And now Matthew is gone. I do not say “dead”—no, he is, as I myself may well soon be, departed… And yet it is my hope that I might still be able to release him from the hell which at present is his prison.
• • •
When Matthew came down to Yorkshire it was not without a purpose. He had read of how, twenty-five years ago, the German genius Horst Graumer found two completely unknown botanical specimens on the moors. This was shortly before that fatal ramble from which Graumer never returned. Since the German’s disappearance—despite frequent visits to the moors by various scientific bodies—no further evidence of the Graumer Specimens had been found. Now that the original plants, at the University of Cologne, were nothing more than mummified fragments, in spite of all precautions taken to preserve them, Matthew had decided that it was time someone else explored the moors. For unless they had been faked, the Graumer Specimens were unique in botany, and before his disappearance Graumer himself had described them as being “sehr sonderbare, mysteriöse Unkräuter!”—very strange and mysterious weeds…
So it was that shortly before noon on the seventh day of July Matthew set out over the moors, taking with him a rucksack, some food, and a rope. The latter was to ensure, in the event of his finding what he sought on some steep incline, that he would experience no difficulty in collecting specimens. With the fall of night he still had not returned, and although a search party was organised early the next morning no trace of him could be found. Just as Horst Graumer had disappeared a quarter of a century earlier, so now had my nephew apparently vanished from the face of the earth.
I was ready to give Matthew up for dead when, on the morning of the fourteenth, he stumbled into my study with twigs and bits of bracken sticking to the material of his rough climbing clothes. His hair was awry; he was bearded; the lower legs of his trousers were strangely slimed and discoloured, yet apart from his obvious weariness and grimy aspect he seemed perfectly sound and well nourished.
Seeing this, my first joy at having him back turned to a rage in which I demanded to know, “what the devil the young skelp meant by worrying people half to death?—And where in the name of heaven had he been this last week?—And did he not know that the entire countryside had been in an uproar over him?”—and so on.
Matthew apologized profusely for everything and condemned himself for his own stupidity, but when his story was told I did not have it in me to blame him for what had happened; and rightly so. It seemed that he had climbed a particularly steep knoll somewhere on the moors. Upon reaching the summit a mist had set in which prevented his exploration of the peak. Before the mist settled, however, he had been overjoyed to find a single misshapen weed that he did not recognise and which, so far as he knew, was as yet unclassified. He believed it to be similar to the much sought after Graumer Specimens!
Intending first to study the plant in its natural surroundings, he did not uproot it but left it as it was. He merely sat down, marked his rough position on a map he had taken with him, and waited for the mist to clear. After about an hour, by which time he was thoroughly drenched, he gave up all hope of the mist clearing before nightfall and set about making the descent.
He found that in the opaque greyness of the mist the downward route he had chosen was considerably more difficult to manoeuvre than the one by which he had climbed. Indeed, the knoll’s steepness—plus the fact that he was wet and uncomfortable—caused him to slip and slither for a short distance down the wild slope. Suddenly, as his slide was coming to an end, he bumped over the edge of a narrow crack in the earth, broke through the bracken which partly covered it, and shot into space with his arms wildly failing. He fell some distance before landing on his back on a dry ledge at the bottom of the crevice.
When he somewhat dazedly had a look around, he was surprised that he had not suffered a serious injury. He had fallen some twenty feet onto a bank of sandy shingle. The place was a sort of pothole, with walls which were so sheer that in places they overhung. It was plainly impossible to climb out unaided. At his feet was a motionless, slimy-green pool that narrowed to a mere channel at a point where it vanished under a low archway of limestone at one end of the defile.
The true horror of his situation dawned on him fully when he realized that he had lost his rucksack, and further that his rope was useless to him as he had no grappling hook. It fully appeared that unless a miracle occurred and he could somehow devise a means of getting out, he would be forced to spend the rest of his days in this dank and cheerless place; and those days would not be too many with nothing but the evil-looking water of the scummy pool as sustenance. He did have a small pocket first-aid kit that I had given to him in case of emergencies, and this he used as best he could to clean up his few bruises and abrasions.
After sitting thus occupied, recovering himself, and regaining a little of his composure, Matthew took to exploring his prison. The place had a perceptibly foreboding aura about it, and hanging in the air was a sickly-sweet smell so heavy it seemed almost a taste rather than an odour. All was silent except for a distant drip, drip, drip of water. Little light entered the hole from above, but Matthew was not too disheartened for the stone walls were covered with a grey, semiluminescent moss that gave off a dim light.
He had left Eeley-on-the-Moor before noon, and he calculated that by now it must be about seven in the evening. He knew that in another hour or so I would begin to worry about him—but what could he do about it? He was virtually a prisoner, and try as he might he could think of no practical way out. Upon examining his rope he saw that it was badly frayed in two places. He cursed himself for not having checked it before setting out, then hung it over a projecting rock and swung on it to test its capacity to take his weight. The rope broke twice before he was finally left with a serviceable length of no more than twenty feet or so.
He tied one end of this remaining piece of rope to a fairly large stone but upon tossing it upwards was dismayed to find that it only reached a point a good two or three feet short of the lip of the crevice. All he could do now, he decided, was sit it out and hope that some search party would find him. He realised that no such search party would exist until early morning at the soonest, and so knew that it was pointless to try calling for help.
It did not become noticeably darker, though he knew it must fast be approaching night, and he put this down to the fact that the moss on the walls was supplementing the natural light. He knew his fancy to be correct when, a short while later, he saw twinkling through the crack above him the first stars in the night sky.
Thoroughly tired now, he sat down in the driest place he could find and fell asleep; but his sleep was troubled by nightmare visions of weird events and strange creatures. He awoke several times, stifled by the unnatural and oppressive warmth of the place, to find the echoes of his own cries of terror still ringing in the hole’s foul atmosphere. Even when wide awake the next morning the dreams persisted in his memory. In them he had seemed to understand all of the horrible and strangely threatening occurrences.
In one of these dreams there had been a misty landscape of queer rock formations, unfamiliar trees, and giant ferns; plants which, to the best of Matthew’s knowledge, had not existed on Earth since the dawn of time. He had been one of a crowd of loathsome ape-like beings, ugly, with flat faces and sloping foreheads. They had approached a forbidden place, a hole in the earth from which nameless vapours poured out a ghastly stench.
They had captives, these ape men, creatures like themselves—yet monstrously different—who had defied The Laws. These prisoners had lately trespassed upon this holy ground unbidden by the priests, and they had also dared to spy upon the God-things conjured in horrible rituals by those same hierophants. Because of the horror of what they saw they had practised sedition, calling for the overthrow of the priests and the expulsion of those Gods from Outside. Fearing that this call might somewhere be heard, the God-things had paused momentarily in their horrific pleasures to order their priests to punish the offe
nders—whom they would make recognisable through growing physiological differences!
And indeed those captives were different… They were slimy to the touch and seemed to exude a dreadful moisture which stank evilly. They stumbled rather than walked, apparently afflicted with some nervous disorder which caused their steps to be short and jerky.
But when in his dream Matthew had looked closer at those prisoners of the ape men, then he had seen that he was wrong. They suffered from no nervous disorder—the trouble was all physical. Their legs appeared to be joined from knee to groin by some ghastly fungoid growth, and their arms were similarly fastened to their sides. Their eyes were almost completely scaled over, and their mouths were gone, closed forever by strips of the horrid, scaly substance which was apparently growing over their whole bodies. Matthew knew somehow that this terrible leper-growth was the first phase of their punishment for what they had dared to do—and that the balance was still to be paid.
The entire unholy procession had been led by three creatures different again from the rest. Their foreheads were not so sloped, giving them a position somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale, and they were taller by a head than the others. These were the priests, and they wore the only clothing of the entire assembly: coarse, dark cloaks thrown about their shoulders.
The priests had carried flaring torches, intoning some weird chant which—while Matthew was unable to remember why—he had known in his dream to be immemorially significant. It had been in the form of an invocation to certain “Gods” of an ancient myth cycle. How he understood anything of the dream was a mystery to him; he remembered that on the few occasions when the beings talked to one another, the tongue they used was not one he should normally have been conversant with. Indeed, he said he believed it to be a language dead and vanished from the face of the Earth for some hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.
Soon the group arrived at the malodorous pit, and at its very rim the priests stood with their torches held high over the hole while their chanting grew in volume and fervour. The evil-smelling vapours swirled up around them, occasionally enveloping them completely from the view of their followers; and then, suddenly, as the chanting reached a fever pitch, the unfortunate ones were thrust forward and one after the other were thrown bodily into that eldritch chasm. They were incapable of screaming for their mouths were scaled over, but even had that not been so they would not have screamed. No, they seemed somehow to welcome being thrown into the dreadful abyss.
As the bodies of the unfortunates vanished in reeking darkness, the priests slowly turned towards Matthew, approaching him with alien and horribly sly smiles upon their faces. Not knowing why he, personally, should suddenly feel so horrified, Matthew nevertheless turned to run—but could only stumble!—and in an instant the whole crowd was around him. The evil implication of the looks upon their faces was now all too clear, and he opened his mouth to reject their unspoken accusation, but…
…Horror upon horror—he could barely move his jaws!
He tried to raise his arms to protect himself but could not do so. It was as though his limbs were pinned to his body and, half knowing what he would see, he glanced down at himself. Even this simple movement seemed to be too great an effort for him, but somehow he accomplished it and saw…and saw—
He, too, was one of—Them!
His arms were webbed to his sides and his legs were partly joined. His skin was green and foul and he stank of an unholy, sickly-sweetness. But he was hardly given time to examine these abnormalities for the horde had already lifted him into the air and borne him to the edge of the pit!
That, mercifully, was when he awoke.
II
If my memory serves me correctly, that is the way Matthew related to me the contents of his dream in the hole. There were more dreams later, but I have told of this first one in some detail for I believe that in an inexplicable way its events are related to the rest of my story. It is my belief that in his slumbers Matthew had seen actual occurrences from the abysmal prehistory of his terrifying prison…
On his second day in the hole he waded into the pool and found it unpleasantly warm and greasy, as though composed of thick vegetable secretions rather than water. A great thirst was on him but he could not bring himself to drink that foul muck.
Finding that the pool was quite shallow, he waded to the archway and stooped beneath and beyond it. The water—if such it could be called—beyond the arch was only slightly deeper, and the living walls gave off sufficient light for him to see that the same sandy shelf continued in this secondary cave. Wet and slimy, he climbed out onto the shelf and looked about him. There were long, sharp stalactites hanging from above—for here there was no crack in the ceiling—but though these aeon-formed stone daggers were fascinating enough in themselves, it was the other things which primarily claimed Matthew’s astounded attention.
This primeval cavern contained wonders to fill to bursting point the heart of any man of science—and especially a botanist. Protruding from the walls were plants unlike any existing upon the surface of the Earth—huge pod-like things, standing on end all around the walls with their lower roots trailing in the slimy water. Each plant seemed to be growing out of, or depending from, the wall of the cave; or perhaps they had grown up out of the water, later to fasten upon the walls in the manner of certain other climbing, clinging plants.
The things were between five and six feet long top to bottom, as green as the evil mutations in my nephew’s dreams. They were also slimy and exuded a vile fluid which dripped off them into the pool. Matthew wondered if this constant dripping of vegetable secretions was the reason the pool was so odious.
Later in that secret cave, after he had recovered from his first amazement at this terrific find, he also discovered some water which was at least cleaner than that of the pool. It dripped from the tips of those dagger-like, depending rock formations, and although it had an unpleasant taste—an unwholesome acidity—it went far towards quenching his by now burning thirst. Yet he drank falteringly, as though his whole body instinctively drew back from having anything to do with that unknown hole in the earth.
But now he was filled with anger. What a find! A discovery so immense that he was “made” for life, his future assured, if he could but get out of that accursed pit. It was then that he first saw the means of his salvation. In the gravel of the shelf were many half-buried flat stones. If he could get a sufficient number of these stones to the other side of the natural archway, he could perhaps build them up to form a platform from which to throw his weighted rope over the lip of the crevice.
His difficulties were many. There was the unpleasant feel of the water (for which he had developed a morbid dread); the great weight of the large stones; the fact that he quickly exhausted the supply of readily available stones on the surface and had to dig in the sandy shingle for others.
It was when he was moving the first of these stones that he noticed, in the dim light, the intricate, runic designs cut into their surfaces. Strange cabalistic signs literally covered them, and although he had no knowledge of their meaning, still they filled him with dread. They reminded him of similar glyphs once glimpsed in the university’s rare books department—in the pages of a book by von Junzt—and again he experienced that reluctance of soul encountered upon drinking the dripping water. Nonetheless, he progressed with his work until he had a platform of stones almost three feet high against the wall of his prison.
This took him halfway through his third miserable day in the hole. Though he could now almost reach the lip of the crevice with his weighted rope, he had exhausted his supply of stones and was too weak from hunger and exhaustion to dig for more. He knew that soon he would be starving and that if he was ever to complete his task and get out of the place he must have food… But what to eat?
For all he knew the plants in the inner cave may well be poisonous, but they were his only hope; and so he took his first bite from one of them. That first bite, while
it made him feel sick, was nevertheless strangely satisfying. Later he was able completely to fill himself from the plant and the strength he gained from this singular food source was prodigious. After a while the sickly taste no longer made him feel ill; indeed, he began to enjoy a narcotic sense of well-being.
Just how true this was—the fact that he had deeply drugged himself—was not realised until another evil dream released him from his torpor. He had been in the hole almost seven days when his own screaming roused him from the throes of nightmare. He could fairly well gauge just how much time had passed by the heavy stubble grown on his chin.
In his new dream the priest-creatures had sealed off the sacrificial cavern with holy, inscribed stones—the very stones for which he now dug so frantically in the floor of the pit—but there had been much more than that to the dream; Matthew admitted so much but would tell me no more of that final nightmare, merely stating that it “did not bear relating”.
With his new-found strength and in his frantic haste, it took him only a few hours to complete the platform. At last he was able to fling his stone-laden rope up out of the defile and, amazingly, with his very first attempt came success! The rough stone wedged, and held, and without a great deal of effort he was able to haul himself out. Elated, he scrambled down the knoll and hurried back across the moors to Eeley.
• • •
In just a few days Eeley and High-Marske got over the upset that Matthew had caused; the groups which had gathered in the village pubs to chat and wonder about his disappearance themselves dispersed. Then, after Matthew had assured police Sergeant Mellor that the pit was so out of the way as to create no menace to village children, he was able to get down to his studies again.
He had unintentionally brought back with him a portion of the plant from which he had eaten; he assured me that in his haste to escape from the pit he would never consciously have thought of it. In fact his sample was one that he had torn from the plant to eat later and which he found, upon his return, still in his pocket where he had put it. Though the fragment was rapidly deteriorating, it was still firm enough to permit him to study it.