As he approached the Ring, he saw an eerie glow within, so that the gaunt stones stood etched like the ribs of a skeleton in which a witch-fire burns. The stallion snorted and reared as Bran tied him to one of the menhirs. Carrying the Stone he strode into the grisly circle and saw Atla standing beside the altar, one hand on her hip, her sinuous body swaying in a serpentine manner. The altar glowed all over with ghastly light and Bran knew someone, probably Atla, had rubbed it with phosphorus from some dank swamp or quagmire.

He strode forward and whipping his cloak from about the Stone, flung the accursed thing on to the altar.

"I have fulfilled my part of the contract," he growled.

"And They, theirs," she retorted. "Look!-They come!"

He wheeled, his hand instinctively dropping to his sword. Outside the Ring the great stallion screamed savagely and reared against his tether. The night wind moaned through the waving gra.s.s and an abhorrent soft hissing mingled with it. Between the menhirs flowed a dark tide of shadows, unstable and chaotic. The Ring filled with glittering eyes which hovered beyond the dim illusive circle of illumination cast by the phosph.o.r.escent altar. Somewhere in the darkness a human voice t.i.ttered and gibbered idiotically. Bran stiffened, the shadows of a horror clawing at his soul.

He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shapes of those who ringed him. But he glimpsed only billowing ma.s.ses of shadow which heaved and writhed and squirmed with almost fluid consistency.

"Let them make good their bargain!" he exclaimed angrily.

"Then see, oh king!" cried Atla in a voice of piercing mockery.

There was a stir, a seething in the writhing shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bran's feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death's-head, howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bran, soul-shaken, saw the blank gla.s.sy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy-G.o.ds, was this t.i.tus Sulla, the proud lord of life and death in Eborac.u.m's proud city?

Bran bared his sword.

"I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance," he said somberly. "I give it in mercy-Vale Caesar!"

The steel flashed in the eerie light and Sulla's head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.

"They harmed him not!" Atla's hateful laugh slashed the sick silence. "It was what he saw and came to know that broke his brain! Like all his heavy-footed race, he knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. This night he has been dragged through the deepest pits of h.e.l.l, where even you might have blenched!"

"Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this accursed land!" Bran roared, maddened, "with its monster-haunted meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean realms where sp.a.w.n in the darkness shapes of h.e.l.l!"

"Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?" cried Atla with a shriek of fearful mirth. "Give them their Black Stone!"

A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran's soul with red fury.

"Aye, take your cursed Stone!" he roared, s.n.a.t.c.hing it from the altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the ma.s.s detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed-mottled-all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. G.o.ds!-the myths had prepared him for horror in human aspect, horror induced by b.e.s.t.i.a.l visage and stunted deformity-but this was the horror of nightmare and the night.

"Go back to h.e.l.l and take your idol with you!" he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some black flood. "Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous-but G.o.ds, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right-there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!"

He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the stallion free. At his elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from her like a cloak in the night.

"King of Pictland!" she cried, "King of fools! Do you blench at so small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint-you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!"

He yelled a wordless curse and struck her savagely in the mouth with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but her fiendish laughter only rose higher.

Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into clean slaughter and his sickened soul into the red maelstrom of battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. He gave the frantic stallion the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost, until the h.e.l.lish laughter of the howling were-woman died out in the darkness behind.

ENVY, THE GARDENS OF YNATH, AND THE SIN OF CAIN.

by Darrell Schweitzer.

Justin Noyes, this is for you. Some of it is the work of the imagination, the paradox being that only the imagined parts are purely true, for the rest is clouded by pa.s.sion, by memory, by human consciousness.

I do not think you will ever understand. But bear with me. Remember that we used to be friends once.

When they first take me, there is that moment of unbearable pain, as the limbs, or tendrils, or whatever they are penetrate the skull. I more sense than actually see the great bodies hovering above me in the air. They seem to condense out of nothingness. Then the hard, sharp claws take hold, and I am pierced; but numbness soon follows as if some intensely cold fluid were pouring down into my body. I barely feel the alien limbs sliding down through my neck, into my spinal cord. They have control of my nervous system now. I feel something seize hold firmly under the arms from inside my own body and then I am well into the air. The great wings spread above, not so much flapping as vibrating in some way human senses cannot quite follow, some way that defies gravity.

Inevitably, I look down. The ground falls away swiftly now, like in a rocket launch, only I don't feel any acceleration, only the cold, and then not even that. Somewhere along the way I have stopped breathing, but I don't feel that either.

The ground falls away, then the Earth. The curved edge is clearly visible, and the terminator between night and day. The roaring in my ears becomes utter silence, and there are stars everywhere, brilliant, unflickering.

There's a glimpse of a crescent Moon. My captors pull away from the Sun, into the eternal darkness. The stars. The darkness. Silence. All is abstraction, my body a speck, a mote, something I can barely remember. If I look down, I might see my legs and feet trailing against the starfields.

Or nothing. It is like a long dream.

It has only begun.

Justin, you couldn't possibly have known, when I finally walked up the dirt path to that Vermont farmhouse, "the old Akeley place" as I had heard it called in my childhood; as I clambered up over the stones because the road was long since washed out and impa.s.sible; you couldn't possibly have known how far I had come, not merely in miles, which was no more than the distance between New York and Brattleboro, but the distance in my life itself, midway in the course of which, as Dante so aptly put it, I wandered into a darkened wood and became lost.

I knocked on the door. There were no lights. The night was very, very dark, as only a Vermont night can be when there is no moon.

I knocked again. The door opened. There you were holding a barely flickering kerosine lantern. You stared up at the brilliant stars. I turned to look too. They were very beautiful, yes, but you and I both knew how to look at them and see them as something more. I was afraid, I admit. I think you were too.

You just stood there. I leaned against the doorway and shook a rock out of my shoe.

"h.e.l.lo again at last," I said.

You stood there.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?"

You seemed to come back to yourself, from somewhere else.

"Oh, it's you, Opie."

"You still call me that."

"You still are that."

Justin, when we first met, in college, I was a naive 18-year-old freshman from rural a.s.s-End-Of-Nowhere (Vermont) and you were the epitome of all that was urban and sophisticated and dangerously decadent, not to mention two years older than me. Oh, I knew you slightly when you used to sit around the offices of Villanova University's literary magazine, The Lynx, and expostulate on art or the meaning of life or the mysteries of the universe, or whatever you were into that week. I was just one of the audience, perhaps its most uncritical member. I didn't know much about you. You were rumored to be rich. They said your father had started a cult back in the '50s, then died, mysteriously, which only made you all the more mysterious. They said you were a writer, maybe a philosopher. I remember that I admired your poetry, too, which somebody called Baudelairean. I remember how I laughed, then puzzled over your line, "Evil is just a pa.s.sing fad." It was then that you noticed me for the first time and pointed right at me and said, "So, get it printed on a t-shirt."

I probably would have if I'd known how.

But I didn't know very much then. I was the sort of boy who was beaten up by undercla.s.smen in highschool, laughed at because I read odd books and entertained odd ideas (however furtively), largely ignored by my family; and at that age I was looking hard for someone to follow, a mentor of any sort, who would take me under his wing and recognize my special talents (a.s.suming that I had any) and tell me the secret of how everything worked, so I could avoid pain.

And there you were.

Then you literally grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as if I were a kitten and dragged me up the stairs into your oh-so-exclusive private dorm room on the third floor, which you shared with, I think, n.o.body. It fit. I mean, you were special, with connections, or something. You dragged me up and all sorts of crazy thoughts went through my head, up to and including thoughts of the loss of my precious virginity, not that I could necessarily even formulate the phrase "h.o.m.os.e.xual encounter" and of course later I understood how fantastic (and stupid) it was to imagine that you would ever descend to the earthly plane of carnality at all. But, yeah, the dread was there and also a kind of expectation, as if yes, you finally were singling me out for something special.

So up we went, and I fluttered and babbled nonsense and struggled to avoid tripping or dropping my textbooks.

You let go of me, and with a melodramatic flourish got out a key.

"Opie, I want to show you something."

"But my name's Brian."

"I think of you as Opie, from Mayberry, The Andy Griffith Show, the nice, simple Southern country kid-"

"But I'm from Vermont."

"Aw jeepers-" You laughed and turned the key, then looked down at me. It helped, for dramatic effect, that you were more than a head taller than me and maybe seventy pounds heavier. "Opie, I want you to take a look at this-"

You swung the door open, and I let out a gasp and unconsciously or m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tically or whatever, I really did exclaim, "Jeepers!" (because I knew you wanted me to) when you flicked on the light and I saw that the room was filled with some of the most amazing artwork I had ever seen or ever hoped to see. Did you know, even then-yes, I suppose you did, because you seemed to know everything about me, about everyone-did you know that I was trying to be a painter myself, and taking all sorts of art cla.s.ses and getting nowhere? The kindest thing one of my teachers said, after looking at my attempts at landscapes, was, "Mr. Simmons, you might become a decent cartoonist. Think of Charles Schulz or whoever draws Miss Peach."

But here- "Jeepers..."

Here in brilliantly subtle, bold colors were landscapes or cityscapes, but depicting no scenes anyone had ever beheld on this Earth, strange jungles of pale, glowing tree-like growths and vines like living ice that hung from the sides of black towers that reached up into an equally black sky, where no sun shone, and the stars did not seem quite right, somehow. Words cannot begin to capture the power of the image. I felt the cold, the distance, the strangeness, and I somehow had the sense that all of this was alive-the jungle growths, the vines, even the towers. As I looked more closely I saw that there seemed to be things, animals of some sort, creatures, and human beings caught in those frigid vines, dangling there like the prey a spider wraps in silk and leaves dangling in the web for later. I was afraid even looking at what must have been a fantasy image, because it was so real, as real and alive as the black, winged monstrosities that seemed to flicker through some of the scenes and shift slightly whenever my eye turned away from them.

It was both beautiful and terrible beyond belief.

"Behold the Gardens of Ynath," you whispered.

"Huh? What?"

I noticed a half-finished painting on an easel, and brushes and paints on a stand beside it.

"Your work?"

"Yes, when the spirit is upon me. But I am not entirely sure it is my work."

"I don't understand."

"I know you don't."

And the dreamer wakes, from out of his dream, into his dream. In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamt man awoke. Pace Borges. Like that. All is real, and nothing is real. Lao Tzu dreaming he is the b.u.t.terfly and the b.u.t.terfly dreaming he is Lao Tzu.

The dreamer awakes, and for an instant the cold is pain. He looks down at his useless legs dangling amid the starfields. He looks down again, and hours, days, years have pa.s.sed, and the great planet Jupiter stretches out below, farther than the eye can see or the mind comprehend. He has the sensation of falling, of accelerating, and he knows, somehow, that his winged bearers are swooping into the planet's gravity well, for a slingshot boost, the kind s.p.a.ce-probes use to gain momentum when coming out the other side, from the forward motion of the planet.

Dreaming still, I look down and notice that my shoes, loafers, which are no more appropriate for interplanetary travel than for climbing a hillside in Vermont, have fallen off, and are tumbling, down, down into the multi-colored cloud bands, and my stocking feet drag slowly across the turning planet. One sock slides off, and I see that the skin of my foot has turned a dark blue.

But there is no more pain.

Only darkness, as Jupiter fades away and I am carried deep, deep into the endless, nighted abyss.

Justin, we were more than friends. I was your slave for years, Renfield to your Dracula. I would have done anything for you. You knew that.

You knew too that I wouldn't cry out, even when you took hold of me again, and maybe I was still afraid of what you might have intended for my nubile self.

But it wasn't that. It was never that.

You sat on the couch. I sat at your feet, back to you, so that your legs held my shoulders in place, and you placed your terrible, speaking hands on either side of my head, and somehow you were inside my mind then. I think, I thought then at least and for a long time after, that it was some kind of hypnosis, because I didn't believe in magic, or telepathy, and I had an absurd flash of an image of Mr. Spock with his Vulcan Mind Meld. Then I stopped thinking at all, because I was soaring, with you, into the vision you deigned to share with me, and it was a kind of rape, a head-rape, or mind-f.u.c.k, to use the commoner parlance, as I, too, shared the vision and we soared through the black s.p.a.ces, beyond the Earth, to places with impossible names, to Yuggoth and s.h.a.ggai and the darkness beyond; to the Gardens of Ynath, where, somehow I knew, ancient intelligences waited, minds frozen in ice for all eternity but alive for all eternity; waited, to talk to us.

It was all so real. I seemed to come right to the threshold. I could just begin to hear the ancient voices speaking, like a buzzing inside my head, just begin to feel their soothing, timeless wisdom. I wanted it so badly to continue, to become clearer- And then I fell away, and I was in the room with you again, and I think I did cry out, and maybe I even wept.

After a very long time, you sighed and said, "Opie, now you know about the old family curse. My father had these visions, and my grandfather before him. They dreamed thus every night, as I do. They knew many things which I myself am only beginning to discover, but they, too, reached for the Gardens of Ynath and could never reach them. They leapt. They fell short. Now you know what it feels like."

At long last, I asked a very sensible question.

"Why are you sharing this with me?"

You smiled, but only, I think, from a sense of irony. You did not laugh at me. I will thank you for that. I think you answered me honestly when you said, "A combination of ego and loneliness. I want a disciple."

Now maybe one or both of us were out of our minds. That would have been the logical explanation. But I didn't think so, not then.

Justin, if you had been Christ calling out to me, "Come, follow me," I would have come and followed, and hoped I would be promoted to apostle one day.

It was only much later that I understood that you were taking me up to the mountaintop to show me the treasures of the world (not to mention the universe), which would be mine if I would but fall down and worship you. And I did fall down and worship you, but if you were devoting this much attention to plain old Opie, a.k.a. Brian Simmons, it must have been some kind of dry run, to prepare you for the Big Job which was to come later.

Get thee behind me, Justin.

I never said that. Not until now.

In the Vermont farmhouse, as we groped through the dark and you paused to light one candle, then another, and finally a third, I could tell that time had not treated you well. It had been twenty-five years. Thirty? I don't know any more. You were starting to look old, your relatively gigantic frame bent, your face lined, haggard, your voice raspy.

I on the other hand was pretty much the same as ever. True, in middle age I became bald as an egg, but if I kept my hat on I was the same old Opie.

The place stank. It was a wreck. We had to walk gingerly where the floorboards had been torn up.

"Answers," you muttered. "Looking for answers."