Clay Page 5

  6

  Heath was never quite certain about the island. It seemed probable that the Macedonia had run aground on the pinpoint of land that rose like a monstrous medusa from the mauve-green depths of the sea, yet Heath had never been aware of the existence of such an island; it was marked on none of the charts drawn by human hands. At a moment’s notice, it had seemed to rear itself into the cotton-wool fog off the port bow of the ship. The water lapping at its fungus-clotted shores gurgled insanely as it swallowed the last of the Macedonia.

  Oil-stained brine tangled Lazarus Heath’s limbs; swimming was next to impossible. He never knew how long he was lost in the whirling eddies that licked about the island. It seemed an eternity. In the limitless, time-killing darkness of the fog, he struggled hopelessly, until finally, his feet touched bottom. He slithered ashore, lashed on by the incoming tide. Salt burned his lips and eyes; he was between choking and crying. In the lee of a gigantic finger of rock, he toppled to his knees, and sank forward, facedown, into a thoughtless stupor....

  The fog never lifted. When Heath’s mind crawled upward from the soundless depths of unconsciousness, he had no way of knowing how long he had lain, senseless, with the mossy, damp soil of the island clinging to him as if it had some power of physical possessiveness. He rolled over on his back, his head throbbing and dazed. He was breathing more easily, now; some of the weary tautness had gone out of his limbs. Wincing at the effort, he dragged himself to a standing position. He leaned against the shadowy hardness of the rock. His hand came away coated with a malodorous, verdant slime. Heath wiped the hand clean, feeling suddenly ill at the cold dampness that rushed in on him. He couldn’t be sick; do something... something to keep his mind busy. Dragging one foot heavily after the other, he began to explore the island.

  When he tried to set down the incommunicable, barren loneliness of that lost outpost, Lazarus Heath failed. His pen stammered, searching for the right words, and finally admitted that the tone of the place was indescribable. He wandered endlessly through the cloying blueness of the mist, and found nothing that offered hope of any sort. The entire, clammy surface of the island seemed to be covered with the same nauseous green slime his hand had encountered on the coastal rock. It sucked hungrily at his feet with each step he took. It oozed from the trunks and gnarled, lifeless limbs of the barren trees that were scattered sparsely inland. The smooth, mucous-like scum coated the jutting rock formations wherever they sprang into spectral being, making them gleam with a malevolent phosphorescence. Lazarus Heath wrote one fearful sentence, the ghastly import of which he was not to guess until an age of horror had passed. “One gets the singular, frightening impression that this island has been a part of the ocean depths for more years than man can count, and, somehow, has risen to cause the tragedy of the Macedonia and claim its only survivor... myself....” This was written just before he began to hear the voices.

  *

  Perhaps, before, even up to the last nightmarish moment, when he saw the crew of the Macedonia drawn, hypnotized and unresisting, into the slavering maw of the sea, Lazarus Heath had not believed in the voices. A great many explanations of that frozen, listening attitude which held the men to their death, may have flashed like a wild phantasmagoria through his mind. Most of all, I think, he believed the officers and men alike seized by some loathsome mass madness. The sounds to which they “listened” so intently must be the figment of some malady of the mind. But, there, in the clammy mists of the lost, slime-coated island, he suddenly knew that the voices were very real.

  They were not ordinary sounds. They were soft, cloying cadences that caught and held consciousness in a spider-web of evil beauty. They seemed uttered by countless alien tongues echoing across a vast and fearful chasm, and yet, as Heath stumbled on in search of them, he would have sworn that their source must be, there, just the other side of that next slimy knoll. He did not think of why he must find them; he only knew that this vile harmony had suddenly become very clear and understandable in his mind. “Come away!” the voices chanted, with the sound of myriad Gehennan lutes. “Come away to your bride, Zoth Syra! Come away... away... to the Queen of the Green Abyss....”

  “I staggered blindly onward,” Heath wrote in his diary. (The words themselves staggered crazily across the water-ruined pages, a mute reflection of the precipitous, hellish compulsion of his quest for the voices.) “I knew not where I was going, nor why. I fell time and again; my hands and knees bled with scrambling among the slippery, treacherous rocks. I came to the beach. Somehow the fog there seemed to lift, growing less dense, and I found myself on the brink of the ocean. I knew I must stop, or drown, but my legs continued to pump with piston-like persistence. The voices were nearer, now; they held a malevolent beauty more compelling than the sounds that echo through narcotic dreams. Panic-stricken, I felt the icy water rising about my body, and still I kept moving out to sea. Brine swelled about my chest. The voices chanted mad cacophonies in my ears; wild, discordant, irresistible. The water reached my neck, my mouth... and then, my head was covered....

  “And, now the maddest thing of all. Submerged, I continued to walk, to breathe, slowly, easily, not through nose or mouth, but through a pair of gills in my throat! I strode onward through the swirling, opalescent depths, ever toward the howling, evilly-joyful singing... toward my bride, Zoth Syra!”

  Between these frenzied, staggering words and the next and final entry, there is a gap of several blank, brine-yellowed pages. But for this, one might have guessed through desperate wishful thinking, that the final episodes of that hideous record were dreamed of whole cloth—the fanatical ravings of a mind lost beyond rescue. No such guess can be hazarded when you have seen that last entry. It is dated almost twenty years later, in Kalesmouth. The writing is spidery and precise; the words have the cold, terrifying ring of unquestionable, blasphemous truth. Lazarus Heath set down those final sentences with a calm, almost grim determination. The very bareness of the clipped emotionless style he used has a numbing quality. God knows I would rather have died than believe this unholy tale, but there was no choice.

  *

  Even after twenty years, Heath could only hint at the monstrous dream which followed his descent into what he called “The Empire of the Green Abyss.” His tight, controlled words whisper of a world unknown to mortals, a submarine, slime-choked empire of strange geometrical dimensions, a city whose architecture was somehow “all wrong.” Entering it, Lazarus Heath was seized with an unutterable nausea, a repulsion that made him want to return, to go back somehow, and die as normal men would in such circumstances. But, he went on. In some inexplicable manner, he had become a part of this world of loathsome watery putrescence. He became one with the creatures who were the subjects of Zoth Syra, Empress of the Abyss.

  Obviously, the pen faltered, the words would not come, but lay stagnant, and unspeakable, in Heath’s mind when he tried to “describe” these creatures. He could no more draw a picture of them than he could explain the evil charm they held for him—a charm embodied in the chanting, ungodly thing they called Zoth Syra. Lazarus Heath was at once repelled and terribly, irresistibly drawn to this Queen who had chosen him for her lover. In trembling half-scrawls, he hints at the monstrous, primitive rites that were part of their betrothal ceremony. And of himself he writes with frightening simplicity: “I was helpless. I was part of those decadent blasphemies and knew it, yet had not the will to resist. I wanted only to go on listening to that hellish, sweet voice which belonged to my Queen....”

  There was no time; there was nothing but an endless, bittersweet madness, from which he had not the will to escape. He became to the creatures of the Abyss, Yoth Zara, the Chosen One. And reigning beside the indescribably evil beauty, Zoth Syra, he became conscious of a ceaseless murmuring of restless voices that echoed sibilantly in the song of his Queen. Perhaps it was then that Heath pieced together his explanation of that hideously magnificent underworld. I do not know. But it was the whispering of the voices that made him
uneasy, that sent his mind struggling upward from the Abyss, groping blindly toward the light of normalcy. It was the murmured legends that made possible his final escape. The horror of them gave him a strength he needed; they deafened his ears to the song of Zoth Syra. And, when the Empress of the Abyss bore Lazarus Heath a child in his image, he fled with the baby, wildly, insanely, rising through the undulant shadows of a mad dream.

  More than a year and a half after the disappearance of the Macedonia, Lazarus Heath was found, more dead than alive, on an uncharted island in the Atlantic. Some aboard the rescue ship wondered about the strange blue marks on Heath’s throat; they asked each other how a man could survive for nearly twenty months when there was no sign of shelter or vegetation on the island. They questioned him about the baby girl who was rescued along with him. Heath said her name was Cassandra.

  7

  I Lazarus John Heath, being of sound and sane body and mind, and under the influence of no thing or man, natural or otherwise, do this day set my hand in protestation of the truth of what I have written above. My story is not a dream; it happened, and I pray to the Almighty it may never happen again. At first glance, it will have, for the reader, all the earmarks of drunken fantasy, but upon closer consideration of the facts, upon a study of the lore of the sea, I feel certain that another decision will be reached.

  In the ancient books, men have written of a race of Syrens, monstrous beauties of the seas, who lured men to death and worse with their strange, irresistible chanting. This race, say the recorders, was banished from the earth for its evil practice of black magic; the Syrens were turned into the rocky, treacherous shoals of the ocean; turned into stone....

  The whispered legends of the Abyss have another tale to tell. Yes, they murmur. Their race was cast out as men recorded, but only condemned to the deep they once controlled; so that, sullen and alone, they begat the People of the Abyss, a race of creatures that lurks on the edge of time, safe in the maw of the green ocean, until the moment comes when they shall again proclaim themselves and retake the world from which they were banished countless ages ago. I have been one of them; through me they hoped to strike, I think. I was to be their contact with this world we know. I have heard their unsatisfied whimpering; they chafe at the bit for release. And I say beware. They have claimed me. True, I escaped, but even yet I am of them. In the end, they shall reclaim me... but, not alive, if I can help it. All these haunted years since my escape from the Abyss, I have heard their songs, their endless pagan chanting. So far, I have resisted, but I grow ever weaker. Some day, they will win. But, it is not this that terrifies me; I know I must die as a traitor to their cause. My only fear is that somehow, some day, they will realize that with me in my flight, I took the daughter of Zoth Syra. I pray God they will never reclaim her... for Cassandra is one of them, just as I....

  The last words of Lazarus Heath’s horrible testament wavered frailly across the page, as if the controlled hand of the writer had grown too weak to go on. The ink was blurred in spots by vague, circular stains that might have been made by raindrops, or the impotent tears of a lost, frightened old man.

  With numbed fingers I closed that book of the damned. I sank back against the cold unfriendliness of the throne chair, and shut my eyes. I could feel beads of icy perspiration forming at the base of my skull and trickling down the back of my neck. Not only my hands were numb, my brain was working with the dreamy sluggishness of a somnambulist. Curiously evil visions danced across the shadowy, decaying bindings of books on the far wall. I do not know how long I sat there. The candle guttered and died. I sat on, hemmed in by the writhing ghosts that complete darkness set loose again in the chamber where Heath had written his hateful confession.

  Outside, the storm raged maniacally, seething through the forgotten, rat-pirated tunnels under Heath House. Vaguely, I thought that somehow with each passing instant, the sea and the wind had become more ferocious, more predatory, as though lashed on to devastating fury by some infernal, supernatural disturbance. Then, slowly, through the screaming lunacy of the storm, I became aware of another sound. It was a high, soft threnody that was of the wind and lightning, yet a song in itself, a chorus of myriad voices that echoed from beyond life and death, that whispered hauntingly, evilly, of the secrets of the unknown. The song of the Syrens, my mind muttered. Yes, their song. But, for whom? They had Lazarus Heath, now; they must be calling another....

  Even before I heard Cassandra’s voice, I was out of the chair, stumbling toward the door. Then, the first anguished wail of her ghastly litany froze my senses. For an incalculable moment, I could only stand and listen. That unbearable throbbing was not my heart; it was Cassandra’s frail hands pounding madly on her chamber door for release.

  And always, steadily, her cry rose, shrilling through the shadow- crawling halls of Heath House, an obscene, awesome chant, at once wheedling, beguiling, and commanding. Slowly, painfully, I made out the words.

  “I have heard you call, O, Yoth Kala, my betrothed! I have seen the spirits of the Abyss grown wild as presage of your coming; their rejoicing has set loose the sea that is their empire; it echoes in the thunder, the black wind and lightning! Come then, my husband and father of my child! Claim your bride! Come to me through the cove of Yoth Zara, my father! I wait! Come then. Come!”

  *

  The silence in which that last unholy plea died away was an eternity of horror for me, yet it must have endured only an instant. It was a strange, pregnant silence, fraught with impending terror. I realized dully, that those countless voices that had risen a moment before above the howling wind, had just as suddenly been quieted. Now, in their stead, another voice, single and terrifying in the very loneliness of its sound, rose from a murmur to a sharp nasal chant that sliced through the violence of the storm as if it were a mere unruly zephyr. Someone, something, very near, yet outside, was calling Cassandra’s name. The cove, my mind repeated mechanically. Come to me through the cove of Yoth Zara, my father....

  I staggered through the blinding darkness toward the single tall window of Heath’s study. I felt the skin of my ankle tear as I stumbled over some vague, edged object. I swore and righted myself. My hand caught at the drape, and its dusty velvet strength supported me. I peered through the smeary, leaded panes, into the streaming maw of the storm.

  “Cassandra!” that hell-spawned voice echoed. “I come, O, Cassandra, my bride...

  I do not know how I looked standing there, that night, in the evil-sodden gloom, but I know what I saw. Perhaps, in the end, I shall be no more successful at putting the essential, blasphemous horror of that vision into words, than was Lazarus Heath. But, 1 must try. If I can transcribe only one grain of the actual loathsomeness of the Abyss-born creature called Yoth Kala, perhaps, then, men will know why I destroyed Cassandra....

  The flash of lightning that rent the maddened heavens in that moment, was nothing ordinary. It was like a sudden noon-day sun at midnight, throwing into relief the hideous, turbulent cove where Lazarus Heath died. The cold stone of the sacrificial pillars cast gargoylesque shadows on the slimy sand; a torrent of cackling sea crashed inland, and drowned them for an instant, then, suddenly, receded, and the Thing was there. I do not remember what wild conjectures twisted through my fear-tortured brain in the moment. Perhaps I thought I had gone mad; perhaps I told myself I was letting my imagination run away with me. But, I knew I wasn’t.

  I cannot say the Thing in the cove walked; it moved inland rapidly, but with a seemingly gradual, amoebic motion. It expanded and ebbed, gelatinous tendrils creeping over the sand of the cove, spreading like a stain of ink, or black, poisonous blood. I saw no distinct form. I was conscious only of a monstrous, jelly-like mound, black and glistening with a slime-coated, nauseous putrescence. The Thing slobbered onward to Heath House, covering ground with frightening speed. And from this hellish creature, through the whiplash of the storm, shrilled the high, hypnotic voice of Yoth Kala, calling his bride....

  The period of befogge
d waiting came to an abrupt end. I knew, quite suddenly, that the time for thinking and rational disbelief had run out. It was no longer a matter of guessing and wondering at the mad writings of Lazarus Heath. I, myself, had seen them come to foul, soulless life. I had witnessed the evil of the Abyss incarnate, creeping relentlessly toward its goal—coming to claim Cassandra!

  *

  Even as I watched, the fetid Thing disappeared around the dim corner of Heath House. I moved more surely, now, with a strange, icy calm. For, now, I had at least one thing for which to be grateful. The evil that I fought had taken on concrete form; I was no longer fighting shadows. Clutching the cool butt of the revolver in my pocket, I went out into the murky shadows of the hallway. I moved quietly, scarcely daring to breathe. I must reach Cassandra before It did. I must keep her from this creature of lost and carrion ages. And, always, as I walked, the discordant, shrill threnody of Yoth Kala sliced into my consciousness. The pounding on Cassandra’s door became more frantic by the second. Her voice rose wildly, calling to the Thing risen from the briny tomb of the sea.

  I had almost reached her door, when I stopped. A sudden, whirling vertigo seized my brain; I clutched at the balustrade for support. Rising from the well of the foyer, a reeking effluvia reached out to every corner of the shadow-ridden house. I will not say I actually heard movement; it was simply a soft, hissing sound, as of oily water eating at the rotten pilings of a river dock. I stared down the long staircase, trying to focus my eyes, and then, abruptly, the Thing was there, moving quickly up the stairs. I saw it clearly for the first time.

  No one whose mind is cramped by cut-and-dried conceptions of form and the three known dimensions, can possibly sense the vague, hideous shapelessness of that creature of the Abyss. The form it possessed cannot be drawn in units of height or thickness or density. It seemed to undulate, varying by the second, rising gelatinously to a height of perhaps ten feet, and then, subsiding, swelling, spreading slimy tentacles forward. The whole of the rubbery outer skin was coated with a foul ichor, a tarry stickiness that seemed secreted from monstrous, leathery pores. I think it was this bluish slime that set loose the rancid stench that grew more overpowering with each moment, with each slithering inch of its progress up the staircase.