Selected Stories. Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт

can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move — you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!’

      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary.

      For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.

      I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He, who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:

      ‘God! If you could see what I am seeing!’

      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:

      ‘Carter, it’s terrible — monstrous — unbelievable!’

      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, ‘Warren, what is it? What is it?’

      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:

      ‘I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought — I dare not tell you — no man could know it and live — Great God! I never dreamed of this!’

      Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:

      ‘Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick! — leave everything else and make for the outside — it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!’

      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:

      ‘Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!’

      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, ‘Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!’ But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:

      ‘Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late — and my own fault. Put back the slab and run — there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!’

      The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.

      ‘Quick — before it’s too late!’

      I tried not to heed him: tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.

      ‘Carter — hurry! It’s no use — you must go — better one than two — the slab —’

      A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:

      ‘Nearly over now — don’t make it harder — cover up those damned steps and run for your life — you’re losing time — so long, Carter — won’t see you again.’

      Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages -

      ‘Curse these hellish things — legions — My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!’

      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those eons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, ‘Warren! Warren! Answer me — are you there?’

      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all — the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, ‘Warren, are you there?’ and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing — that voice — nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more — heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours — heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.

      And this is what it said:

      ‘You fool, Warren is DEAD!’

       HERBERT WEST–REANIMATOR

      I. FROM THE DARK

      Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in other life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University medical school in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

      The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in medical school, where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible,