Call of Mimiteh

If the Princess ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Austallionian journal, the Sydneigh Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my aunt's research.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Tongues called the “Mimiteh Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in a small town just outside Manehatten; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydneigh Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Green Grass had found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:

Mystery Derelict Found Drifting in Sky

Watchful Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zebraland Dirigible in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Mare Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths in Clouds. Rescued Crewmare Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in Her Possession. Inquiry to Follow.

The Mareison Co.'s cargo airship Watchful, bound from Valpareinso, arrived this morning at its hangar in Dales Landing Yard, having in tow the battered and disabled but heavily armed steam dirigible Intent of Dun’edin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34°21', W. Longitude 152°17', with one living and one dead mare aboard.

The Watchful left Valpareinso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of his course by exceptionally heavy storms and vicious high-altitude winds. On April 12th the drifting derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one mare who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living mare was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about one foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydneigh University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in Coltlege Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says she found in the cabin of the dirigible, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.

This mare, after recovering her senses, told an exceedingly strange story of air-piracy and slaughter. She is Starboard Beacon, a Neighrwegian earth-pony of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the 100 yard long airship Acorn of Aucklivery, which sailed for Baltimare February 20th with a complement of eleven mares. The Acorn, she says, was delayed and thrown widely south of his course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49°51' W. Longitude 128°34', encountered the Intent, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of pegasi and griffons. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Holly refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the Acorn with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of their dirigible’s equipment. The Acorn's mares showed fight, says the survivor, and though their airship began to sink from shots that punctured the gas-envelope they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board him, grappling with the strange crew on the dirigible’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

Three of the Acorn's mares, including Capt. Holly and First Mate Graving, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Beacon proceeded to navigate the captured dirigible, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small cloud structure. Although the crew included several non-pegasi Beacon insists that all hands went ashore; and six of the mares somehow died there. Beacon is queerly reticent about this part of her story, and speaks only of their falling into a chasm. Later, it seems, she and one companion boarded the dirigible and tried to manage him, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd, From that time till her rescue on the 12th the mare remembers little, and she does not even recall when Marlinspike, her companion, died. Marlinspike's death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dun’edin report that the Intent was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the coast, it was owned by a curious group of griffons whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and lunar eclipse of March 1st. Our Aucklivery correspondent gives the Acorn and his crew an excellent reputation, and Beacon is described as a sober and worthy mare. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Beacon to speak more freely than she has done hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Mimiteh Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests in the sky as well as on land. What motive prompted the Intent’s crew to order back the Acorn as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What of the unknown clouds on which six of the Acorn's crew had died, and about which the mate Beacon was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dun’edin? And most marvelous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my aunt?

March 1st — or February 28th according to the International Date Line — the eclipse and storm had come. From Dun’edin the Intent and her pernicious crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the world poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, sandy Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in her sleep the form of the dreaded Mimiteh. March 23rd the crew of the Acorn landed on an unknown cloud isle and left six mares dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive mares assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a shining monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd — the date on which all dreams of the sandy city ceased, and Maquette emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this — and of those hints of old Castle about the drifting, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond mare's power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of ponykind's soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for Los Pegasus. In less than a month I was in Dun’edin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sky-taverns. Landing yard scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these miscreants had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills.

In Aucklivery I learned that Beacon had returned with yellow mane and tail turned stark white. After a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning in Sydneigh, she had thereafter sold her cottage in West Street and sailed with her husband to her old home in Ostler, Neighrway. Of her stirring experience she would tell her friends no more than she had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me her Ostler address.

After that I went to Sydneigh and talked profitlessly with skymares and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Intent, now sold and in commercial use, at Colicular Quay in Sydneigh Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The curled image with its snake head, skeletal body, membranous feathered wings, tendrel hair, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hide Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmareship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Green Grass’ smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the earth held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castle had told Green Grass about the Old Ones; “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”

Shaken with such a mental resolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Beacon in Ostler. Launching for Trottingham, I reembarked at once for the Neighrwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim airyard in the shadow of the Equusberg. Beacon's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of Queen Hunter the Stern, which kept alive the name of Ostler during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Celestiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced stallion in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when he told me in halting English that Starboard Beacon was no more.

She had not long survived her return, said her husband, for the doings in the sky in 1925 had broken her. She had told him no more than she told the public, but had left a long unguscript — of “technical matters” as she said — written in English, evidently in order to guard him from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gaitenburg yards, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked her down. Two pegasi skymares at once helped her up, but before the ambulance could reach her she was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause in the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widower that my connection with his wife’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to her unguscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the Trottingham airship.

It was a simple, rambling thing — a naïve crewmare's effort at a post-facto diary — and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundancy, but I will tell its gist enough to show why the sound of the wind through the vessel's rigging became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.

Beacon, thank the Princess, did not know quite all, even though she saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream above the clouds, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another eclipse shall pull down their monstrous sandy city again into the clouds and air.

Beacon's voyage had begun just as she told it to the vice-admiralty. The Acorn, in ballast, had cleared Aucklivery on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that eclipse-born tempest which must have dragged down from the void the horrors that filled mares' dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Intent on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as she wrote of his bombardment and sinking. Of the winged cult-fiends on the Intent she speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Beacon shows ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against her party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured dirigible under Beacon's command, the mares sight a strange wavering mirage of the Moon come down among the clouds, and in S. Latitude 47°9', W. Longitude 126°43', through a cruel trick of blasphemous geometry, they fly below the mirage only to find themselves above it viewing a landscape of jumbled rocks, steep sandy dunes, and dusty Cyclopean masonry on the surface which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of the world’s supreme terror — the nightmare corpse-city of E'ruylt, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the twinkling stars. There lay great Mimiteh and her hordes, hidden in white sandy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Beacon did not suspect, but the Sun knows she soon saw enough!

I suppose Beacon saw only a single sandy mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Mimiteh was buried. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding up there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Beacon and her mares were awed by the cosmic majesty of this sandy Babylonge of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the white stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Intent, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Beacon achieved something very close to it when she spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, she dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces — surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this world, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention her talk about angles because it suggests something Maquette had told me of her awful dreams. She said that the geometry of the dream-place she saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered skymare felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Beacon and her mares landed on a sandy slope of this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered with difficulty up over titan dusty blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed tainted and magnified when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sand-bathed perversion so that it nearly blinded them. Twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and sand and sky was seen. Each would have fled had she not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched — vainly, as it proved — for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was Swift Rudder the pegasus who flew up to the foot of the monolith and shouted of what she had found. The rest followed her, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar snake-bat-alicorn bas-relief. It was, Beacon said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Maquette would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sky and the horizon were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Marlinspike pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Clear Decks felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as she went. She climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding — that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal — and the mares wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great lintel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced.

Clear Decks slid or somehow propelled herself down or along the jamb and rejoined her fellows, and everypony watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, as if thousands of flowers had been left to rot. At length the quick-eared Jetsam thought she heard a nasty, scraping clopping sound down there. Everypony listened, and everypony was listening still when It paced billowously into view and began to spread the expanding black-purple cloud of Its noxious, writhing hair around It as It stepped through the dark doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Beacon's hoofwriting almost gave out when she wrote of this. Of the six mares who never reached the ship, she thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described — there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A thunderstorm flew or walked. It filled the air with darkness yet was so bright that it blinded those wretched viewers with a terrible inner light. What wonder that across the world a great architect went mad, and poor Maquette raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the black, shining spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim her own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent skymares had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Mimiteh was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three mares were swept up by the purple-black cloud before anypony turned. Princess rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Clear Decks, Windbound, and Yardarm. Elm Mast slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of sand-crusted rock to the ship, and Beacon swears she was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Marlinspike and Beacon reached the airship, and pulled desperately for the Intent as the vast whole of the monstrosity drifted down the dusty stones and hesitated, almost delicately at the edge of a sand bank.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hooves for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Intent under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, he began to push through the resisting headwind, returning again to a wholesome angle in the world’s sky; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of our sky the gaseous Thing from the stars shrieked and raged like Ponypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odraftseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Mimiteh lept billowing into the open air and began to pursue with vast deafening flaps of cosmic potency. Marlinspike looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as she kept on laughing at intervals till death found her one night in the cabin whilst Beacon was wandering deliriously.

But Beacon had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Intent until steam was fully up, she resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, dashed lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. The ship shook and the wind screamed protest through the rigging as he struggled to turn, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Neighrwegian drove her vessel head on against the brilliant dark cloud which rose above the shrieking wind like the stern of a daemon zeppelin.

The awful cloud-like-hair with it’s writhing tendrils nearly engulfed the front of the gondola of the sturdy dirigible, but Beacon drove on relentlessly and before the tendrils could gain a hold she struck the body of the Thing. There was a terrible crunch, a mushy cracking as of a crushed frog, a stench as of a thousand acres of burning hair and tulips, and a sound that the chronicler could not put to paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding purple cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where — Princess preserve us! — the scattered drifting wisps of purple-black of that nameless sky-spawn were nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Intent gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Beacon only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for herself and the laughing maniac by her side. She did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of her soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about her consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comets tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the purple, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue — the Watchful, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dun’edin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Equusberg. She could not tell — they would think her mad. She would write of what she knew before death came, but her husband must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Tongues. With it shall go this record of mine — this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my aunt went, as poor Beacon went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Mimiteh still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded her since the sun was young. Her accursed city is ascended once more, for the Watchful flew over the spot after the April storm; but her ministers in this world still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. She must have been trapped by the ascent whilst within her black abyss, or else Equestria would by now be stampeding with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has sunk may rise, and what has risen may sink. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the void, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of mares. A time will come — but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this unguscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.