The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt

them — and soulless.

      He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely — lovely even through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin’s, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning, these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.

      And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to save him had cast herself into the Dweller’s embrace!

      “Throckmartin!” I cried. “Throckmartin! I’m here!”

      Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.

      But then I waited — hope striving to break through the nightmare hands that gripped my heart.

      Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them, others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying — and still staring were lost in the awful throng.

      Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see them — nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by the Dweller.

      “Throckmartin!” I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.

      I felt Lakla’s light touch.

      “Steady,” she commanded, pitifully. “Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help them — now! Steady and — watch!”

      Below us the Shining One had paused — spiralling, swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires. Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. They poised themselves like a diadem — calm, serene, immobile — and down from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of spider’s web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to run — POWER— from the seven globes; like — yes, that was it — miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool’s chamber roof.

      Swam out of the coruscating haze the — face!

      Both of man and of woman it was — like some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic — and still no more of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.

      Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form — and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something amorphous, unearthly — as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it — and in some — unholy — way debased.

      It had eyes — eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, OPENING windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the — face — bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!

      “Steady!” came Lakla’s voice, her body leaned against mine.

      I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had none — nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.

      So the Dweller stood — and gazed.

      Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!

      Under my hand Lakla’s shoulder quivered; Dead–Alive and their master vanished — I danced, flickered, WITHIN the rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack, one by one — slipped, wheeled, flattened, and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.

      Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm still about the handmaiden’s white shoulder; Larry’s hand still clutching her girdle.

      The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space — was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened — died.

      “Now have you beheld,” said Lakla, “and well you trod the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the Shining One is — and how it came to be.”

      The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.

      Larry as silent as I— we followed her through it.

       1. Reprinted in full in Nature, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it. — W. T. G.

      CHAPTER XXIX

       THE SHAPING OF THE SHINING ONE

       Table of Contents

      We reached what I knew to be Lakla’s own boudoir, if I may so call it. Smaller than any of the other chambers of the domed castle in which we had been, its intimacy was revealed not only by its faint fragrance but by its high mirrors of polished silver and various oddly wrought articles of the feminine toilet that lay here and there; things I afterward knew to be the work of the artisans of the Akka — and no mean metal workers were they. One of the window slits dropped almost to the floor, and at its base was a wide, comfortably cushioned seat commanding a view of the bridge and of the cavern ledge. To this the handmaiden beckoned us; sank upon it, drew Larry down beside her and motioned me to sit close to him.

      “Now this,” she said, “is what the Silent Ones have commanded me to tell you two: To you Larry, that knowing you may weigh all things in your mind and answer as your spirit bids you a question that the Three will ask — and what that is I know not,” she murmured, “and I, they say, must answer, too — and it — frightens me!”

      The great golden eyes widened; darkened with dread; she sighed, shook her head impatiently.

      “Not like us, and never like us,” she spoke low, wonderingly, “the Silent Ones say were they. Nor were those from which they sprang like those from which we have come. Ancient, ancient beyond thought are the Taithu, the race of the Silent Ones. Far, far below this place where now we sit, close to earth heart itself were they born; and there they dwelt for time upon time, laya upon laya upon laya — with others, not like them, some of which have vanished time upon time agone, others that still dwell — below — in their — cradle.

      “It is hard”— she hesitated —“hard to tell this — that slips through my mind — because I know so little that even as the Three told it to me it passed from me for lack of place to stand upon,” she went on, quaintly. “Something there was of time when earth and sun were but cold mists in the — the heavens — something of these mists drawing together, whirling, whirling, faster and faster — drawing as they whirled more and more of the mists — growing larger, growing warm — forming at last into the globes they are, with others spinning around the sun — something of regions within this globe where vast fire was prisoned and bursting forth tore and rent the young orb — of one such bursting forth