The Color out of Space and Other Mystery Stories / «Цвет из иных миров» и другие мистические истории

Theunis paused while I stared at him. Finally he spoke. “Now, I think you can guess how it all links up. According to the old legends, this is the so-called ‘Year of the Black Goat’ when certain horrors from the Outside are supposed to visit the earth and do harm. We don’t know what they are like, but they could be like strange mirages and hallucinations. I don’t like your story or the pictures. It may be pretty bad, and I warn you to be careful. But first I must try to do what old Yergler says. Fortunately, the old Gem he mentions has been found, and I know where I can get it. We must use it on the photographs and see what we see, and maybe make sketches. The Gem is more or less like a lens or prism, though one can’t take photographs with it. There’s a bit of danger, and the looker’s sanity might be harmed because the real shape of the shadow isn’t pleasant and doesn’t belong on this earth. But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything about it. So if you value your life and sanity, stay away from that hill and from the thing you think is a tree on it.”

I was more scared than ever. “How can there be someone from the Outside here?” I cried. “How do we know that such things exist?”

“You think in terms of[13] this small planet Earth,” Theunis said. “Surely it cannot measure the whole universe. There may be invisible creatures we have never dreamed of right under our noses. Modern science is studying the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so wrong.”

Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond… A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous picture because I was afraid I would recognize some object in it…

I looked at my friend. He was reading the ancient book with a strange expression on his face. Then he sat up straight. “Enough for today. I’m tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must try to get the gem from the museum where it is and do what is to be done.”

“Will you have to go to Croydon?” I asked.

He nodded.

3

In the next two weeks I wanted to return to the tree of dreams and freedom and at the same time I feared the thing and all connected with it. Meanwhile, Theunis was busy with some investigation of the strangest nature, something which involved a mysterious trip and a return in greatest secrecy. On the telephone he told me that he had somewhere found the object mentioned in the ancient book as “The Gem,” and that he was trying to use it on the photographs I had left with him. He spoke of “refraction,” “polarization,” “unknown angles of space and time” and of building a special box.

Sixteen days later I got the shocking message from the hospital in Croydon. Theunis was there and wanted to see me at once. He had some strange seizure. He was found unconscious by friends who had come into his house after hearing cries of mortal fear. Though still weak, he wanted to tell me something. The hospital told me this much over the phone, and in half an hour I was at my friend’s bed. He first asked the nurses to leave in order to speak with me in private[14].

“I saw it!” he said. “You must destroy them all – those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it. That tree will never be seen on the hill again – at least for thousands of years till the next

Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now, and the mankind is safe.”

He paused, then continued.

“But you need to do something. Take the Gem out of the black box and put it in the safe. It must go back where it came from because there’s a time when it may be needed to save the world. They won’t let me leave yet, but I can rest if I know it’s safe. Don’t look through the Gem because it can do the same thing to you as it did to me. And burn those damned photographs!”

In another half an hour I was at his house and looking at the black box on the library table. And next to the box I saw the envelope of pictures I had taken. It did not take me long to examine the box with my earliest picture of the tree at one end and a strange amber-colored crystal at the other. I felt a mixture of emotions. Even after I had put the picture in the envelope with the rest of the photos, I had a wish to save it, and look at it, and run up the hill toward its original again. But the picture also scared me, so I quickly burned the envelope with all the photographs in the fireplace.

Strangely, I never wanted to look through the box before taking out the gem and the photograph. What was shown in the picture by the antique crystal’s lens was not – I was sure of it – what a normal brain could take. Whatever it was, I had been close to it, had been under its spell on that distant hill in the form of a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And to sleep better at night, I did not wish to know what it had been.

Unfortunately, something had caught my eye[15] before I left the room. It was a paper lying among other papers on the table beside the black box. All papers were blank, but that one had a drawing in pencil. Suddenly I remembered what Theunis had once said about sketching the horror seen through the gem. Out of curiosity, I looked at the drawing and straight into the dark and forbidden design – and fainted.

Since then I have never been quite the same. I will never describe fully what I saw. After a while, I managed to get up and throw the drawing into the dying fire. Then I walked through the quiet streets to my home, thanking God I had not looked through the crystal at the photograph and praying to be able to forget the terrible drawing of Theunis.

Only a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the most part, the view was clouded by some kind of vapor. Every object that might have been familiar was a part of something vague and unknown – something alien and monstrous, and greater than any human eye could see.

In the landscape itself, where I had seen the twisted tree, there was only a terrible hand with fingers reaching for something on the ground. And right below it I thought I saw an outline in the grass where a man had lain. But the sketch was quick, and I could not be sure.

The beast in the cave

The horrible conclusion I had made was now an awful reality. I was lost, completely lost, in the vast maze of the Mammoth Cave. I turned left and right, but I could not see in any direction any guidepost to show me the way to the right path out of the cave. I thought I would never see the light of day, or the pleasant hills of the beautiful world outside.

The last hope had left me. Yet, I was an educated man, so I did not panic. I had often read of the poor victims who went immediately crazy and hysterical in such situations. I had none of this. I stood calm and quiet when I clearly realized that I had lost my way. I also suspected I had probably walked far beyond the limits of a usual search. If I must die, I decided, then this could be as good a place as any.

My disaster was the result of no one’s fault except my own. Without telling the guide, I had left the group of sightseers and wandered for over an hour in the forbidden parts of the cave. And now I could not find the way back to my companions.

The light of my torch had already begun to fade. Soon I would be surrounded by the total blackness of the earth. As I stood in the dying light, I wondered what exactly my end would be. Starving would kill me, I was sure of this. I remembered the stories which I had heard of the colony of people, who had gone to live in a gigantic cave to find health from the air of the underground world, with its steady temperature and peaceful quiet. Instead, they had found death in strange circumstances. I had seen the sad remains of their cottages as I passed them by with the other sightseers, and had wondered what unnatural effect this cave would have on me. Now, I told myself, I had a chance to find it out.

As the last light of my torch faded, I decided to make sure[16]I had done everything possible to escape. So I started shouting loudly in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide. Yet, as I called, I believed in my heart that my cries were useless, and that my voice, reflected by the black maze, could not be heard by anyone.

Suddenly, however, I was startled because I thought that I heard the sound of soft steps on the rocky floor of the cave. Would I be saved so soon? Was it the guide who had noticed my absence and was now looking for me in this limestone maze? The steps were coming closer. I was going to shout again when I froze and listened in horror. In the total silence of the cave these footsteps were not like those of any mortal man. The steps of the guide wearing boots would have sounded like blows. These ones were soft, as of the paws of a cat. Besides, at times, when I listened carefully, I seemed to hear four instead of two feet.

I was now sure that I had attracted some wild beast by my cries, maybe a mountain lion which had lived within the cave. Perhaps, I thought, God had chosen for me a quicker death than that of hunger. Yet the instinct of self-preservation[17] was waking up inside me, and I decided to fight for my life. So I became very quiet, in the hope that the unknown beast would lose its way[18] and pass me by. But it was hopeless because the strange footsteps were coming closer. Perhaps the animal could smell me from a great distance.

I needed a weapon to protect myself against an unseen attack in the dark, so I picked two pieces of rock which were lying around me on the floor of the cave, and, holding one in each hand, I waited. Meanwhile, the paws came near. Certainly, the behavior of the creature was very strange. Most of the time, I heard four footsteps, yet sometimes I thought I could hear only two moving feet. I wondered what animal it was. I thought it could be some unfortunate beast who had also lost its way in that cave. It had been eating fish, bats, and rats of the cave. I tried to imagine the physical features of the beast. But then I remembered that even if I killed it, I would never be able to see it. My torch had long since died[19], and I did not have any matches. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful footsteps came. I wanted to scream, but I could not. I was terrified and frozen to the spot. I doubted if my arm would throw the stone at the oncoming thing when the right moment came.

Now the steady pat, pat of the steps was close, very close. I could hear the heavy breathing of the animal and realized that it must have come from a great distance and was tired. Suddenly the spell broke. My right hand threw the piece of limestone toward that point in the darkness from which the heavy breathing came. I must have missed because I heard the thing jump at a distance away, where it seemed to pause.

Then I threw my second stone, this time quite successfully because I listened with joy as the creature fell down and never moved again. Relieved, I leaned against the wall. Then I heard heavy breathing in gasps and realized that I had just wounded the creature. I had no wish to examine the thing. I did not come near the body, nor did I throw more stones at it. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as far as I could guess, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly, I heard a sound, and then regular sounds. This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed with joy as I saw the faint light of a torch. I ran to meet him, and before I knew it, I was on the ground at the feet of the guide, babbling, telling my terrible story, and at the same time thanking God and my savior. Some time later I became my normal self. The guide had noticed my absence when the group returned to the entrance of the cave and started checking all the by-passages, looking for me for about four hours.

By the time he had told me this, I, brave in his company, told him about the strange beast which I had wounded. It was only a short distance back in the darkness, and I suggested that we go and see what kind of creature my victim was. So we went deeper into the cave, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we found a white object on the floor – an object even whiter than the limestone itself. The monster appeared to be a large ape. Its hair was snow-white, mostly on the head, where it was so long that it fell over the shoulders. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost face down. The limbs looked strange, which explained why the beast used sometimes all four, and sometimes two for its movement. There were long claws on the tips of its fingers or toes. The hands or feet were crooked, probably due to living in the cave for so long. There seemed to be no tail.

The breathing had now become very feeble, and the guide had taken out his gun to shoot the creature, when a sudden sound made by the beast made him drop the weapon. The sound was difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species, and I wondered if this was the result of living in complete silence for so long. The sound continued, and then, all of a sudden, a spasm of energy seemed to pass through the body of the beast. With a jerk, the white body rolled over and turned its face to us. For a moment, I was so shocked that I did not see anything else except the eyes. They were black, deep black. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face differently than those of the average ape. The nose was quite big too. As we looked at it, the thick lips opened, and several sounds came out, after which the thing relaxed in death.

The guide was trembling so violently that the torch light shook, casting weird shadows[20] on the walls around us. I did not move, but stood still, my horrified eyes fixed on the floor.

Eventually, fear left, and then there was only wonder and awe because the sounds made by that figure that lay dead on the limestone had told us the terrible truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the cave was, or had once been, a man!

The music of Erich Zann

Many times I looked carefully at the maps of the city, but I could never find the Rue d’Auseil on them again. I looked at the modern maps and also at the old maps because I know that street names change. I have personally explored the place – every street, every lane, with any name, which could possibly be the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But, sadly, I still haven’t found the house, the street, or even the district, where during the last months of my life as a student at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

My memory might be broken, I have to say, because back then, during my stay in the Rue d’Auseil, my health – both physical and mental – was quite poor. I remember that I never invited any of my friends there. But the fact that I cannot find the place again is very strange and puzzling because it was within a short walk of the university. There also were certain specific landmarks which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. Yet I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.

The Rue d’Auseil went across a dark river bordered by warehouses. There was a bridge of dark stone, and it was always shadowy along that river as if the smoke of the factories shut out the sun. The river had an evil stench which I have never smelled anywhere else, and which may some day help me to find it. I am sure I will recognize it at once. Beyond the bridge there were narrow cobbled streets which went up quite steeply right before the Rue d’Auseil.

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was closed to all transport because in several places it consisted of steps and ended at the top in a wall. It was mostly cobbled, but sometimes there was just bare earth. The houses were tall, very old, and crazily leaning in all directions. Sometimes two houses on the opposite sides lent forward almost like an arch. There also were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

The people who lived on that street impressed me very much. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and shy, but later I decided it was because they were all very old. I don’t know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places because I never had much money until at last I found that ancient house in the Rue d’Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street and the tallest of them all.

My room was on the fifth floor – the only inhabited room there because the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the attic above, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb[21] man who wrote his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra. Blandot also added that Zann’s wish to play in the night after returning from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this isolated attic room whose single window was the only point on the street from which a person could look over the dead-end wall at the panorama beyond.

After that, I heard Zann every night. He kept me awake, but I was fascinated by the strangeness of his music. I knew little of this art myself, but I was sure that his music had no relation to music I had heard before. I thought he was a highly original composer, a genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated. Then, one week later, I finally decided to meet with the old man.

One night, as Zann was returning from his work, I stopped him in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him while he played. He was a small, thin, bent person. He had shabby clothes and an ugly face, and his head was almost bald. At first, my words made him angry and frightened. But then my friendliness softened him, and he grudgingly showed to me to follow him up the dark and creaking attic stairs.

His room was on the west side of the attic. Its only curtained window was facing the high wall at the end of the street. The room was big in size, but mostly because it was almost empty. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bed, a dirty washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, a music-rack, and three old chairs. Sheets of music were lying everywhere on the floor. The walls were bare, and dust and cobwebs made the place seem uninhabited. Clearly, Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of his imagination.

Showing me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, locked it, and lighted a candle. He took his viol and sat in one of the chairs. He did not use the music-rack, but played from memory and enchanted me for more than an hour with tunes I had never heard before. It is impossible to describe them. But in them I didn’t hear any of the queer notes I had heard from my room below on other nights.

I had remembered those weird notes, and I had often hummed and whistled them to myself. So when the old man put down his bow, I asked him if he could play some of them. As I began saying that, the wrinkled face of the musician started showing the same strange mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when I first met him. I was insistent and even tried to whistle a few of the tunes which I had listened to the night before. But in a moment, when the dumb musician recognized the notes I whistled, his face suddenly changed, and his long, cold, thin hand reached out to make me stop. As he did this, he glanced toward the window, as if he was afraid of someone. It was absurd because the attic was high above all the other roofs, and surely no one could ever get in through that window from which, as the concierge had told me, one could see over the wall at the end of the street.

The old man’s glance suddenly made me want to look out over the wide panorama of the roofs and city lights beyond, which only this old musician could see. I walked toward the window and wanted to draw the curtains aside, when the frightened old man stopped me again. This time he showed me toward the door and even tried to nervously drag me there with both hands. Furious, I ordered him to let go of me and told him that I would leave at once. He calmed down, but then, seeing my anger, he led me to a chair, this time in a friendly way. He went to the little table and wrote something with a pencil in the poor French of a foreigner.

The note which he finally gave me was an apology. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and had strange fears and nervousness, connected with his music and with other things. He had liked it when I was listening to his music and wanted me to come again. But he could not play to me his weird notes and could not stand hearing them from another person. Also he did not like it when other people touched things in his room. He had not known that I could hear his playing in my room and now asked me if I wanted to take another room where I would not hear him in the night. He would then, he wrote, help me with the rent.

As I sat reading the note and trying to understand his poor French, I felt more and more sorry for the old man. He was suff ering physically and mentally, just like I was, and my studies had taught me to be kind. In the silence of the room there came a slight sound from the window – it was probably just the wind moving the shutters – and for some reason I was so startled that I almost jumped, as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook the old man’s hand and left as a friend.

The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor. There was no one on the fourth floor.

Soon I found out that Zann’s wish for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was telling me to move down from the fifth floor. He did not ask me to visit him, and, when I came, he looked annoyed and played very little. This was always at night because in the day he slept. I did not like him much, but the attic room and the weird music were still fascinating for me. I also wanted to look out that window, over the wall and down at the roofs which must be there. Once I even went up to the attic during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.

What I still could do was to listen to the old man playing at night. At first I tiptoed up to my old fifth floor, and then I even climbed the last creaking stairs to the attic door. There, in the narrow hallway, I often heard mysterious sounds which filled me with horror. The sounds were not horrible, no, but their vibrations were something not of this world, and sometimes it seemed to me they were produced by more than one player. Of course, Erich Zann was a genius. As the weeks passed, the playing became wilder and wilder, while the old musician looked more and more exhausted. He did not want me to visit him at any time now, and even ignored me when we met on the stairs.

Then one night, as I listened at the door, I heard the viol explode into a madness of sounds, and from behind that door came a horrible cry of the old man. I knocked at the door several times, but there was no answer. I waited and waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, until I heard the poor musician trying to get up from the floor with the help of a chair. I thought he had fainted, and so I started knocking and calling his name at the same time. Finally, I heard Zann walk to the window and close the shutters, then to the door which he unlocked to let me in. I could tell that this time he was really glad to see me.

Shaking violently, the old man led me to one chair, while he sat into another. His viol and bow lay on the floor. He sat for some time as if listening to something. Then, satisfied, he walked to the table and wrote a short note. He gave it to me and returned to the table where he began to write something very quickly. The note asked me in the name of God to wait there while he wrote in German about all the strange things happening to him. I waited as the dumb man was writing down his story.

About an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician continued to write, I saw Zann suddenly startle as from a horrible shock. He was looking at the curtained window and listening carefully. Then I thought I heard a sound myself. It was not a horrible sound. It was a low and very distant musical note, as if the player was in one of the neighboring houses, or in some house beyond the wall over which I had never been able to look. The effect it produced on Zann was terrible. He dropped his pencil, got up, took his viol and began the wildest playing I had ever heard.