The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

The Render of the Veils

At midnight the last bus to Brichester had gone, and it was raining heavily. Kevin Gillson bitterly considered standing under the marquee of the nearby cinema until morning, but the high wind was driving the rain under it so that it provided no shelter. He turned the collar of his raincoat up as water began to ooze down his neck, and slowly walked up the hill away from the bus stop.

The streets were virtually deserted; a few cars which passed did not respond to his signals. Very few of the houses he passed were even lit; it depressed him to walk along the wet-black pavement which reflected wavering images of street lamps back at him. He met only one other person — a silent figure leaning in the shadow of a doorway. Only the red glow from a cigarette persuaded Gillson that anyone was there at all.

At the corner of Gaunt and Ferrey Streets he saw a vehicle approaching him. Half-dazzled by the reflection of the headlights, he made out that it was a taxi, travelling the streets for a final passenger of the night. He waved the bedraggled Camside Observer he was still clutching, and the taxi drew to a stop beside him.

'Are you still taking passengers?' he yelled through the partition.

'I was goin' home,' called back the driver. 'Still — if you've got some way to go — I wouldn't want you walkin' the streets on a night like this. Where to?'

Gillson ordered 'Brichester,' and made to get in. At that moment, however, he heard a voice calling something nearby; and turning, he saw a figure running through the rain towards the taxi. From the cigarette between his fingers and the direction from which he had come, Gillson guessed that this was the man he had noticed in the doorway.

'Wait — please wait!' the man was shouting. He clattered up to the taxi, splashing Gillson in the process. 'Would you mind if I shared your taxi? If you're in a hurry, it doesn't matter — but if I take you out of your way, I'll pay the difference. I don't know how I'll get home otherwise, though I don't live far from here.'

'Where do you live?' Gillson asked cautiously. 'I'm not in any hurry, but—'

'On Tudor Drive,' the man replied eagerly.

'Oh, that's on the way to Brichester, isn't it?' said Gillson, relieved. 'Sure, get in — we'll both catch pneumonia if we stand here much longer.'

Once in the taxi, Gillson directed the driver and sat back. He did not feel like talking, and decided to read a book, hoping the other would take a hint. He took out the copy of Witchcraft Today he had bought on a bookstall that morning and flipped the pages a little.

He was just beginning a chapter when a voice broke in on him. 'Do you believe in that stuff?'

'This, you mean?' Gillson suggested resignedly, tapping the cover of the book. 'In a way, yes — I suppose these people believed that dancing naked and spitting on crucifixes would benefit them. Rather childish, though — they were all psychopathic, of course.'

'Fit to be consigned to a lurid book like that, I'd say,' agreed the other.

There was silence for a few minutes, and Gillson contemplated returning to the book. He opened it again and read the suitably garish blurb inside the cover, then put it down irritably as a trickle of water ran down his sleeve on to the page. He wiped this, then felt beside him for the book.

'But do you know what was behind all these witch-cults?'

'How do you mean?' Gillson inquired, leaving his book where it was.

'Do you know about the real cults?' continued the voice. 'Not the medieval servants of Satan — the ones who worship gods that exist?'

'It depends what you mean by "gods that exist",' replied Gillson.

The man did not appear to notice this remark. 'They formed these cults because they were searching for something. Perhaps you have read some of their books — you won't find them on the stalls like you did that one, but they are preserved in a few museums.'

'Well, I was once down in London, and I took a look at what they had in the British Museum.'

'The Necronomicon, I suppose.' He seemed almost amused. 'And what did you think of it?'

'I found it rather disturbing,' Gillson confessed, 'but not as horrifying as I'd been led to expect. But then I couldn't understand all of it.'

'Personally, I thought it was ludicrous,' the other told him, 'so vague… But of course if it had described what's only hinted at in there, no museum would touch it. I suppose it's best that only we few know… Forgive me, you must think me queer. Come to think of it, you don't even know who I am. I'm Henry Fisher, and I suppose you could call me an occultist.'

'No, please go on,' said Gillson. 'What you were saying there interested me.'

'What, about people searching for things? Why, are you searching for something?'

'Not really, though I have had a sort of persistent conviction since I was young. Nothing to bother about, really — just a kind of idea that nothing is really as we see it: if there were some way of seeing things without using your eyes, everything would look quite different. Weird, isn't it?'

When no answer came, he turned. There was a strange expression in Henry Fisher's eyes; a look of surprised triumph. Noticing Gillson's puzzlement, he seemed to control himself, and remarked:

'It's queer you should say that. I've had the same idea for a long time, and quite often I've been on the brink of finding a way to prove it. You see, there is a way to see as you would without using your eyes, even though you're actually using them — but not only can it be dangerous, it needs two people. It might be interesting for us to try… But here's where I get out.'

They had drawn up before a block of flats. Behind dripping trees a concrete path stretched to where yellow-and-black-painted windows mounted upward. 'Mine's on the ground floor,' Fisher remarked as he got out and paid the driver.

Gillson rolled the window down. 'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Did you mean it — what you said about seeing things as they really are?'

'Are you interested?' Fisher bent down and peered into the taxi. 'Remember I told you it might be dangerous.'

'I don't mind,' replied Gillson, opening the door and getting out. He waved the driver to leave, and it was not until they were standing and watching the tail-lights dwindle that he remembered he had left his book on the seat.

Although the trees still dripped, it had stopped raining. The two men walked up the concrete path, and the wind eddied around them, seeming to blow down from the frosty stars. Kevin Gillson was glad when they closed the glass doors behind them and entered a flowery-papered hall. Stairs led upward to other flats, but Fisher turned to a door to the left with glass panels.

Gillson had not really expected anything specific, but what he saw beyond that glass-panelled door amazed him. It was a normal living-room, with contemporary furnishings, modernistic wallpaper, an electric fire; but some of the objects in it were not at all normal. Reproductions of paintings by Bosch, Clark Ashton Smith and Dalí set the abnormal mood, which was augmented by the esoteric books occupying a case in one corner. But these could at least be found elsewhere; some of the other things he had never seen before. He could make nothing of the egg-shaped object which lay on the table in the centre of the room and emitted a strange, intermittent whistling. Nor did he recognise the outlines of something which stood on a pedestal in a corner, draped with a canvas.

'Perhaps I should have warned you,' Fisher broke in. 'I suppose it's not quite what you'd expect from the outside. Anyway, sit down, and I'll get you some coffee while I explain a little. And let's have the tape-recorder on — I want it running later so it can record our experiment.'

He went into the kitchen, and Gillson heard pans rattling. Over the clanking Fisher called:

'I was a rather peculiar kid, you know — very sensitive but oddly strong-stomached. After I saw a gargoyle once in church I used to dream it was chasing me, but one time when a dog was run over outside our home the neighbours all remarked how avidly I was staring at it. My parents once called in a doctor, and he said I was "very morbid, and should be kept away from anything likely to affect me." As if they could!

'Well, it was at grammar school that I got this idea — in the Physics class, actually. We were studying the structure of the eye one day, and I got to thinking about it. The more I looked at this diagram of retinas and humours and lenses, the more I was convinced that what we see through such a complicated system must be distorted in some way. It's all very well saying that what forms on the retina is simply an image, no more distorted than it would be through a telescope. That's too glib for me. I almost stood up and told the teacher what I thought, but I knew I'd be laughed down.

'I didn't think much more about it till I got to the University. Then I got talking to one of the students one day — Taylor, his name was — and before I knew it I'd joined a witch-cult. Not your naked decadents, but one that really knew how to tap elemental powers. I could tell you a lot about what we did, but some of the things would take too long to explain. Tonight I want to try the experiment, but perhaps afterwards I'll tell you about the things I know. Things like what the unused part of the brain can be used for, and what's buried in a graveyard not far from here…

'Anyway, some time after I joined, the cult was exposed, and everybody was expelled. Luckily I wasn't at the meeting that was spied on, so I stayed on. Even better, though, some of them decided to give sorcery up entirely; and I persuaded one of them to give me all his books. Among them was the Revelations of Glaaki, and that was where I read of the process I want to try tonight. I read of this.'

Fisher had entered the living-room, carrying a tray on which were two cups and a pot of coffee. Now he crossed the room to where the object stood veiled on a pedestal, and as Gillson leaned forward, pulled the canvas off.

Kevin Gillson could only stare. The object was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognise no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between the rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them. The strangest part was that he felt this was an image of something living—something from a dimension where such an example of abnormal geometry could live. As he turned to speak to Fisher, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the thing had expanded and occupied almost the whole side of the room — but when he swung back, the image, of course, was the same size. At least, he was sure it was — but Gillson could not even be sure how high it had originally been.

'So you're getting illusions of size?' Fisher had noticed his puzzlement. 'That's because it's only the three-dimensional extension of the actual thing — of course in its own dimension it looks nothing like that.'

'But what is it?' asked Gillson impatiently.

'That,' said Fisher, 'is an image of Daoloth — the Render of the Veils.'

He went over to the table where he had placed the tray. Pouring the coffee, he passed a cup to Gillson, who then remarked:

'You'll have to explain that in a minute, but first I thought of something while you were in there. I'd have mentioned it before, only I didn't feel like arguing between rooms. It's all very well saying that what we see is distorted — say this table really isn't rectangular and flat at all. But when I touch it I feel a flat rectangular surface — how do you explain that?'

'Simple tactile hallucination,' explained Fisher. 'That's why I say this might be dangerous. You see, you don't really feel a flat rectangular surface there at all — but because you see it the way you do, your mind deludes you into thinking you feel the counterpart of your vision. Only sometimes I think — why would the mind set up such a system of delusion? Could it be that if we were to see ourselves as we really are, it might be too much for us?'

'Look, you want to see the undistorted thing,' Gillson said, 'and so do I. Don't try and put me against it now, for God's sake, just when you've got me interested. You called that Daoloth — what's it mean?'

'Well, I'll have to go off at what may seem a tangent,' apologised Fisher. 'You've been looking at that yellow egg-shaped thing there, off and on, ever since you came in — you've read of them in the Necronomicon. Remember those references to the crystallisers of Dream? That's one of them — the device that projects you when asleep into other dimensions. It takes a bit of getting used to, but for some years I've been able to enter nearly every dimension as high as the twenty-fifth. If only I could convey to you the sensations of that last plane, where it is the space which exists and matter can have no existence! Don't ask me where I got the crystalliser, by the way — until I can be sure its guardian will not follow, I must never speak of it. But never mind that.

'After I read in the Revelations of Glaaki about the way to prove this idea of mine, I determined to see for myself what I would be invoking. It was mostly trial and error; but finally, one night, I found myself materialising in a place I'd never been before. There were walls and columns so high I couldn't even see where they ended, and in the middle of the floor was a great fissure running from wall to wall, jagged as if from an earthquake. As I watched, the outlines of the crack seemed to dim and blur, and something rose up out of it. I told you that image looks very different in its own dimension — well, I saw the living counterpart, and you'll understand if I don't try to describe it. It stood there swaying for a moment and then began to expand. It would have engulfed me in a few minutes, but I didn't wait for that. I ran off between the columns.

'I didn't get far before a group of men stepped out in front of me. They were dressed in metallic robes and hoods, and carried small images of what I'd seen, so that I knew they were its priests. The foremost asked me why I had come into their world, and I explained that I hoped to call on Daoloth's aid in seeing beyond the veils. They glanced at each other, and then one of them passed me the image he was carrying. "You'll need this," he told me. "It serves as a link, and you won't come across any on your world." Then the whole scene vanished, and I found myself lying in bed — but I was holding that image you see there.'

'But you haven't really told me—' began Gillson.

'I'm coming to that now. You know now where I got that image. However, you're wondering what it has to do with tonight's experiment, and what Daoloth is anyway?

'Daoloth is a god — an alien god. He was worshipped in Atlantis, where he was the god of the astrologers. I presume it was there that his mode of worship on Earth was set up: he must never be seen, for the eye tries to follow the convolutions of his shape, and that causes insanity. That's why there must be no light when he is invoked — when we call on him later tonight, we'll have to switch out all the lights. Even that there is a deliberately inaccurate replica of him; it has to be.

'As for why we're invoking Daoloth, on Yuggoth and Tond he's known as the Render of the Veils, and that title has a lot of meaning. There his priests cannot only see the past and future — they can see how objects extend into the last dimension. That's why if we invoke him and hold him by the Pentacle of Planes, we can get his aid in cutting out the distortion. And that's about all the explanation I can give you now. It's almost 2:30 already and we must be ready by 2:45; that's when the openings will align… Of course, if you don't feel like going ahead, please tell me now. But I don't want to get everything into place for nothing.'

'I'll stay,' Gillson told him, but he glanced at the image of Daoloth a little uneasily.

'All right. Give me a hand here, will you?'

Fisher opened a cupboard door next to the bookcase. Gillson saw several large crates, set in neat order and marked with painted symbols. He held one up as Fisher slid another from beneath it. As he closed the door, Gillson heard the other lifting the lid; and when he turned, Fisher was already laying the contents out on the floor. An assortment of plastic surfaces came to light, which were assembled into a distorted semi-solid pentagram; and it was followed by two black candles formed into vaguely obscene shapes, a metal rod carrying an icon, and a skull. That skull disturbed Gillson; holes had been bored in its cranium to hold the candles, but even so he could tell from its shape and lack of mouth that it had not been human.

Fisher now began to arrange the objects. First he pushed chairs and tables against the walls, then shoved the pentagram into the centre of the floor. As he placed the skull, now carrying the candles, inside the pentagram, and lit the candles, Gillson asked behind him:

'I thought you said we mustn't have any light — what about those, then?'

'Don't worry — they won't illuminate anything,' Fisher explained. 'When Daoloth comes, he'll draw the light from them — it makes the alignment of the openings easier.'

As he turned to switch the lights out, he remarked over his shoulder: 'He'll appear in the pentacle, and his solid three-dimensional materialization will remain in there all the time. However, he'll put forth two-dimensional extensions into the room, and you may feel these — so don't be afraid. You see, he'll take a little blood from both of us.' His hand moved closer to the switch.

'What? You never said anything—'

'It's all right,' Fisher assured him. 'He takes blood from any that call him; it seems to be his way of testing their intentions. But it won't be much. He'll take more from me, because I'm the priest — you're only here so I can draw on your vitality to open the path through for him. Certainly it won't hurt.' And without waiting for further protests, he switched off the lights.

There was a little light from the neon sign of the garage outside the window, but hardly any filtered through the curtains. The black candles were very dim, too, and Gillson could make out nothing beyond the pentagram, from his position by the bookcase. He was startled when his host slammed the icon-bearing rod on the floor and began to shout hysterically. 'Uthgos plam'f Daoloth asgu'i — come, o Thou who sweepest the veils of sight aside, and showest the realities beyond.' There was much more, but Gillson did not notice it specially. He was watching the luminous mist which appeared to arch from both him and Fisher, and enter the misshapen cranium of the skull in the pentacle. By the end of the incantation there was a definite aura around the two men and the skull. He watched it in fascination; and then Fisher ceased speaking.

For a minute nothing happened. Then the arcs of mist vanished, and there was only the light of the candles; but they glowed brighter now, and a misty aura surrounded them. As Gillson looked at them, the twin flames began to dim, and suddenly winked out. For a moment a black flame seemed to replace each — a sort of negative fire — and as quickly it was gone. At the same moment Gillson knew that he and Fisher were not alone in the room.

He heard a dry rustling from the pentacle, and sensed a shape moving there. At once he was surrounded. Dry, impossibly light things touched his face, and something slid between his lips. No spot on his body was touched for long enough for him to snatch at what felt at him; so quickly did they pass that he remembered rather than sensed the touching feelers. But when the rustling returned to the centre of the room, there was a salt taste in his mouth — and he knew that the feeler entering his mouth had tapped his blood.

Above the rustling, Fisher called: 'Now Thou hast tasted of our blood, Thou knowest our intentions. The Pentagram of Planes shall hold Thee until Thou shalt do what we desire — to rend the veil of belief and show us the realities of unveiled existence. Wilt Thou show it, and thus release Thyself?'

The rustling increased. Gillson wished the ritual would end; his eyes were becoming accustomed to the glow from the garage sign, and even now he could almost see a faint writhing in the darkness within the figure.

Suddenly there was a violent outburst of discordant metal scraping, and the entire building shook. The sound whirred into silence, and Gillson knew that the pentacle's tenant had gone. The room was still dark; the candlelight had not returned, and his sight could not yet penetrate the blackness.

Fisher said from his position by the door: 'Well, he's gone — and that figure is constructed so he couldn't go back without doing what I asked. So when I turn on the light you'll see everything as it really is. Now if you feel your way, you'll find a pair of eyepatches on top of the bookcase. Put them on and you won't be able to see anything — that's if you don't want to go through with it. Then I can turn the light on and see all I want to see, and then use the icon to nullify the effect. Would you rather do it that way?'

'I've come all this way with you,' Gillson reminded him, 'and it wasn't to get scared at the last moment.'

'Do you want to see now? You know once you've seen, the tactile delusions won't ever operate again — are you sure you can live with it?'

'For God's sake, yes!' Gillson's answer was barely audible.

'All right. I'm turning on the lights—now!'

When the police arrived at the flats on Tudor Street, where they had been summoned by a hysterical tenant, they found a scene which horrified the least squeamish among them. The tenant, returning from a late party, had only seen Kevin Gillson's corpse lying on the carpet, stabbed to death. The police were not sickened by this, however, but by what they found on the lawn under the broken front window; for Henry Fisher had died there, with his throat torn out by glass slivers from the pane.

It all seemed very extraordinary, and the tape-recorder did not help. All that it definitely told them was that some kind of black magic ritual had been practised that night, and they guessed that Gillson had been killed with the pointed end of the icon rod. The rest of the tape was full of esoteric references, and towards the end it becomes totally incoherent. The section after the click of the light-switch on the recording is what puzzles listeners most; as yet nobody has found any sane reason for Fisher's murder of his guest.

When curious detectives play the tape, Fisher's voice always comes: 'There — hell, I can't see after all that darkness. Now, what…

'My God, where am I? And where are you? Gillson, where are you — where are you? No, keep away — Gillson, for Christ's sake move your arm. I can see something moving in all this — but God, that mustn't be you… Why can't I hear you — but this is enough to strike anyone dumb… Now come towards me — my God, that thing is you — expanding — contracting — the primal jelly, forming and changing — and the colour… Get away! Don't come any closer — are you mad? If you dare to touch me, I'll let you have the point of this icon — it may feel wet and spongy and look — horrible — but it'll do for you! No, don't touch me — I can't bear to feel that—'

Then comes a scream and a thud. An outburst of insane screaming is cut short by the smashing glass, and a terrible choking sound soon fades to nothing.

It is amazing that two men should have seemingly deluded themselves into thinking they had changed physically; but such is the case, for the two corpses were quite unchanged except for their mutilations. Nothing in the case cannot be explained by the insanity of the two men. At least, there is one anomaly; but the chief of the Camside police is certain that it is only a fault in the tape which causes the recorder to emit, at certain points, a loud dry rustling sound.