"I was terrified, for they were plant cells! It was vegetable sap that crept slowly through my veins, replacing life-sustaining red fluid.
"The doctors to whom I submitted the extraordinary question had to shrug their shoulders and declare themselves incompetent when faced with a phenomenon that evaded both their knowledge and science.
"I told them what had happened, describing my fears and the strange words I had heard from the mouth of the cacique. They just smiled and, after prescribing ineffective remedies, no doubt to allay their consciences more than for any other reason, shrugged their shoulders once more.
"Believe me, I felt that my body was being transformed, that I was no longer myself, that my blood was not my own, that I was going to meet a grim fate from which my every thought turned away in disgust.
"So I fled my country, trying a change of climate, as all sick people do when they have one foot in the grave. I tried alternately very cold climates and equatorial climates, until a few months ago I came to your wonderful Italian soil."
The doctor paused thoughtfully, lowering his head.
"I am leaving tomorrow, Sir," he added after a moment. "I will end my existence in my own country, which will have to hold the remains of a man who, on that great day, will no longer be a man.
"You seem surprised. But you are still ignorant of the most terrible part of my awful existence.
"But, tell me, would you like to know everything?
"Do you feel strong and fearless enough to endure the sight of something truly terrible?
"Well, then, now you shall know, Sir. You see me motionless in this chair, my legs inert and hands enveloped in these silk gloves. You believe that I am paralyzed, is that not so? Now I will show you my hands, and you will understand. My other limbs are similar to these, or soon will be. Now you will see, Sir, so be strong."
He asked me to ring an electric buzzer on the wall. I did so, and immediately a devoted servant, one of the doctor"s fellow countrymen, appeared and went to stand next to his chair.
The doctor looked at him.
"Take off my gloves, Alonso," he said in Spanish, in a low voice.
And then good G.o.d! What a sight met my eyes, which became dilated with horror! No! It must have been a hallucination. I could not believe my senses. After the gloves had been removed, the hands of the paralytic appeared. Hands? No, it was not hands that I saw. No! They were leaves, meaty leaves, similar to those of a p.r.i.c.kly pear two large green leaves attached to repulsive-looking trunks like human arms without skin. And, horrifying vision, on those two short formless fleshy ma.s.ses sat the same sinister and terrible eyes that I had seen on the leaf enclosed in the gla.s.s case.
I let out a terrible cry and fled hastily.
The People of the Pit.
A. Merritt.
A. Merritt (18841943) was an American fiction writer and highly successful journalist who traveled the world and reportedly compiled a library of over five thousand occult books. Writing stories was a sideline in part because the journalism paid so well. The writer Gertrude Barrows Bennett (Francis Stevens) heavily influenced Merritt"s fiction, especially in terms of her fascination with strange monsters and ruined civilizations. Rumor has it that Merritt"s fiction may have itself influenced the US television series Lost. The tale reprinted here, "The People of the Pit", first appeared in 1918 in All-Story Magazine. The story is a strong example of early American pulp magazine fiction in a weird mode.
North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast no shadows.
As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It was exactly as though it moved to push something back. The shining beam held steady for a moment; then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.
The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I felt the dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but every muscle in their bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along their backs and their eyes, fixed on the falling lights, were filmed with the terror glaze.
I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the beam had pulsed upward.
"It can"t be the aurora," I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was as dry as though Lao T"zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.
"If it is I never saw one like it," he answered in the same tone. "Besides who ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?"
He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.
"It makes me think something is being hunted up there," he said, "an unholy sort of hunt it"s well for us to be out of range."
"The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up," I said. "What"s it keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut for them."
He raised a hand listening.
From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager. It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.
The whispering grew louder.
"What the h.e.l.l"s the matter with those dogs?" cried Anderson savagely. "Look at them!"
The malamutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.
The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I suppose three hundred miles above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us. The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now we saw the light that had led us to them.
Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once it flashed upon me it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it was terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns and dropped them. Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!
It was a man. Still with the high climbing padpad he swayed to the fire. He stopped.
"Safe," whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur overhead. "Quite safe here. They can"t get you out of the blue, you know. They can"t get you unless you go to them"
He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.
"G.o.d"s love!" he said. "Frank, look at this!"
He pointed to the hands. The wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn to the bone. They looked like the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal. From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!
"What is he? Where did he come from?" said Anderson. "Look, he"s fast asleep yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw themselves up one after the other! And his knees how in G.o.d"s name was he ever able to move on them?"
It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler arms and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as though they had a life of their own they kept their movement independently of the motionless body. They were semaphoric motions. If you have ever stood at the back of a train and had watched the semaph.o.r.es rise and fall you will know exactly what I mean.
Abruptly the overhead whispering ceased. The shaft of light dropped and did not rise again. The crawling man became still. A gentle glow began to grow around us. It was dawn, and the short Alaskan summer night was over. Anderson rubbed his eyes and turned to me a haggard face.
"Man!" he exclaimed. "You look as though you have been through a spell of sickness!"
"No more than you, Starr," I said. "What do you make of it all?"
"I"m thinking our only answer lies there," he answered, pointing to the figure that lay so motionless under the blankets we had thrown over him. "Whatever it was that"s what it was after. There was no aurora about that light, Frank. It was like the flaring up of some queer h.e.l.l the preacher folk never frightened us with."
"We"ll go no further today," I said. "I wouldn"t wake him for all the gold that runs between the fingers of the five peaks nor for all the devils that may be behind them."
The crawling man lay in a sleep as deep as the Styx. We bathed and bandaged the pads that had been his hands. Arms and legs were as rigid as though they were crutches. He did not move while we worked over him. He lay as he had fallen, the arms a trifle raised, the knees bent.
"Why did he crawl?" whispered Anderson. "Why didn"t he walk?"
I was filing the band about the waist. It was gold, but it was like no gold I had ever handled. Pure gold is soft. This was soft, but it had an unclean, viscid life of its own. It clung to the file. I gashed through it, bent it away from the body and hurled it far off. It was loathsome!
All that day he slept. Darkness came and still he slept. That night there was no shaft of light, no questing globe, no whispering. Some spell of horror seemed lifted from the land. It was noon when the crawling man awoke. I jumped as the pleasant drawling voice sounded.
"How long have I slept?" he asked. His pale blue eyes grew quizzical as I stared at him. "A night and almost two days," I said.
"Was there any light up there last night?" He nodded to the North eagerly. "Any whispering?"
"Neither," I answered. His head fell back and he stared up at the sky.
"They"ve given it up, then?" he said at last.
"Who have given it up?" asked Anderson.
"Why, the people of the pit," replied the crawling man quietly.
We stared at him.
"The people of the pit," he said. "Things that the Devil made before the Flood and that somehow have escaped G.o.d"s vengeance. You weren"t in any danger from them unless you had followed their call. They can"t get any further than the blue haze. I was their prisoner," he added simply. "They were trying to whisper me back to them!"
Anderson and I looked at each other, the same thought in both our minds.
"You"re wrong," said the crawling man. "I"m not insane. Give me a very little to drink. I"m going to die soon, but I want you to take me as far South as you can before I die, and afterwards I want you to build a big fire and burn me. I want to be in such shape that no infernal spell of theirs can drag my body back to them. You"ll do it too, when I"ve told you about them" he hesitated. "I think their chain is off me?" he said.
"I cut it off," I answered shortly.
"Thank G.o.d for that too," whispered the crawling man.
He drank the brandy and water we lifted to his lips.
"Arms and legs quite dead," he said. "Dead as I"ll be soon. Well, they did well for me. Now I"ll tell you what"s up there behind that hand. h.e.l.l!
"Now listen. My name is Stanton Sinclair Stanton. Cla.s.s of 1900, Yale. Explorer. I started away from Dawson last year to hunt for five peaks that rise like a hand in a haunted country and run pure gold between them. Same thing you were after? I thought so. Late last fall my comrade sickened. Sent him back with some Indians. Little later all my Indians ran away from me. I decided I"d stick, built a cabin, stocked myself with food and lay down to winter it. In the Spring I started off again. Little less than two weeks ago I sighted the five peaks. Not from this side though the other. Give me some more brandy.
"I"d made too wide a detour," he went on. "I"d gotten too far North. I beat back. From this side you see nothing but forest straight up to the base of the Hand Mountain. Over on the other side"
He was silent for a moment.
"Over there is forest too. But it doesn"t reach so far. No! I came out of it. Stretching miles in front of me was a level plain. It was as worn and ancient looking as the desert around the ruins of Babylon. At its end rose the peaks. Between me and them far off was what looked like a low dike of rocks. Then I ran across the road!
"The road!" cried Anderson incredulously.
"The road," said the crawling man. "A fine smooth stone road. It ran straight on to the mountain. Oh, it was road all right and worn as though millions and millions of feet had pa.s.sed over it for thousands of years. On each side of it were sand and heaps of stones. After a while I began to notice these stones. They were cut, and the shape of the heaps somehow gave me the idea that a hundred thousand years ago they might have been houses. I sensed man about them and at the same time they smelled of immemorial antiquity. Well "The peaks grew closer. The heaps of ruins thicker. Something inexpressibly desolate hovered over them; something reached from them that struck my heart like the touch of ghosts so old that they could be only the ghosts of ghosts. I went on.
"And now I saw that what I had thought to be the low rock range at the base of the peaks was a thicker litter of ruins. The Hand Mountain was really much farther off. The road pa.s.sed between two high rocks that raised themselves like a gateway."
The crawling man paused.
"They were a gateway," he said. "I reached them. I went between them. And then I sprawled and clutched the earth in sheer awe! I was on a broad stone platform. Before me was sheer s.p.a.ce! Imagine the Grand Canyon five times as wide and with the bottom dropped out. That is what I was looking into. It was like peeping over the edge of a cleft world down into the infinity where the planets roll! On the far side stood the five peaks. They looked like a gigantic warning hand stretched up to the sky. The lip of the abyss curved away on each side of me.
"I could see down perhaps a thousand feet. Then a thick blue haze shut out the eye. It was like the blue you see gather on the high hills at dusk. And the pit it was awesome; awesome as the Maori Gulf of Ra.n.a.lak, that sinks between the living and the dead and that only the freshly released soul has strength to leap but never strength to cross again.
"I crept back from the verge and stood up, weak. My hand rested against one of the pillars of the gateway. There was carving upon it. It bore in still sharp outlines the heroic figure of a man. His back was turned. His arms were outstretched. There was an odd peaked headdress upon him. I looked at the opposite pillar. It bore a figure exactly similar. The pillars were triangular and the carvings were on the side away from the pit. The figures seemed to be holding something back. I looked closer. Behind the outstretched hands I seemed to see other shapes.
"I traced them out vaguely. Suddenly I felt unaccountably sick. There had come to me an impression of enormous upright slugs. Their swollen bodies were faintly cut all except the heads which were well marked globes. They were unutterably loathsome. I turned from the gates back to the void. I stretched myself upon the slab and looked over the edge.
"A stairway led down into the pit!"
"A stairway!" we cried.
"A stairway," repeated the crawling man as patiently as before. "It seemed not so much carved out of the rock as built into it. The slabs were about six feet long and three feet wide. It ran down from the platform and vanished into the blue haze."
"But who could build such a stairway as that?" I said. "A stairway built into the wall of a precipice and leading down into a bottomless pit!"
"Not bottomless," said the crawling man quietly. "There was a bottom. I reached it!"
"Reached it?" we repeated.
"Yes, by the stairway," answered the crawling man. "You see I went down it!
"Yes," he said. "I went down the stairway. But not that day. I made my camp back of the gates. At dawn I filled my knapsack with food, my two canteens with water from a spring that wells up there by the gateway, walked between the carved monoliths and stepped over the edge of the pit.
"The steps ran along the side of the rock at a forty-degree pitch. As I went down and down I studied them. They were of a greenish rock quite different from the granitic porphyry that formed the wall of the precipice. At first I thought that the builders had taken advantage of an outcropping stratum, and had carved from it their gigantic flight. But the regularity of the angle at which it fell made me doubtful of this theory.
"After I had gone perhaps half a mile I stepped out upon a landing. From this landing the stairs made a V-shaped turn and ran on downward, clinging to the cliff at the same angle as the first flight; it was a zigzag, and after I had made three of these turns I knew that the steps dropped straight down in a succession of such angles. No strata could be so regular as that. No, the stairway was built by hands! But whose? The answer is in those ruins around the edge, I think never to be read.
"By noon I had lost sight of the five peaks and the lip of the abyss. Above me, below me, was nothing but the blue haze. Beside me, too, was nothingness, for the further breast of rock had long since vanished. I felt no dizziness, and any trace of fear was swallowed in a vast curiosity. What was I to discover? Some ancient and wonderful civilization that had ruled when the Poles were tropical gardens? Nothing living, I felt sure all was too old for life. Still, a stairway so wonderful must lead to something quite as wonderful I knew. What was it? I went on.
"At regular intervals I had pa.s.sed the mouths of small caves. There would be two thousand steps and then an opening, two thousand more steps and an opening and so on and on. Late that afternoon I stopped before one of these clefts. I suppose I had gone then three miles down the pit, although the angles were such that I had walked in all fully ten miles. I examined the entrance. On each side were carved the figures of the great portal above, only now they were standing face forward, the arms outstretched as though to hold something back from the outer depths. Their faces were covered with veils. There were no hideous shapes behind them. I went inside. The fissure ran back for twenty yards like a burrow. It was dry and perfectly light. Outside I could see the blue haze rising upward like a column, its edges clearly marked. I felt an extraordinary sense of security, although I had not been conscious of any fear. I felt that the figures at the entrance were guardians but against what?
"The blue haze thickened and grew faintly luminescent. I fancied that it was dusk above. I ate and drank a little and slept. When I awoke the blue had lightened again, and I fancied it was dawn above. I went on. I forgot the gulf yawning at my side. I felt no fatigue and little hunger or thirst, although I had drunk and eaten sparingly. That night I spent within another of the caves, and at dawn I descended again.
"It was late that day when I first saw the city."
He was silent for a time.
"The city," he said at last, "there is a city you know. But not such a city as you have ever seen nor any other man who has lived to tell of it. The pit, I think, is shaped like a bottle; the opening before the five peaks is the neck. But how wide the bottom is I do not know thousands of miles maybe. I had begun to catch little glints of light far down in the blue. Then I saw the tops of trees, I suppose they are. But not our kind of trees unpleasant, snaky kind of trees. They reared themselves on high thin trunks and their tops were nests of thick tendrils with ugly little leaves like arrow heads. The trees were red, a vivid angry red. Here and there I glimpsed spots of shining yellow. I knew these were water because I could see things breaking through their surface or at least I could see the splash and ripple, but what it was that disturbed them I never saw.
"Straight beneath me was the city. I looked down upon mile after mile of closely packed cylinders. They lay upon their sides in pyramids of three, of five of dozens piled upon each other. It is hard to make you see what that city is like look, suppose you have water pipes of a certain length and first you lay three of them side by side and on top of them you place two and on these two one; or suppose you take five for a foundation and place on these four and then three, then two and then one. Do you see? That was the way they looked. But they were topped by towers, by minarets, by flares, by fans, and twisted monstrosities. They gleamed as though coated with pale rose flame. Beside them the venomous red trees raised themselves like the heads of hydras guarding nests of gigantic, jeweled and sleeping worms!
"A few feet beneath me the stairway jutted out into a t.i.tanic arch, unearthly as the span that bridges h.e.l.l and leads to Asgard. It curved out and down straight through the top of the highest pile of carven cylinders and then it vanished through it. It was appalling it was demonic"
The crawling man stopped. His eyes rolled up into his head. He trembled and his arms and legs began their horrible crawling movement. From his lips came a whispering. It was an echo of the high murmuring we had heard the night he came to us. I put my hands over his eyes. He quieted.
"The Things Accursed!" he said. "The People of the Pit! Did I whisper. Yes but they can"t get me now they can"t!"