of the stone thing, as electrical energy is stored within a battery. And this force had now been—triggered. That which had slept dormant within the crystalline atoms of the cold stone was now violently active.
And there was something else. An intelligence—vast and deep and malignant—peered forth from the stone thing—a Mind, awesome and terrible, was now awake—aware—and watchful!
Suddenly, without volition on my part, there came into my mind the image of a page from that accursed and blasphemous Necronomicon I had so shudderingly perused back at Arkham ... and a single passage from that page stood out in my mental picture with clamorous and desperate clarity—
"It is whispered in certain old, forbidden books an awesome power lurks within such images, and that through them, as through strange windows in time and space. Those that dwell afar can sometimes be evoked and summoned hither ...
Even in the same moment that this scrap of ancient lore rang through my brain with irresistible urgency, my eyes wavered and fell before the carved glare of the stony thing. And I saw that which knelt before it—that which had struck down old Gonzalez, and now groveled in abasement before the Image from Beyond.
At the first glance it looked like an ordinary man, some sort of Polynesian or Mongoloid, perhaps a half-breed. The worshiper before the idol had greasy, copper-colored skin, a bloated, chinless face with goggling, muddy-colored eyes, a mere flattened slit of a nose. He was bundled in a suit of cheap clothing, such as merchant seamen might buy in a waterfront pawnshop for a night ashore, and his head was wrapped in a piece of dark greenish cloth that resembled some sort of turban. Curiously, his hands were covered with bulky mittens—
But there was something about him, something in the abnormality of his crouching posture, in the odd lumpish bulging of his body beneath the baggy suit, something in the squat, sagging, toad-like corpulence of his slumped, slope-shouldered form, which raised the hair at the nape of my neck, filled my dry mouth with sour bile, and sent raw, unnerving horror shrieking through my brain.
That and the smell of him—the mingled reek of salt water and nameless decay—
He slithered about, goggling eyes glaring frog-like into my own. One mitten-covered hand fished clumsily into a baggy pocket and came out clutching a revolver. Then he came to his feet in an indescribable, boneless wriggle and pointed the revolver at me. As he did so that loosely wrapped green turban came loose, and I saw, and shrieked aloud to see it, that he had no cars, no ears at all.
I had no weapon, but something hard and heavy pressed against my heart—something wrapped in silken cloth, which I had carried in my inside breast pocket all the way from Arkham. With a numb hand I dragged it out. Hung aside the wrappings and held it up—the gray stone starfish-shaped talisman from lost Mnar, which the followers of Kish had graven with the Elder Sign in time’s dim, dark dawn.
At the sight of the star-stone the greasy-skinned man in the baggy suit cried aloud—a glutinous, gobbling sound that I swear before God came never from a human throat—and flung his arms wide as if to shield the idol of his cosmic god from profanation.
And I flung the star-stone.
What happened next I lack the words to describe. But I will try.
The star-stone struck the hideous face of the idol. And both star-stone and idol vanished—vanished in a soundless glare of light—light that burnt blackly—light that was a negation of luminance, rather then luminance itself.
The air, sucked inward by the instantaneous destruction of matter, slapped against itself, ruffling the tapa cloth wall hangings. Then, in the next eye-blink of time, fiery lightning lanced from the vortex of nothingness where the idol had stood an instant before.
Jagged streaks of electric fire zigzagged through the room. Windows shattered outward; I was flung to the floor; the earth shook.
Lightning touched the barrel of the revolver held by the turbaned halfbreed who stood motionless as it transfixed. Touched and clung. And crawled over his bloated deformity of a body in scaring rivulets of electric flame.