Call of Mimiteh

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the equine mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and all ponies form only transient incidents. They have hinted at the futility of our friendship in this great expanse in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things — in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no pony else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part she knew, and that she would have destroyed her notes had not sudden death seized her.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my great-aunt, Dead Tongues, Professor Emeritus of Ancient Languages in Canterlot University. Professor Tongues was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that her passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning home from the Fillydelphia airship; collapsing suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a aeronautical-looking mare who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the landing yards to the deceased's home in Whinnyams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a mare, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder — and more than wonder.

As my great-aunt's heir and executor, for she died a childless widow, I was expected to go over her papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved her entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Bayston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the Equestrian Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always with her. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings and cuttings which I found nestled so safely in a bed of soft hay? Had my aunt, in her latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old mare's peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my aunt, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of a snake, a bat, and an alicorn,  I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A wedge shaped, fanged head with a long horn and slit pupiled eyes surmounted a skeletally slim body with membranous wings, which were partly lined in feathers. There was a strange suggestion of tendrils or tentacles where the mane and tail should have been on a more wholesome creature, but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Tongues' most recent script; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “MIMITEH CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the  erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This unguscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925 — Dream and Dream Work of C. Maquette, 7 Two Sisters St., Fillydelphia,” and the second, “Narrative of Inspector Green Grass, 121 Governor St., New Oatleans., at 1908 E. A. S. Mtg. — Notes on Same, & Prof. Web's Acct.” The other unguscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different ponies, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably Thistle Shine’s  Atlanti-stable and The Lost Liverymuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and hippopological source-books as Forest's Golden Bridle and Mr. Sea's Witch-Cult of the Western Gryphonian Empire. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illness and outbreaks of group foaly or mania in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the principal unguscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on 1 March 1925, a thin, dark, young unicorn mare of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Tongues bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. Her card bore the name of Crystal Maquette, and my aunt had recognized her as the youngest daughter of an excellent family slightly known to her, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Fillydelphia School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Maquette was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from fillyhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams she was in the habit of relating. She called herself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid ponyfolk of the ancient commercial city dismissed her as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with her kind, she had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Fillydelphia Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found her quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's unguscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of her host's hippopological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. She spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my aunt showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but hippopology. Young Maquette's rejoinder, which impressed my aunt enough to make her recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified her whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of her. She said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylonge.”

It was then that she began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my aunt. There had been a full lunar eclipse the night before, the most spectacular seen in Equestria for some years; and Maquette's imaginations had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, she had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all smothered in drifting white sand and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which she attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Mimiteh pguhyuh.”

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Tongues. She questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found herself working, chilled and clad in her nightcap, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over her. My aunt blamed her old age, Maquette afterward said, for her slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of her questions seemed highly out of place to her visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Maquette could not understand the repeated promises of silence which she was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Tongues became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, she besieged her visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the unguscript records daily calls of the young mare, during which she related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and sand swathed stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Mimiteh” and “E'ruylt”.

On 23 March, the unguscript continued, Maquette failed to appear; and inquiries at her quarters revealed that she had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of her family in Watermare Street. She had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My aunt at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Tower Street office of Dr Hart, whom she learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as she spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what she had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a shining thing “burning brightly with the light of darkness” which flew or flowed about. She at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr Hart, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity she had sought to depict in her dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young mare's subsidence into lethargy. Her temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On 2 April at about 3 P.M. every trace of Maquette's malady suddenly ceased. She sat upright in bed, astonished to find herself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of 22 March. Pronounced well by her physician, she returned to her quarters in three days; but to Professor Tongues she was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with her recovery, and my aunt kept no record of her night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

Here the first part of the unguscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought — so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various ponies covering the same period as that in which young Maquette had had her strange visitations. My aunt, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom she could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of her request seems to have been varied; but she must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary mare could have managed without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but her notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average ponies in society and business — Equestria's traditional “salt of the earth” — gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between 23 March and 2 April — the period of young Maquette's delirium. Scientific mares were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what she had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Maquette, somehow cognizant of the old data which my aunt had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Maquette had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the bright nameless thing visible towards the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect by the name of Lilytrader, who had previously confessed strong leanings towards theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Maquette's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of Tartarus. Had my aunt referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Tongues must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in Trottingham, where a lone sleeper had leaped to their death from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in the Southern Draconic Lands, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions she has seen. A dispatch from Coltifornia describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from Quaggaland speak guardedly of serious native unrest towards the end of March. Equestrian officers in the Fillyppines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and Manehattan policemares are mobbed by a group of hysterical pegasi on the night of 22–23 March. The west of the Emerald Isle, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Precious Linseed hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Poniris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have stopped those of the medical profession from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Maquette had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.