The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt

Stanton, my eyes swept the head of the steps and stopped, fascinated. For the moonlight had thickened. It seemed to be — curdled — there; and through it ran little gleams and veins of shimmering white fire. A languor passed through me. It was not the ineffable drowsiness of the preceding night. It was a sapping of all will to move. I tried to cry out to Stanton. I had not even the will to move my lips. Goodwin — I could not even move my eyes!

      “Stanton was in the range of my fixed vision. I watched him leap up the steps and move toward the gateway. The curdled radiance seemed to await him. He stepped into it — and was lost to my sight.

      “For a dozen heart beats there was silence. Then a rain of tinklings that set the pulses racing with joy and at once checked them with tiny fingers of ice — and ringing through them Stanton’s voice from the courtyard — a great cry — a scream — filled with ecstasy insupportable and horror unimaginable! And once more there was silence. I strove to burst the bonds that held me. I could not. Even my eyelids were fixed. Within them my eyes, dry and aching, burned.

      “Then Goodwin — I first saw the — inexplicable! The crystalline music swelled. Where I sat I could take in the gateway and its basalt portals, rough and broken, rising to the top of the wall forty feet above, shattered, ruined portals — unclimbable. From this gateway an intenser light began to flow. It grew, it gushed, and out of it walked Stanton.

      “Stanton! But — God! What a vision!”

      A deep tremor shook him. I waited — waited.

      CHAPTER V

       INTO THE MOON POOL

       Table of Contents

      “Goodwin,” Throckmartin went on at last, “I can describe him only as a thing of living light. He radiated light; was filled with light; overflowed with it. A shining cloud whirled through and around him in radiant swirls, shimmering tentacles, luminescent, coruscating spirals.

      “His face shone with a rapture too great to be borne by living man, and was shadowed with insuperable misery. It was as though it had been remoulded by the hand of God and the hand of Satan, working together and in harmony. You have seen that seal upon my own. But you have never seen it in the degree that Stanton bore it. The eyes were wide open and fixed, as though upon some inward vision of hell and heaven!

      “The light that filled and surrounded him had a nucleus, a core — something shiftingly human shaped — that dissolved and changed, gathered itself, whirled through and beyond him and back again. And as its shining nucleus passed through him Stanton’s whole body pulsed radiance. As the luminescence moved, there moved above it, still and serene always, seven tiny globes of seven colors, like seven little moons.

      “Then swiftly Stanton was lifted — levitated — up the unscalable wall and to its top. The glow faded from the moonlight, the tinkling music grew fainter. I tried again to move. The tears were running down now from my rigid lids and they brought relief to my tortured eyes.

      “I have said my gaze was fixed. It was. But from the side, peripherally, it took in a part of the far wall of the outer enclosure. Ages seemed to pass and a radiance stole along it. Soon drifted into sight the figure that was Stanton. Far away he was — on the gigantic wall. But still I could see the shining spirals whirling jubilantly around and through him; felt rather than saw his tranced face beneath the seven moons. A swirl of crystal notes, and he had passed. And all the time, as though from some opened well of light, the courtyard gleamed and sent out silver fires that dimmed the moonrays, yet seemed strangely to be a part of them.

      “At last the moon neared the horizon. There came a louder burst of sound; the second, and last, cry of Stanton, like an echo of his first! Again the soft sighing from the inner terrace. Then — utter silence!

      “The light faded; the moon was setting and with a rush life and power to move returned to me. I made a leap for the steps, rushed up them, through the gateway and straight to the grey rock. It was closed — as I knew it would be. But did I dream it or did I bear, echoing through it as though from vast distances a triumphant shouting?

      “I ran back to Edith. At my touch she wakened; looked at me wanderingly; raised herself on a hand.

      “‘Dave!’ she said, ‘I slept — after all.’ She saw the despair on my face and leaped to her feet. ‘Dave!’ she cried. ‘What is it? Where’s Charles?’

      “I lighted a fire before I spoke. Then I told her. And for the balance of that night we sat before the flames, arms around each other — like two frightened children.”

      Abruptly Throckmartin held his hands out to me appealingly.

      “Walter, old friend!” he cried. “Don’t look at me as though I were mad. It’s truth, absolute truth. Wait —” I comforted him as well as I could. After a little time he took up his story.

      “Never,” he said, “did man welcome the sun as we did that morning. A soon as it had risen we went back to the courtyard. The walls whereon I had seen Stanton were black and silent. The terraces were as they had been. The grey slab was in its place. In the shallow hollow at its base was — nothing. Nothing — nothing was there anywhere on the islet of Stanton — not a trace.

      “What were we to do? Precisely the same arguments that had kept us there the night before held good now — and doubly good. We could not abandon these two; could not go as long as there was the faintest hope of finding them — and yet for love of each other how could we remain? I loved my wife — how much I never knew until that day; and she loved me as deeply.

      “‘It takes only one each night,’ she pleaded. ‘Beloved, let it take me.’

      “I wept, Walter. We both wept.

      “‘We will meet it together,’ she said. And it was thus at last that we arranged it.”

      “That took great courage indeed, Throckmartin,” I interrupted. He looked at me eagerly.

      “You do believe then?” he exclaimed.

      “I believe,” I said. He pressed my hand with a grip that nearly crushed it.

      “Now,” he told me. “I do not fear. If I— fail, you will follow with help?”

      I promised.

      “We talked it over carefully,” he went on, “bringing to bear all our power of analysis and habit of calm, scientific thought. We considered minutely the time element in the phenomena. Although the deep chanting began at the very moment of moonrise, fully five minutes had passed between its full lifting and the strange sighing sound from the inner terrace. I went back in memory over the happenings of the night before. At least ten minutes had intervened between the first heralding sigh and the intensification of the moonlight in the courtyard. And this glow grew for at least ten minutes more before the first burst of the crystal notes. Indeed, more than half an hour must have elapsed, I calculated, between the moment the moon showed above the horizon and the first delicate onslaught of the tinklings.

      “‘Edith!’ I cried. ‘I think I have it! The grey rock opens five minutes after upon the moonrise. But whoever or whatever it is that comes through it must wait until the moon has risen higher, or else it must come from a distance. The thing to do is not to wait for it, but to surprise it before it passes out the door. We will go into the inner court early. You will take your rifle and pistol and hide yourself where you can command the opening — if the slab does open. The instant it opens I will enter. It’s our best chance, Edith. I think it’s our only one.’

      “My wife demurred strongly. She wanted to go with me. But I convinced her that it was better for her to stand guard without, prepared to help me if I were forced again into the open by what lay behind the rock.

      “At the half-hour before moonrise we went into the inner court. I took my place at the side of the grey rock. Edith crouched behind a broken pillar twenty feet away; slipped her rifle-barrel over it so