The Fantasy Fan, April 1934<br />The Fan's Own Magazine, Various [books you have to read .TXT] 📗

be clacking down something he didn't understand?

It was just three thirty that suddenly Ross ripped the head-phones off and dropped them to the floor. He stood a moment looking at the paper in his hand and I noticed then that his skin was deadly white.

I couldn't stand it anymore. I jerked off my own phones and ran to him. Call or no call, I couldn't stand by while my pal was in danger of losing his mind or something else as bad.

"Norm!" I cried, "for God's sake! Tell me what it is! What—"

But I didn't finish. With an explosion of curses, Ross crumpled the paper in his hand and began to walk up and down the room. He was so unconscious of everything else that he bumped squarely into me, reeled a moment, and then went on racing up and down feverishly.

I tried to stop him—grabbed his arm and jerked it—but Ross was a much bigger and stronger fellow than I am, and he went on without noticing me. He didn't shake me off, you understand, but just tore on as if he hadn't even felt my hand. I didn't say anything because I had lost my voice looking at the terrible picture of his face twisted in some agony of his mind.

Then he began to speak, throwing his hands about hopelessly, and swinging[Pg 21] his head like a maniac. While I—I just stood there, out of the path of his walk, panting like I had run ten miles, and listened.

"Great God in Heaven," he cried in a voice that I hope never to hear again in reality, although I hear it every night in my tortured dreams.

"It can't be ... it's impossible ... I'm going mad ... I am mad!... what did I ever do to deserve this?... how can it be? oh! how can it be?"

For a while he just repeated those things until I wanted to scream out in frenzy. But I didn't do a thing. I could see he was beyond my reach—beyond anybody's reach.

Then his voice changed, it became low, full of intense energy, ominously quiet. "What did he say? He said the weather had become frigidly cold ... that it would not be long ... that soon the Ice would cover the whole earth...."

Then he stopped a moment, his eyes burned maniacally. "But ... I know something about geology ... that was over fifty thousand years ago ... do you hear me?"—he wasn't talking to me, he was talking to himself—"do you get that?... fifty thousand years ago!"

His voice became low and intense again so that my blood turned to water: "What did he say?... he said to his friend that the land was being flooded with creatures—maddened men and frenzied animals—that were retreating before the Ice ... retreating before the Ice ... the ice ... but good God! I tell you that was fifty thousand years ago!"

Then his voice became high-pitched and sobbing: "Oh! Dear Mary and Our One God! release me from this mad dream ... save me from the destruction[Pg 22] that will overwhelm me ... how can it be?... it's impossible ... how can it be?"

He repeated that dozens of times while he rumpled his hair and ground his teeth.

I mustered up courage and grabbed him by the shoulders. Next moment I was spinning backward and hit the wall with a thump. I fell down and stayed there, looking up at Ross with an expression that I sometimes wonder could be. I know my eyes became salty with tears of mental agony—maybe it was blood that I sweated out that night.

Then I heard him again, head to one side, staggering like a drunken man: "The radio was only invented twenty-five years ago ... this was fifty thousand years ago ... what did he say?... he said to his friend that this would probably be his last broadcast as the heat coils were running out ... goodbye ... he said ... goodbye, my friend ... civilization is doomed ... the Ice will cover all ... but I know something about geology, I tell you!... that was over fifty thousand years ago!... do you see what that means?"

He paused as if expecting an answer, but I knew—my chilled brain told me—that he wasn't talking to me, didn't know I was there. He was still arguing with himself.

"You see?... it means that I have received a message broadcast fifty thousand years ago just before the Ice came! ... that's what it means ... do you hear me?"

Then he fell into a senseless jargon that I knew meant the coming of the end of his mind's fortitude. It would collapse soon.

"And then," came his voice to me,[Pg 23] a bloodcurdling knife of a voice, "and then, how can you explain that I understood that voice?... tell me that ... I never heard that language before ... it was just a jumble at first ... and then ... and then ... in a flash ... I understood it ... just as if I had lived there ... lived there fifty thousand years ago."

His voice became a wild shriek, a voice that a ghost might have: "Ah! Saviour! God! How can it be?... how can it be?"

That was all. I sprang to my feet joyfully—as joyfully as I could after passing through that—and ran to him. The light of madness had died out of his eyes. He had seen me and recognized me. His shoulders drooped as if he carried the weight of a world on them.

With a babble of sobs and broken cries I threw my arms around him and thanked the Lord he had been saved.

He gently disengaged me.

"O.K. Bob," he said weakly. "I'm over it now."

"Darn right you are!" I said more calmly, realizing I must show a braver front than I had. "And what's more, we're going to get out of here!"

I took him to the door of his uncle's house and left him there, satisfied that the crisis was over. Then I went back to the station and finished up my calls. How I had the courage and fortitude to do it, I don't know. Before the day shift came in, before I did a lot of explaining how Ross had been suddenly taken sick in the stomach and had to go home, I picked up a crumpled piece of paper from the floor, tore it into little bits, and threw the confetti in a waste paper basket.

I got the news when I went to my[Pg 24] room. Norman Ross had committed suicide at seven o'clock in the morning. That was an hour after I left him at his door.

I told Hegstrom plain out that I wouldn't work that night shift anymore for love or money. He said he'd have me transferred but would I stay one more night until he got a new man? Like a fool, I agreed.

It was three a.m. that next night that I turned the dial to where the China Station should come in that had failed once. I sat petrified for five seconds while I listened to a muffled voice that spoke in hisses and sharp consonants.

Then I tore the earphones off my head, smashed them against the panel with all my strength, and dashed out of the room. I remembered seeing the other operator—the one who had taken my calls—popping his eyes out. Then I was out in the cool air, panting like I had been running for hours.

So it is that I wonder if I shouldn't escape it all—tossing nights, cold sweats of stark terror, a tortured, fevered brain? It would be so easy: a dark night, real dark, you know, so no one would see me and try to stop me, then the cool water to moisten my feverish brow—nice cool water, inviting water—just one little splash, not a noisy one—no one would know—no one would care—no one would understand—just one splash—and then peace.

My friends tell me not to take on so over the death of my one and only pal. They do not know the story. I have[Pg 25] told no one. My friends, they tell me there is a haunted look in my eyes, that lines are deepening in my face. They tell me to buck up, to face life squarely.

But I can't. I simply can't. I'll tell you why. After that night when I ripped out the earphones and blew a fuse in the station by short-circuiting a switch on the panel (I found that out later) I went back in answer to a call from Hegstrom. He was very kind and sympathetic. Wanted to know what had caused me to act so strangely the night before—also wanted to know what had caused Ross's suicide. Hegstrom is sharp. He saw the connection. But I clamped my jaws together and refused to say anything.

Then Hegstrom asked if the thing he held in his hand had anything to do with Ross. I took the paper. Then I think I gasped or screamed or something. It was a paper filled with some of that balderdash that Ross had written that night. He must have filled two sheets, and I only destroyed one.

I left Hegstrom as mystified as ever, but I had that paper in my pocket. I had a plan to save my sanity. I took the paper to a professor at a college—a professor famous as a language specialist, ancient and modern. I gave him the paper and one hundred dollars (he afterwards returned the money) and asked him to find out from what country or place it came from.

I got my answer a week later.

There was no such language in either the modern or recorded ancient times!

[Pg 26]

[Pg 28]

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

Part Seven

by H. P. Lovecraft

(Copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)

III. The Early Gothic Novel

The shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's Tam O' Shanter, the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's Christabel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore—both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great—are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimee in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.

But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman—none other[Pg 29] than Horace Walpole himself—to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romance and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto, a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparallelled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a 'translation' by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his connection with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity—a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatizations, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.

The story—tedious, artificial, and melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son, Conrad, on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth—the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from this design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver,[Pg 30] Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the