‘And this thing really exists?’ Bellman seemed to hear his own voice through a creeping film of slumber, as if another than himself had spoken, and had roused him.
‘It is the Dweller,’ mumbled Chalmers. He leaned toward the image, and his outstretched fingers trembled above it in the air, moving to and fro as if he were about to caress the white horror. ‘The Yorhis made the idol long ago,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know how it was made… And the metal they moulded it from is like nothing else… A new element. Do as I am doing… and you won’t mind the darkness so much. … You don’t miss your eyes or need them here. You’ll drink the putrid water of the lake, you’ll eat the raw slugs, the raw blind fish and lake-worms, and find them good… And you won’t know if the Dweller comes and gets you.’
Even as he spoke, he began to caress the image, running his over the gibbous carapace, the flat reptilian head. His face took on the dreamy languor of an opium-eater, his voice died to inarticulate murmurs, like the lapping sound of a thick liquid. About him, there was an air of strange subhuman depravity.
Bellman, Chivers and Maspic, watching him in amazement, became aware that the altar swarmed with the white Martians. Several of them crowded forward on the side opposite Chalmers, around the summit, and also began to fondle the eidolon, as if in some fantastic ritual of touch. They traced its loathsome outlines with lank fingers, their movements appearing to follow a strictly prescribed order from which none of them deviated. They uttered sounds that were like the cheepings af sleepy bats. Upon their brutal faces a narcotic ecstasy was imprinted.
Completing their bizarre ceremony, the foremost devotees fell back from the image. But Chalmers, with slow and sleepy movements, his head lolling on his tattered bosom, continued to caress it. With a queer mingling of revulsion, curiosity and compulsion, the other earthmen, prompted by the Martians behind them, went nearer and laid their hands on the idol The whole proceeding was highly mysterious, and somehow revolting, but it seemed wise to follow the custom of their captors.
The thing was cold to the touch, and clammy as if it had lain recently in a bed of slime. But it seemed to live, to throb and swell under their fingertips. From it, in heavy ceaseless waves, there surged an emanation that could be described only as an opiate magnetism or electricity, It was as if some powerful alkaloid, affecting the nerves through superficial contact, was being given off by the unknown metal. Quickly, irresistibly, Bellman and the others felt a dark vibration course through all their members, clouding their eyes, and filling their blood with slumber. Musing drowsily, they tried to explain the phenomenon to themselves in terms of terrene science; and then, as the narcotism mounted more and more like an overwhelming drunkenness, they forgot their speculations.
With senses that swam in a strange darkness, they were vaguely aware of the pressure of thronging bodies that displaced them at the altar-summit. Anon, certain of these, recoiling as if satiate with the drug-like effluence, bore them along the oblique tiers to the cavern-floor, together with the limp and sodden Chalmers. Still retaining their torches in nerveless fingers, they saw that the place teemed with the white people, who had gathered for that unholy ceremony. Through blackening blurs of shadow, the men watched them as they seethed up and down on the pyramid like a leprous, living frieze.
Chivers and Maspic, yielding first to the influence, slid to the floor in utter sopor. But Bellman, more resistant, seemed to fall and drift through a world of lightless dreams. His sensations were anomalous, unfamiliar to the last degree. Everywhere there was a brooding, palpable Power for which he could find no visual image: a Power that exhaled a miasmal slumber. In those dreams, by insensible graduations, forgetting the last glimmer of his human self, he somehow identified himself with the eyeless people; he lived and moved as they, in profound caverns, on nighted roads. And yet — as if by a participation to which the obscene ritual had admitted him — he was something else: an Entity without name that ruled over the blind and was worshipped by them; a thing that dwelt in the ancient putrescent waters, in the nether deep, and came forth at intervals to raven unspeakably. In that duality of being, he sated himself at blind feasts — and was also devoured. With all this, like a third element of identity, the eidolon was associated; but only in a tactile sense, and not as an optic memory. There was no light anywhere — and not even the recollection of light.
Whether he passed from these obscure nightmares into dreamless slumber, he could not know. His awakening, dark and lethargic, was like a continuation of the dreams at first. Then, opening his sodden lids, he saw the shaft of light that lay on the floor from his fallen torch. The light poured against something that he could not recognize in his drugged awareness. Yet it troubled him; and a dawning horror touched his faculties into life.
By degrees, it came to him that the thing he saw was the half-eaten body of Chalmers. There were rags of rotten cloth on the gnawed members; and though the head was gone, the remaining bones and viscera were those of an earthman.
Bellman rose unsteadily and looked about with eyes that still held a web-like blurring of shadow. Chivers and Maspic lay beside him in heavy stupor; and along the cavern and upon the seven-tiered altar were sprawled the devotees of the somnific image.
His other senses began to awake from their lethargy, and he thought that he heard a noise that was somehow familiar: a sharp slithering, together with a measured sucking. The sound withdrew among the massy pillars, beyond the sleeping bodies. A smell of rotten water tinged the air, and he saw that there were many curious rings of wetness on the stone, such as might be made by the rims of inverted cups. Preserving the order of footprints, they led away from the body of Chalmers, into the shadows of that outer cave which verged upon the abyss: the direction in which the queer noise had passed, sinking now to inaudibility.
In Bellman’s mind a mad terror rose and struggled with the spell that still benumbed him. He stooped down above Maspic and Chivers, and shook them roughly in turn, till they opened their eyes and began to protest with drowsy murmurs.
‘Get up, damn you,’ he admonished them. ‘If we’re ever to escape from this hell-hole, now’s the time.’
By dint of many oaths and objurgations and much muscular effort, he succeeded in getting his companions to their feet. In their stupor, they did not seem to notice the remnants of that which had been the unfortunate Chalmers. Lurching drunkenly, they followed Bellman among the sprawled Martians, away from the pyramid on which the white eidolon still brooded in malign somnolence above its worshippers.
A clouding heaviness hung upon Bellman; but somehow there was a relaxation of the opiate spell. He felt a revival of volition and a great desire to escape from the gulf and from all that dwelt in its darkness. The others, more deeply enslaved by the drowsy power, accepted his leadership and guidance in a numb, brute-like fashion.
He felt sure that he could retrace the route by which they had approached the altar. This, it seemed, was also the course that had been taken by the maker of the ring-like marks of fetid wetness wandering on amid the repugnantly carven columns for what seemed an enormous distance, they came at last to the sheer verge: that portico of the black Tartarus, from which they could look down on its ultimate gulf. Far beneath, on those putrefying waters, the phosphorescence ran in widening circles, as if doubled by the plunge of a heavy body. To the very edge, at their feet, the watery rings were imprinted on the rock.
They turned away. Bellman, shuddering with halfmemories of his blind dreams, and the terror of his awakening, found at the cave’s corner the beginning of that upward road which skirted the abyss: the road that would take them back to the lost sun.
At his injunction, Maspic and Chivers turned off their flashlights to conserve the batteries. It was doubtful how much longer these would last; and light was their prime necessity. His own torch would serve for the three till it became exhausted.
There was no sound or stirring of life from that cave of lightless sleep where the Martians lay about the narcotizing image. But a fear such as he had never felt in all his adventurings caused Bellman to sicken and turn faint as he listened at its threshold.