The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt (electronic reader .TXT) š
- Author: Abraham Merritt
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"Steady!" It was Lakla's voiceāand not beside me there, but at my ear close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin! Andāsee!"
The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me. Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdureāfruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivionāgrapes of Letheāthat cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a hordeāgreat as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califsāmen and women and childrenāclothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westernersāmen and women and childrenādrifting, eddyingāeach stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embraceāthe seal of the Shining Oneāthe dead-alive; the lost ones!
The loot of the Dweller!
Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us, glaring upwardāa bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath usāstaringāstaring!
Now there was a movementāfar, far away; a concentrating of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separatedāforming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.
First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendours through the lane cameāthe Shining One. As it passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spirallings and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamingsālike vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly. And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.
The Dweller paused beneath us.
Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within themāand soulless.
He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovelyālovely 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 waitedāhope 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, eddyingāand 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 themānor 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 themānow! Steady andāwatch!"
Below us the Shining One had pausedāspiralling, 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 diademācalm, serene, immobileāand 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 runāpowerāfrom the seven globes; likeāyes, that was itāminiatures 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 theāface!
Both of man and of woman it wasālike some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and maleficāand 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 formāand as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something amorphous, unearthlyāas 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 itāand in someāunholyāway debased.
It had eyesāeyes 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 theāfaceābore 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 noneānothing 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 stoodāand gazed.
Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!
Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanishedāI 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 oneāslipped, 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 spaceāwas still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessenedādied.
"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 isāand how it came to be."
The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.
Larry as silent as Iāwe followed her through it.
[1] Reprinted in full in Nature, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it.āW. T. G.
CHAPTER XXIX The Shaping of the Shining One
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 Akkaāand 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 askāand what that is I know not," she murmured, "and I, they say, must answer, tooāand itāfrightens 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 layaāwith others, not like them, some of which have vanished time upon time agone, others that still dwellābelowāin theirācradle.
"It is hard"āshe hesitatedā"hard to tell thisāthat slips through my mindābecause 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 theāthe heavensāsomething of these mists drawing together, whirling, whirling, faster and fasterādrawing as they whirled more and more of the mistsāgrowing larger, growing warmāforming at last into the globes they are, with others spinning around the sunāsomething of regions within this globe where vast fire was prisoned and bursting forth tore and rent the young orbāof one such bursting forth that sent what you call moon flying out to company us and left behind those spaces whence we now dwellāand ofāof life particles that here and there below grew into the race of the Silent Ones, and those othersābut not the Akka which, like you, they say came from aboveāand all this I do not understandādo you, Goodwin?" she appealed to me.
I noddedāfor what she had related so fragmentarily was in reality an excellent approach to the Chamberlain-Moulton theory of a coalescing nebula contracting into the sun and its planets.
Astonishing was the recognition of this theory. Even more so was the reference to the life particles, the idea of Arrhenius, the great Swede, of life starting on earth through the dropping of minute, life spores, propelled through space by the driving power of light and, encountering favourable environment here, developing through the vast ages into man and every other living thing we know.[1]
Nor was it incredible that in the ancient nebula that was the matrix of our solar system similar, or rather dissimilar, particles in all but the subtle essence we call life, might have become entangled and, resisting every cataclysm as they had resisted the absolute zero of outer space, found in these caverned spaces their proper environment to develop into the race of the Silent Ones andāonly they could tell what else!
"They say," the handmaiden's voice was surer, "they say that in theirācradleānear earth's heart they grew; grew untroubled by the turmoil and disorder which flayed the surface of this globe. And they say it was a place of light and that strength came to them from earth heartāstrength greater than you and those from which you sprang ever derived from sun.
"At last, ancient, ancient beyond all thought, they say again, was this timeāthey began to know, toātoārealizeāthemselves. And wisdom came ever more swiftly. Up from their cradle, because they did not wish to dwell longer with thoseāothersāthey came and found this place.
"When all the face of earth was covered with waters in which lived only tiny, hungry things that knew naught save hunger and its satisfaction, they had attained wisdom that enabled them to make paths such as we have just travelled and
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