H.P. Lovecraft. The Challenge from Beyond
The Challenge from Beyond
by H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, and Frank
Belknap Long
Written August 1935
[C. L. Moore]
George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out
of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he
roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen,
clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug.
Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious
borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed
sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were
vacation's most delightful moments, after all -- rest, after toil, in the
clear, sweet forest night.
Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself
once more that three long months of freedom lay before him -- freedom from
cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students
with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by
dinning Into their obdurate ears. Freedom from --
Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside
the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George
Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed
and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom
outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous
little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped
about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed
on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.
But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the
dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded
corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so
remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays
upon the thing he held.
All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle
groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz,
unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow
-- he could not guess the method -- it had been wrought into a perfect
cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was
incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners
were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a
sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have
passed over this strange clear thing.
But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly
in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc
of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its
quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of
cuneiform writing.
George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma
in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have
imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind
of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too
hard to melt again. Ice -- and wedge-shaped cuneiforms -- yes, didn't that
sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north
in history's remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian
valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of
course, was formed in the earliest of earth's geological periods, when
there was nothing anywhere but beat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for
tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.
And yet -- that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were
unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could
there, In a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who
might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he
held? Or -- might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space
into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it --
Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the
luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the
queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common
sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet,
switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him
an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.
But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he
flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if
with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps
he was wrong. Perhaps It had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see
the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing In the enigmatic deeps of the
thing with queer persistence.
He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions
over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out
of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that
constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.
[A. Merritt]
He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering
light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his
mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened,
stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert ... and Intent upon him.
Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his
watch. Close to one o'clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam
fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely,
for minutes. He snapped It out, then watched.
There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the
darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny
fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They
were at Its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with
Its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger ... the
markings shifting shapes ... the cube was growing ... was it illusion
brought about by the tiny lightnings....
He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of
harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came
from the cube....
There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized
wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small
tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to where it
had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off the flash
and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It
was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning,
drew back his hand.
And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings
flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There
was no sound from it.
He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but
steadily becoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were necessary
to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his own fixed
attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube's
heart, if its beat were to wax, until ... what?
He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing.
It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth's life. He
conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took It into the tent. It
was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would not have known
he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it;
then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.
He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash
directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He
sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will and
sight upon the disc as he had the light.
As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst
from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing
the disc and the markings. Again these began to change, shifting, moving,
advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They were no longer
cuneiform. They were things ... objects.
He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the
sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their
rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed of
the mist of diamonds. And the disc Itself was growing ... the shapes
shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been opened and
Into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright
grew the pulsing light.
He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash.
The cube had no need now of the ray ... and he could not withdraw ...
could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which
was now a globe within which unnameable shapes danced to a music that
bathed the globe with steady radiance.
There was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist behind
which shone the globe.... He felt himself drawn through that mist, sucked
through it as if by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.
[H. P. Lovecraft]
As the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more intense,
the outlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a churning chaos.
Its pallor and its motion and its music all blended themselves with the
engulfing mist- bleaching It to a pale steel-colour and setting it
undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted Imperceptibly
into the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.
Meanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably,
incredibly, cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth
seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that any such flight in physical reality
would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was -- in this
strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare -- the quasi-visual impression of
meteor-like hurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no real
points of reference in the grey, pulsing void, he felt that he was
approaching and passing the speed of light Itself. Finally his
consciousness did go under -- and merciful blackness swallowed everything.
It was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that
thoughts and Ideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many moments --
or years -- or eternities -- had elapsed since his flight through the grey
void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that he seemed to be at rest
and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was the
salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less
solidly black -- suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied
intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a corporeal being
with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of perception. He could
think sharply and quickly -- almost preternaturally so -- yet could form
no idea whatsoever of his situation.
Half by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he
might have awaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet he
knew this was not so. There was no camp cot beneath him -- he had no hands
to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlight that ought to be
around him -- there was no sensation of cold in the air -- no flap through
which he could glimpse the pale night outside ... something was wrong,
dreadfully wrong.
He cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had
hypnotised him -- of that, and all which had followed. He had known that
his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back. At the last moment
there had been a shocking, panic fear -- a subconscious fear beyond even
that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from some
vague flash or remote recollection -- just what, he could not at once
tell. Some cell-group In the back of his head had seemed to find a
cloudily familiar quality In the cube -- and that familiarity was fraught
with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the
terror were.
Little by little it came to him. Once -- long ago, in connection with his
geological life-work -- he had read of something like that cube. It had to
do with those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown
Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern England thirty
years before. Their shape and markings were so queer that a few scholars
hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their
origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist
on the globe -- but their contours and figurings were damnably puzzling.
That was how they got their name.
It was not, however, In the writings of any sober scientist that Campbell
had seen that reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The source was
far less reputable, and infinitely more vivid. About 1912 a deeply learned
Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings -- the Reverend Arthur Brooke
Winters-Hall -- had professed to Identify the markings on the Eltdown
Shards with some of the so-called "pre-human hieroglyphs" persistently
cherished and esoterically handed down in certain mystical circles, and
had published at his own expense what purported to be a "translation" of
the primal and baffling "inscriptions" -- a "translation" still quoted
frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this "translation' -- a
surprisingly long brochure In view of the limited number of "shards"
existing -- had occurred the narrative, supposedly of pre-human
authorship, containing the now frightening reference.
As the story went, there dwelt on a world -- and eventually on countless
other worlds -- of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose
attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the
range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of
interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable
planet in their own galaxy - killing off the races they found.
Beyond the limits of their own galaxy -- which was not ours -- they could
not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and
time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with
their minds. They devised peculiar objects -- strangely energized cubes of
a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in
space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance -- which could
be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would
respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.
These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds
in outside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental
communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting envelope,
leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the intelligent minds
of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and
rivet attention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was
sufficient to set its special properties working.
The mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of the
disc, and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place whence
the disc had come -- the remote world of the worm-like spaceexplorers
across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in one of the machines to
which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would remain suspended
without body or senses until examined by one of the dominant race. Then it
would, by an obscure process of interchange, be pumped of all its
contents. The investigator's mind would now occupy the strange machine
while the captive mind occupied the interrogator's worm-like body. Then,
in another interchange, the interrogator's mind would leap across
boundless space to the captive's vacant and unconscious body on the
trans-galactic world -- animating the alien tenement as best It might, and
exploring the alien world in the guise of one of its denizens.
When done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its disc
in accomplishing his return -- and sometimes the captured mind would be
restored safely to its own remote world. Not always, however, was the
dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentially important race
capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the
cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, andwould extirpate
the race for diplomatic reasons -- using the exploring minds as agents of
destruction.
In other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a
trans-galactic planet - destroying the captured minds and wiping out the
remaining inhabitants preparatory to settling down in unfamiliar bodies.
Never, however, could the parent civilization be quite duplicated In such
a case; since the new planet would not contain all the materials necessary
for the worm-race's arts. The cubes, for example, could be made only on
the home planet.
Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and
response on an inhabited world - since there was no such thing as aiming
them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had
ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these
had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago,
while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the
centre of the galaxy. The third -- and the only one ever known to have
invaded the solar system -- had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years
ago.
It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall's "translation" chiefly
dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial
species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since
In mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it had
actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos,
hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from
the sky and certain Individuals had suffered mental change after gazing at
it.
Reallsing that the changed Individuals represented invading minds, the
race's leaders had them destroyed -- even at the cost of leaving the
displaced minds exiled in alien space. They had had experience with even
stranger transitions. When, through a mental exploration of space and
time, they formed a rough Idea of what the cube was, they carefully hid
the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They did not
wish to destroy a thing so rich in later experimental possibilities. Now
and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to
it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences -- but all such
cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.
Of this evil meddling the only bad result was that the worm-like outside
race learned from the new exiles what had happened to their explorers on
earth, and conceived a violent hatred of the planet and all its
life-forms. They would have depopulated it if they could, and indeed sent
additional cubes into space in the wild hope of striking it by accident in
unguarded places -- but that accident never came to pass.
The cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a special
shrine as a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons it was
lost amidst the chaos of war and the destruction of the great polar city
where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, the beings sent their
minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a nameless peril of inner
earth, the whereabouts of the sinister cube from space were unknown.
This much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had
said. What now made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was the
minute accuracy with which the alien cube had been described. Every detail
tallied -- dimensions, consistency, heiroglyphed central disc, hypnotic
effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the darkness of his
strange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole experience with
the crystal cube -- indeed, its very existence -- were not a nightmare
brought on by some freakish subconscious memory of this old bit of
extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, the nightmare must still
be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had nothing of
normality in it.
Of the time consumed by this puzzled memory and reflection, Campbell could
form no estimate. Everything about his state was so unreal that ordinary
dimensions and measurements became meaningless. It seemed an eternity, but
perhaps it was not really long before the sudden interruption came. What
happened was as strange and inexplicable as the blackness it succeeded.
There was a sensation - of the mind rather than of the body -- and all at
once Campbell felt his thoughts swept or sucked beyond his control in
tumultuous and chaotic fashion.
Memories arose irresponsibly and irrelevantly. All that he knew -- all his
personal background, traditions, experiences, scholarship, dreams, ideas,
and inspirations-welled up abruptly and simultaneously, with a dizzying
speed and abundance which soon made him unable to keep track of any
separate concept. The parade of all his mental contents became an
avalanche, a cascade, a vortex. It was as horrible and vertiginous as his
hypnotic flight through space when the crystal cube pulled him. Finally it
sapped his consciousness and brought on fresh oblivion.
Another measureless blank -- and then a slow trickle of sensation. This
time it was physical, not mental. Sapphire light, and a low rumble of
distant sound. There were tactile impressions -- he could realise that he
was lying at full length on something, though there was a baffling
strangeness about the feel of his posture. He could not reconcile the
pressure of the supporting surface with his own outlines -- or with the
outlines of the human form at all. He tried to move his arms, but found no
definite response to the attempt. Instead, there were little, ineffectual
nervous twitches all over the area which seemed to mark his body.
He tried to open his eyes more widely, but found himself unable to control
their mechanism. The sapphire light came in a diffused, nebulous manner,
and could nowhere be voluntarily focussed Into definiteness. Gradually,
though, visual images began to trickle in curiously and indecisively. The
limits and qualities of vision were not those which he was used to, but he
could roughly correlate the sensation with what he had known as sight. As
this sensation gained some degree of stability, Campbell realised that he
must still be in the throes of nightmare.
He seemed to be in a room of considerable extent -- of medium height, but
with a large proportionate area. On every side -- and he could apparently
see all four sides at once -- were high, narrowish slits which seemed to
serve as combined doors and windows. There were singular low tables or
pedestals, but no furniture of normal nature and proportions. Through the
slits streamed floods of sapphire light, and beyond them could be mistily
seen the sides and roofs of fantastic buildings like clustered cubes. On
the walls - in the vertical panels between the slits - were strange
markings of an oddly disquieting character. It was some time before
Campbell understood why they disturbed him so -- then he saw that they
were, in repeated instances, precisely like some of the hieroglyphs on the
crystal cube's disc.
The actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It
began with the living thing which presently entered through one of the
slits, advancing deliberately toward him and bearing a metal box of
bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thing was
nothing human -- nothing of earth -- nothing even of man's myths and
dreams. It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as
a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless,
cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear
pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically -- the legs, or at
least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a
curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its
grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck,
and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in
measured, deliberate rhythms.
Here, indeed, was outre nightmare at its height -- capricious fantasy at
its apex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George
Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more
thing -- one final, unbearable touch -- to do that. As the nameless worm
advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the
mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet
-- horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations -- it was
not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It
was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great
centipedes.
[Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long.]
From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding
of his situation. His mind was Imprisoned in the body of a frightful
native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the
universe, his own body was housing the monster's personality.
He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why
should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only
realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was
hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were
drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.
What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death
anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had
been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual
frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at
least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more -- much more.
With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked
fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the
physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all
the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no
new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt
promises of strange, exotic joys.
A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, tree of
all conventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet, free
of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With grim
amusement he thought of his body moving in earth's business and society,
with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that were
George Campbell's eyes on people who would flee !f they knew.
Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its
races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one
of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous accumulation of
conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die in his sordid niche.
But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not
death, but re-birth -- the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a
new-found freedom that made little of physical captivity on Yekub.
He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known?
Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied- Tothe.
Memory, deep grooved in Tothe's brain, was stirring in him - shadows of
the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain,
they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human
consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only
to safety and freedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its
primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave would he dwell on Yekub, but as
a kingl Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordly empires.
For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still
lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the
centipede man stood before him, holding the polished metal object, and
clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell knew, and what it
said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of
Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.
But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so
alien to the ways of Yekub that !t was beyond Yukth's comprehension and
caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed
metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth !t was only a scientific
implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell's
earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving
Tothe's body into movements no man of Yekub had ever made before.
Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward.
Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an
instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing,
exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical
sensations.
As he ran, guided wholly by the Instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe's
physical reflexes, it was as If he were borne by a separate consciousness
in his legs. Tothe's body was bearing him along a route it had traversed
ten thousand times when animated by Tothe's mind.
Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved
door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had
found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from
which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose In the middle of
the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The
ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist
drifted upward to a sphere that poised in mid-air -- a sphere that shone
like translucent ivory.
This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of
Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been
forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the altar
which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched was a
blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood
in frozen horror until Campbell's shard ripped the life out of him.
On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its
sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the
floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out In blue
clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the superstitions
of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his
hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm men would dare deny him nothing,
when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand for the ball -- no
longer ivory-hued, but red as blood....
[Frank Belknap Long]
Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George
Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of
enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet scented pine
needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of
frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora
Borealis splashed streamers of fire.
The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the
corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which
fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a man would
walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posture altered. His torso
began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.
In a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was George
Campbell clasped to Its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood,
and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall and out
through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.
Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the
awkward loping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling
a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet
of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse of gleaming
water.
In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George Campbell
moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted
avenues holding aloft the round red god.
There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on
earth where the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by
instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal
flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a
furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted.
Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh
blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved towards the waters of the
lake.
As the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the
black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in
the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate from
its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a throne
of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.
A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent
where the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the
gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark floating there.
He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness enveloped him like
a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.
But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge
of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating
bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.
Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god
ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an
alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft energized
his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of a supermundane
spirituality all animal dross.
On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and
hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively
anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black ichor
poured.
"He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an
unresponsive tenement," said the red god. "No spawn of Yekub can control
the body of a human.
"On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with
unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a
bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds Instinctively
conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the
human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy Itself on earth, seeking
the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at
Its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more
powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in
seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang."
Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the
space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human
desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more
wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an
empire of men.
The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to NAME for
transcribing this text.
