But ever, during these nocturnal visions, were the glittering paths thronged with a motley horde of pilgrims come hither from every era and nation: druidic priests in sombre robes, the oak-leaf chaplet bound about their brows, the golden sickle in their hands; Cro-Magnon hunters clad in hairy hides of beasts, bearing long stone-tipped spears in their grasp; Scythian archers; slender and beslippered Persians in mitred caps; Egyptian hierophants, their heads covered in klafts of starched linen, the mystic uraeus bound about their brows; half-naked savage Picts; tall Normans in sparkling chainmail half-covered with long surcoats emblazoned with scarlet heraldries ... and ever there loped or shambled amongst these more familiar figures, who had seemingly stepped from the pages of history, those gaunt and ungainly Others who bore no resemblance to terrene lifeforms, but were ghastly hybrids, mingling the likeness of men and beasts, lizards and insects, in their persons.
And each time I repeated the Ritual of the Bell, it seemed that my ability to perceive these Others was subtly incremented, until at length I beheld their alien anatomies, which seemed sprung from the divergent biologies of supra-mundane spheres, as clearly and distinctly as I behold you now. But it was not until the eleventh repetition of the experiment that something occurred which gave me pause and which drove icy terror into my very soul. I had been leaning from the tower window, staring with rapt and fascinated gaze upon the surging crowd, when one of the Others—a plodding and ungainly, brutish thing whose obese and pulpy corpulence was hideously pustuled with swollen and abnormal growths, like rudimentary tentacles or truncated proboscises—paused in its shambling progress, and craned its flat-browed and multi-eyed head skywards and stared directly into my eyes.
I SHRANК back from the window, shaken to the heart with a sudden and nameless fear—but fear of what, I could not say!—and returned tremblingly to the great, carven chair and cowered therein. The tolling of the ancient silver bell had ceased and a tense, uncanny silence brooded over the room, even as those leprous moons of cold and nacreous light brooded over the limitless vistas of the weird and wonderful and yet horrible world beyond my tower chamber. Then it was that I recalled with a chill of foreboding the words of admonition with which Abdul Alhazred had terminated his passage—the passage to which that reputed warlock, my great-great-grandsire, had drawn my attention:
Yet be wary that ye not over-doe yr usage of this Mode: for him who sees Beyonde, he may betimes alsoe be seene by Them that make of that Realm the Place of Their abiding.
Had I, in truth, continued my experiments beyond the proscribed limit? I had no way of knowing whether or not this was true, bur I resolved to discontinue using the drugged potion and the tolling of the bell hereafter; but first, I could not restrain my curiosity as to the nature of the goal of that ultra-mundane and trans-temporal nightly pilgrimage I had watched so many times—the crypts or cavern beneath the very foundations of Northam Keep, which had been so inexplicably protected from all attempts to destroy it over so many numberless decades and generations and centuries. Thus it was that the next morning, upon arising from restless and intermittent slumbers made unspeakably hideous by shadowy and half-remembered dreams, I descended into the cellars below the castle and found at length the sealed and barred portal of ancient black wood which for untold ages had guarded its secret from the knowledge of men.
The keys to the crypt were antique and cumbersome, and the locks were eaten with rust and decay, but with perseverance I at last managed to unseal the portal and ventured within, holding aloft an oil lamp to afford some illumination. The age of the crypt was unguessable, hewn as it was by crude, primitive implements from the solid granite of the crag upon which my remotest ancestors had reared Northam Keep, and the gloom which pervaded it, and which had perchance for centuries known not the benison of light, was Stygian and profound. In the outer chambers I discovered the stone sepulchres of my ancestors, whose dates marched backwards, generation by generation, into the abysm of time; but nowhere in these antechambers did I descry aught that could have been the goal or shrine of that mysterious pilgrimage which I had watched file by below my eyrie night after unforgettable night. Indeed, it was nor until I chanced to discover the innermost crypt that I came upon what proved the ultimate guerdon of my quest into the horrible history of my ancient line ... that great coffin crudely hacked from black basalt, whose ponderous lid I prised away, tilting the lamp so that I might peer within ... and from one terrible glimpse of that which the ages had mercifully hidden from the sight and knowledge of men ... that gaunt and glistening and all-but fleshless Thing that squirmed and wriggled in the stinking foetor of its own putrid slime ... that bony and naked and undead Thing whose skull-like and mewling head reared suddenly as if to stare with blind eyes into my own ... that slick, white, unclean Abnormality upon whose lineaments I stared with a soul-sickening sense of recognition ... at which I screamed and let fall the burning lamps from nerveless hands, to fall and shatter within the sarcophagus, to drench with liquid flame the writhing monstrosity which squealed and shrilled with torment from the flames, bat neither burned nor died ... and, screaming, I flung myself in panic-maddened flight from that unspeakable crypt of nethermost horrors ... sealed and locked the ponderous portals behind me with palsied hands ... and fled stumbling up the winding stair to the safety and sanity of the normal, everyday world.
THAT night I flung the abhorrent Necronomicon upon the fire in the grate and burned as well the papers I had found in that accursed rower chamber, and poured every last drop of the vile and hideous potion down the drain, vowing never to risk my soul or sanity again to feed the thirst of my imagination on that penumbral, nightmarish work! beyond the Veil.
The next day, hungry for the sight and sound of men, I left the castle for the first time in weeks and sought out the public house in town, where I sought surcease from my unendurable memories in strong ale and noisy companionship. From the tavern I wended my homewards way in the gloaming, and had all but reached the foot of the drive that ascends the steep to the gates of the castle, when the bells in the village church began to coll the hour. That dreadful music, so horribly alike to the monotonous tolling of that gruesome and sinister silver bell, made me shudder to the roots of my soul, and I was about to scramble up the drive to Northam Keep, when suddenly an inexplicable vertigo seized me and I was forced to lean against the corner of the nearest building in my giddy sickness. I shut my eyes, trying to master the strange weakness which had assailed me, and opened them at length to stare down at the slick cobbles beneath my feet, but saw only powdery and glinting mica. In a panic of utter terror. I looked around with dazed, uncomprehending eyes, noting the peculiar newness of the old, old houses ... looked skywards into depths of fathomless purple, where pallid moons of ghostly opals leered down as if in ghastly mockery at my plight. Now all about me moved a throng of curiously garbed strangers, bound for a goal which horribly I knew; and one of them, a pulpy and bloated, corpse-like thing with more limbs than was normal, turned to grin directly into my eyes, which widened with unbelieving horror. And all the time, the church bells tolled and tolled; and I knew myself to be hopelessly and irretrievably lost to a damnation more shuddersome than that threatened by any merely earthly creed ....