Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

The Warder of Knowledge RICHARD F. SEARIGHT

The following record has been compiled from various sources, of which the most important are Doctor Whitney’s elaborate journal and the remarkable psychic impressions received in Whitney’s bedroom by Professor Turkoff of the university psychology department. The contents of the neatly typed manuscript, found in a drawer of Whitney’s library desk, may be dismissed as the ravings of an unbalanced intellect, or the fantastic flights of a gruesome imagination. In spite of the nature of Turkoff’s clairvoyant impressions, the shocking allusions and appalling inferences with which its pages are filled can hardly receive the credence of an impartial reader. Indeed, those members of the university faculty who saw it were unanimous in their opinion that it was the work of a madman familiar with peculiarly repellent variants of primitive folklore and certain ancient legends; and while these members did not have access to Whitney’s journal, which I appropriated at the time for fear its disclosures might indeed reflect positively on the sanity of my friend, I shall not attempt to refute their conclusions.

It seems that even as a young child Gordon Whitney had been oddly different from his associates. From the age when reason assumed control, an insatiable desire for knowledge had obsessed him. Of course, this was partly the normal, questioning curiosity of childhood — but it went further. He was not satisfied by sketchy outlines of facts; his craving was for the most complete and detailed information available on every subject that his busy mind encountered. Even at this early age he was harassed by a restless, driving urge, without motive or practical goal, to crowd into one mind all the vast aggregation of discovered scientific fact as well as the limitless secrets still undisclosed to research. And as he grew older, and absorbed what seemed to him the superficial teachings of orthodox education, the urge within him clamored more and more loudly.

There was no especial reason behind his selection of chemistry as a life work. He might have chosen any one of half a dozen sciences, particularly paleography, into which he probed as deeply as his diffused energies would permit. But organic chemistry, with its incredibly huge store of proven fact and the staggering array of half-guessed and wholly unsuspected truths which he felt must still be unrevealed, offered an inexhaustible outlet for his ambitions. The tireless enthusiasm with which he threw himself into these studies impressed his instructors; and when he received his doctor’s degree, he was offered an instructorship at Beloin University, the small mid-western seat of his education. This he accepted gladly, since it provided an atmosphere in harmony with his longings as well as the material means of pursuing them.

It was during the period immediately ensuing that he began his delving into the occult. The strange quirk in his nature that would not let him rest was responsible for this series of studies, also; and it had been suggested and stimulated by ambiguous references and obscure quotations in the more standard writings. Thus it was that he spent shuddering, horror-ridden hours perusing the Latin version of the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred. Later he read with revolted fascination the equivocal disclosures and incredible inferences of the Book of Eibon; and finally terminated the studies on a gusty November night by turning white-lipped and shaking from his uncompleted translation of the cryptic and half- decipherable Eltdown Shards. After that his leisure was again directed into conservative channels; but the outrageous suggestions implanted in his mind had left an ineradicable imprint.

While Whitney was not entirely a recluse, the bulk of the time he could spare from routine lectures and paleographic studies — which continued to be an extensive avocation — was still devoted to chemical experiments. He achieved a certain reputation and in time was promoted to the chair of chemistry at Beloin; and thereafter his new facilities were used wholeheartedly for research — for a great dream had taken shape in his mind.

It was an absurd dream whose possibility of fulfillment was so fantastic that he would never have dared to confide it to another; yet so poignantly appealing that he finally embraced it with a passionate, blind acceptance, directing all his thoughts and actions to its realization. Before the dream had crystallized as a potential reality, he had half unconsciously selected and catalogued various data relating to it; and perhaps this segregated information itself suggested the use to which it might be put. And so, at the age of forty-five, Gordon Whitney entered unreservedly upon his great quest for omniscience in fact.

His plan was daring enough but not, he fondly insisted, impossible. Yet after five years of intensive research he had not realized his objective, although he had achieved a number of radical developments in the field of mental stimulants. Profound familiarity with cellular structure and characteristics, coupled with a minute knowledge of pertinent drugs and compounds, had given him a great advantage; but a series of cautious experiments convinced him that the ultimate refinement of his formulae could offer no more than a temporary and perhaps dangerous stimulus. And he finally accepted, regretfully enough, the fact that he had been evading from the first — that no drug by itself could endow his brain with the extraordinary clarity and capacity and superhuman retentiveness that he wished.

It was in the reaction of disappointment after his long-sustained efforts had definitely failed, that he turned to the past for aid. Certainly, he had never given a calculated, unbiased belief to the incredible inferences and revoltingly plausible assumptions which had fascinated him during his early studies. But the bitterness of seeing the fulfillment of his cherished dream beyond his reach made him ready to investigate anything that offered even the remotest likelihood of help, no matter how fantastic — or terrible — it might be.

It was in this connection that the nineteenth of the carefully catalogued Eltdown Shards returned insistently to his mind. He had not made a complete translation of this shard during his study of the series; but he had begun one and had never forgotten the all but unintelligible opening with its ambiguous reference to what, freely translated, he believed meant “the Warder of Knowledge.” Now he welcomed the possibility of some long-forgotten material bearing on his problem, entombed in this shard.

That night he assigned his lectures for the next few days to assistants. In the morning he hurried across the undulating campus, drab and grey and swept by the winds of late autumn, to the small redbrick museum, whose ivy-clad walls sat back among ancient, towering oaks in an obscure corner of the grounds. Here, in the musty, half-lit depths of the building, he found the old curator, Doctor Carr, and induced him to unlock the high cabinet of black walnut which held the collection of the Shards. Carr did this with his usual reluctance. For him the contents of the cabinet had always held a peculiar repugnance; and he had occasionally hinted that they were better left alone.

After Carr had left, Whitney ran an appraising eye over the shelves. Arranged along them were the ticketed slabs of iron-hard grey clay, of all shapes, and ranging in size from the fifth shard, an oblong piece about four inches by eight, to the fourteenth, a jagged, roughly triangular tablet nearly twenty inches across. Most of them were incomplete and some were mere fragments. Eons of time, geologic disturbances, and unknowable mishaps, had cracked them and split off portions, some of which had not been found in the early Tri- assic stratum of the gravel pit near Eltdown where the discovery had been made. The nineteenth shard, which Whitney presently selected and laid on a scarred oak table by the window, presented an odd exception to the others. Its lower edge had been sheared away as cleanly as if by the stroke of a scimitar; and the unbroken line of cleavage, differing so markedly from the ragged indentures and smooth, roundly worn edges of the other tablets, suggested a deliberate mutilation when the clay had been fresh and comparatively soft. In other respects the shard, which was roughly a foot square, was in rather better condition than the average. Its smoothly rounded edges were broken only occasionally by unimportant chippings, and none of the writing was obliterated.

The writing or carving — it was useless to speculate regarding the means used to produce it — consisted of intricate, delicately proportioned characters confined within a surrounding margin about an inch wide; a style of delineation followed in all twenty-three of the shards. Fine, symmetrical symbols writhed over the entire space within this border. They stood out sharply under a magnifying glass, and Whitney found it expedient to use one during most of his work. Examinations had revealed that the writing surface was sunk slightly below the marginal level — a circumstance which, together with the extreme hardness of the material, probably accounted for the specimens being found in as legible a state as they were.

Whitney sat at the table and began the translation, a task demanding the most specialized skill. The geologic stratum in which the shards had lain indicated an antiquity antedating by millions of years the earliest inscriptions previously known; and translation was made possible only by the suggestive similarity of various symbols to certain primitive Amharic and Arabic word roots, whose prototypes they appeared to be. But to the best equipped student the task was complicated and difficult; for in an attempt to interpret word roots only the nicest judgment and most scholarly background could serve to discover a close approximation of the original meaning.

Whitney worked through the grey November day. Then he induced the reluctant curator to lend him the piece for a few days, using the plea of convenient access to the reference works in his library. Holding it carefully wrapped beneath his arm, he crossed the dusky campus to the high stone house at the edge; the house he had purchased shortly after beginning his duties at the University. He placed the shard on his flat-topped walnut desk in the spacious book-lined study which opened off the modest drawing-room, and resumed his work.

He had made encouraging progress and had no doubt of achieving a reasonably accurate translation. His supposition regarding the root combination tentatively believed “The Warder of Knowledge” seemed correct — at least to the extent that no other interpretation appeared plausible. But further deciphering had proved disquieting. The character of the eon-old entity, or principle, to which the term was applied was apparently of a most disturbing nature. While the references to it were marked by an ambiguity of expression distinct from the natural difficulties of translation, the only possible conclusions were quite as alarming as his former work on the shards could have led him to anticipate.

He repressed a shudder as he reviewed the fine script, covering several sheets, which he had written with his fountain pen: the draft of the shard’s contents. He remembered reading how, some forty- four years before, the first examiners of the Shards, Doctors Dalton and Woodford, had announced them to be untranslatable. He recalled their published statements disparaging the importance of the discovery; and the odd haste with which the specimens had been shunted to this obscure museum and locked away. And, thinking of how completely these fragments had been forgotten by scientific men, he wondered if enough could have been deciphered of the halfobliterated symbols to provide a hint of the appalling nature of the meaning — enough to make the translators guess at the authorship of these elaborately worked tablets found in a geologic stratum deposited long before man’s anthropoid ancestors had evolved from lower orders. He had never seriously suspected that the Shards had been deliberately discarded because of their contents, for he attributed his own success with them to certain recondite documents that had suggested the key. But now he wondered.

When he resumed work in his study, he had deciphered enough to know that the portion of writing enclosed in a sort of cartouche effect near the bottom of the shard was a formula of evocation which, according to the preceding text, would call the “Warder” to the presence of whomever would recite it. While this formula appeared complete, as evidenced by the enclosing oblong, the cloven edge of the tablet was directly beneath; a circumstance which suggested that the complementary formula of dismissal, universally met with in ancient spells, had been on the missing fragment.

The evocation proved very different from its prologue. It was purely phonetic in nature, and there was no slightest clue to its meaning. Associated with the preceding inscription, or indeed with any material familiar to Whitney, it was nothing but characters which, when pronounced, would result in a jumble of meaningless sounds. But unquestionably the correct utterance of these sounds was all that was theoretically necessary to call the “Warder.” Whether or not the person pronouncing them understood their significance had nothing to do with their efficacy. This would depend, according to all he had read in other sources, entirely on the faithfulness with which the evocator was able to reproduce the intended sound waves, to which the written formula occupied the relation of a quasi-musical score.

Whitney devoted the greatest care to these phonetics, checking and rechecking his work. When he was satisfied with this, he again went over the prologue, amplifying and refining his original draft. As he progressed, the sinister nature of the supposed entity and the dubious results attendant on summoning it became more and more disquieting. He gathered — assuming his translation to be fairly accurate — that the “Warder” had been considered the custodian or guardian of all knowledge of every description. But much of the reference was almost meaningless, making a singularly alien impression — and he was impelled, as he had been years before, to the belief that a genuine understanding of the Shards would require a background of culture and tradition profoundly at variance to any he had ever encountered. Yet there seemed no doubt of the malign character of the entity, and the undefined risk involved in summoning it. Even in the heat of enthusiasm which had carried him through fifteen hours of arduous effort, Whitney was shocked at the inferences which his interpretation disclosed. He recalled the dire and incredible tales of the fabled elder gods in the Book of Eibon and the frightful allusions in the Necronomicon. Dread Cthulhu, the unspeakable practices of the Tsathoggua cult, and the revolting habits of fiendish Avaloth — of which latter, the fifth Shard had treated at some length- returned vividly to mind and made the mythical era in which the elder gods had walked the earth and bent all things to a callous, inhuman purpose seem unpleasantly real. A bleak, uneasy sense of foreboding settled on his spirits. He sensibly attributed this to the natural reaction from the strain of his work and went to bed, planning to review it all on the following day.

In the morning he told Mrs. Huessman, his housekeeper, that he was not to be disturbed, and retired to his study. Part of the day was given to an exhaustive checking and revision of the translation. He finally made a copy of this on his antiquated typewriter, much in the spirit of a man who cleans up every possible detail before attacking a distasteful task. For much of the time, especially during the grey, dismal afternoon, was spent in mental preparation for an act from which he recoiled with instinctive dread. At times the incubus of impending disaster weighed so heavily on him that he half resolved to dabble no further in the unholy revelations of the Shards, but to burn the translation and banish forever the purpose of evoking the entity. But at this, a revulsion set in, and the idea of abandoning his dream of omniscience struck so keenly at his heart that any risk seemed preferable to accepting it. The early dusk found him tired from the mental strife, but calm. He had decided.

After his dinner he would read the spell aloud and await the result. After all, it was almost certainly nothing but an impotent superstition, ancient of course, but no more effective because of its age. The likelihood of anything at all responding to the summons seemed utterly remote; yet he felt that he could not resign himself to defeat without being satisfied that his last possibility was definitely hopeless. He passed to the dining room with a calm and confident stride.

It was a wild November night, just such a night as that on which his earlier excursion into occult studies had ended, with a raw wind shrilling, and whipping the tall, cone-shaped poplars that grew about the house. After serving his dinner, Mrs. Huessman had left for the night, and Whitney was alone. He lingered over his coffee longer than usual; then lit a second cigarette and returned to the study. He touched a match to the wood piled ready in the fireplace, and paced slowly back and forth as the room warmed.

Presently he seated himself at the old walnut desk which had been the companion of so many years of study. He cast a long look around the dim-lit room, lined by row on row of varied volumes, letting his eyes dwell on each cabinet and table and massive leather chair. Now that the moment had come he could no longer minimize the danger in calling to his presence this shadowy being that stalked, grisly and menacing, through the annals of an elder world. His mind dwelt fleetingly on the folly of it all.

Successful, honored, economically secure — why was he meddling with forces so dark and sinister that fellow scientists had shrunk from them aghast? For a moment his resolution wavered; then he had shaken off the fearsome doubts once more.

What was life, if he could not achieve his long-sought goal? A few more years like those of the past; then life and career would be ended, with all his hopes and dreams and restless longings unfulfilled for want of a moment’s stiffening courage, if he failed to act now. He knew he would not nerve himself to the ordeal a second time.

He began the evocation.

He did not rise and wave his arms and chant; nor light censers, nor enclose himself in a pentacle. He was attempting to draw to his presence an entity from so far back in the dawn of existence that these questionable appurtenances of later wizardry would have been meaningless to it. He was dealing in the crudely forceful elements of all theurgy, stripped of latter day trappings and embellishments.

The formula lay before him, but the grotesque gutturals were burnt indelibly into his brain. He could never forget them, unless through some hiatus of memory akin to the nervous stage-fright of an actor or public speaker. Nevertheless, he took no chances, but kept his eyes on the manuscript.

His tone was low and steady and conversational in pitch. Each uncouth syllable was pronounced slowly and stressed evenly. He knew that it was the combination of vibrations, propelled into the ether by the sound of the words, that would reach the thing he summoned. The sounds were the key — it was possible that the words themselves had no meaning. And consequently the volume of tone could have no bearing on their effectiveness. His great concern was the correct pronunciation of sounds whose blasphemous vibrations had not troubled the earth for untold ages. But he could only try, and hope that his transliteration of the writhing characters within the cartouche had been sufficiently accurate.

Nothing happened. He knew that nothing could happen until the last sound wave of the intricate series had winged its way outward through the atmosphere and perhaps the ether and the universe to its unknown destination, near or far, completing the interlocking pattern of vibrations that comprised the call. And so his voice droned on monotonously, mouthing crude, rumbling gutturals never intended for human utterance. With cold determination he held himself to a steady, unhurried gait. It might spoil everything for the slightest emotion-born quaver to disrupt the even flow of vibrations. It could destroy the efficacy of the spell entirely; or the variation in length of that particular wave, infinitesimal at its origin but gaining steadily in divergency throughout its journey, might create a summons subtly different from that which he intended. And the answer might be even more horrible and far less useful than the one he anticipated.

He reached the end and stopped. He could almost hear his heart thumping wildly in the contrasting silence; and traffic noises from the distant street, mingled with the rushing wind, seemed oddly unreal. After a moment he thrust the translation into a drawer of the desk and sat down, tense and strained, in the deep leather chair beside the fireplace.

He was prepared to wait. Somehow, an instantaneous response would have surprised him. The endless eons which must have passed since those syllables had been pronounced made it seem plausible that a little time — at least a few minutes — might elapse before an answer came, if it came at all. In the meantime his mind should be at rest. He had followed to its logical conclusion the only course remaining that offered a possibility of help. He had taken each separate step with the most painstaking care; and if no response ensued, he would know that the door to omniscience was closed to mortal passage.

But as he sat before the glowing fire an oppressive sense of doubt and foreboding stole over his spirits. Now that the summons was irrevocably completed, he was impressed ever more deeply by the rashness of calling up forces over which he had not the remotest control. The fulfillment of his dream did not so dazzle him, and muffle the warning voice of caution, as it had before. For a moment he had something of the panic feeling of a suicide who sees a suddenly appreciated existence slipping irretrievably away. He could almost accept a defeat of his hopes for realization of the dream, now….

He glanced at the clock and saw that half an hour had passed since he had finished the evocation. Apparently the call was not to be answered. And perhaps it were better so — better that nothing did or could arise from the gelid reaches of outer space to stand before him at his bidding and help him if it would.

But the vague dread rested heavily on his heart. It was still early and, moved by some perverse impulse, he seated himself in the high- backed chair behind his desk and made a long entry in his journal, bringing it up to date. Then he went upstairs to bed, tired and uneasy, with a growing sense of nameless menace weighing on his spirits.

He closed his eyes resolutely, and sleep came quickly, in spite of his fears — a healthful, dreamless slumber brought on by his exhaustion. But at length dreams began to form, and the sleeper muttered and tossed as he stumbled through a shadowy wilderness of tall, fernlike plants, misty with the exhalations of a new and uncooled world. The vegetation was rank and high and utterly alien, shooting up in a towering luxuriance that shut off all view, and through which he forced a pygmy pathway. From all about came sibilant whispers alternating with uncouth, deep-toned gutturals; and occasionally he heard the rustling of unseen bodies through the fern-like stalks. But they were always out of sight in the dense profusion of vegetation, and he steered a tortuous course trying to avoid them, for the sounds suggested no form of life that he had ever known.

Where he was going he did not know; but there grew upon him a sense of pursuit by some unknown and frightful follower. He was fleeing blindly through the enshrouding ferns, with unseen alien beings about him, from an awful and nameless fate that clung upon his trail. He was running now, running with a gasping, reckless haste through the dense growth, careless of discovery by the things that whispered all around him. He ran with a vigor and endurance that he could not have shown in waking life, crushing his way through endless miles of the tall, yielding ferns. But far behind he sensed the presence of the dogged pursuit, hanging grimly to his trail and gradually gaining ground.

He plunged on, panting, and ploughing his way through the mocking barrier with laboring effort. Then, suddenly, he had broken abruptly from the primeval forest upon a broad, bare, undulating plain stretching away to a hazy horizon, without a possibility of hiding- places. He would have turned back into the tenebrous growth behind, but the measured stamp of mighty footsteps already shook the earth along the path he had just made. Above the ferns towered the shrouded visage of a gigantic stalking thing, striding toward him through the dream with heavy, measured steps.

In the dream, Whitney turned to flee across the rolling open space; but a long, snake-like tentacle encircled his waist and jerked him to a halt. The tentacle was grey and rugose and semi-scaled, and its grip was like a loop of tensile steel about his middle. Whitney turned in the loose grasp and gazed up at the figure looming shadowy and monstrous high above his head. Its face was exposed now, and he saw a great, broad, impassive visage, vaguely suggestive of human mold, but with shocking and blasphemous differences. Cold, impersonal eyes met his own — long, narrow green orbs in which pity or hate or any human emotion seemed impossible.

Suddenly the tentacle tightened its grip and he was swung aloft. As his feet left the spongy soil a whirling nausea gripped him; a roaring filled his ears and the plain turned black.

Like a dream within a dream he opened his eyes on a vast panorama of cosmic grandeur unfolding with measured sweep before him. He was moving swiftly through illimitable reaches of space, passing great stars and planets and through constellations and universes. He felt the swirling rush and beat of blind, titanic forces all about him; but of their nature he could tell little save that they were mindless reservoirs of terrific energy, pulsing in accordance with unfathomable laws.

Finally he came to rest and saw, or was aware of, a giant gaseous globe, flaming endlessly through boundless reaches of space; and after untold millions of years beheld a stupendous explosion which scattered blazing gas across the universe. Like a god, he was conscious of the passage of more billions of years while the gas cooled and molten planets swung through their elliptical orbits around the parent star. He watched them cool and saw, at last, the genesis of life upon the third world from the sun. It seemed closer to him now, and he looked down upon dank, lush vegetation growing on a watery orb in which huge shapes, neither reptile nor mammal, bellowed and fought through long ages.

Then he beheld the migration from the voids of outer space of numberless alien creatures, winged and tentacled, with strange, barrel-shaped bodies. And he knew that he witnessed the colonization of a new world by the supposedly fabulous Old Ones, mentioned so insistently by the mad author of the Necronomicon. And he understood, too, that his vision was being limited by the restrictions of his own finite experience and knowledge. He was seeing only the development of his own planet. But he scarcely gave this a thought, and continued to watch the teeming millions of the Old Ones as they built their vast, cyclopean cities, partly on land but mostly beneath the water on the ocean beds. He viewed the flight from other worlds of the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow Men, the spawn of Cthulhu, and their building of the terrible stone city of R’lyeh; and the terrific struggle waged between them and the Old Ones for supremacy. He saw a compromise finally effected, and the progress of the Old Ones through more millions of years. He shuddered at their unspeakable slaves, the shoggoths, the existence of which on this earth was so fervently denied in the Necronomicon. He studied their strange, alien culture and dimly, as through a haze, saw their dwindling and decline and beheld certain records being inscribed on familiar-looking baked-clay tablets for an inscrutable purpose.

After this the rise of reptilian life upon the planet appeared.

Eon after eon passed before him. Mammalian life came into being and developed, but the terrible elder gods, who had lived even before the Old Ones came, continued to walk the earth, plaguing the crude, semi-anthropoid creatures who had begun to stand erect. Time passed and the earth swarmed with two-legged beings, now definitely men and definitely beginning to subjugate nature. Whitney watched their evolution, their wars and cultures and scientific progress. He saw the civilizations of Atlantis and Mu and Lemuria and scores of others of which no faintest memory has descended to the modern world; and realized in a flash of astounded comprehension to what heights of power and learning they attained before the rushing seas, barbaric onslaughts, or inevitable decadence, swallowed them up. He thrilled to the deeds of the Grecian heroes of the Golden Age and followed the path of Aeneas to the founding of Rome. The destinies of mighty Egypt and the conquests of the dark hordes of Assyria and Babylonia unfolded before his eyes; and he passed on down the years of history, knowing all, seeing all, understanding all the happenings of the world he lived in. The obscure and misunderstood events of the past and the disputed points of history became clear.

At length his own age passed in review, and he smiled contentedly as the immense minutiae of world learning was absorbed by his mind. Then, leisurely, inexorably, he passed on into time, thrilling to behold, one after another, the solution of the great problems towards which science had been turning. One by one he beheld the secrets of the universe captured and harnessed and their fundamental simplicity made clear. Through endless eons to an aged world, rolling cold and desert-like beneath a dying sun, to the ultimate black frigidity of interstellar space and final annihilation, he followed.

In the last darkness, enveloped in the cosmic cold, his senses reeled and the whirling nausea again engulfed him.

He opened his eyes to find himself suspended high in the air by the great tentacle still wrapt around his waist. And his gaze opened full on the cold, inhuman stare of the green eyes.

There was something magnetic yet revolting, something utterly alien yet supremely fascinating in those long, green eyes. He could not swerve his head nor wrench his gaze away from that effortlessly hypnotic stare. As he struggled in helpless panic, the thought of the strangely symmetrical mutilation of the nineteenth shard and the spell of exorcism he had never had an opportunity to memorize flashed across his mind…. He sensed the tentacle gradually and inexorably drawing him closer and closer. The weird, unmentionably deformed face loomed nearer and nearer. The eyes seemed growing, great lakes of mystic green, shot with tiny, dancing sparks. Whitney felt the fainting sensation of one swaying on a precipice. Then he was hurtling down into a vast seething sea of cold green fire where his intellect and ego would be absorbed and become one with their host.

The sun shone and a crisp wind blew bracingly over a new- washed world the next morning when Gordon Whitney’s housekeeper found the professor’s bedroom door locked and the inmate unresponsive to her knocks. In her growing concern she called certain faculty members who were crossing the campus, and together they finally broke down the bedroom door.

Whitney was quite dead, although an autopsy failed to establish any cause. He would have seemed asleep had it not been for that shocking expression of horrified despair — which, as Professor Turkoff privately observed afterwards, harmonized so strangely with the realization of a life’s dream.