Chapters 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.
II: The Tale of Inspector Green Grass
The older matters which had made the sculptor's vision and bas-relief so significant to my aunt formed the subject of the second half of her long unguscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Tongues had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Mimiteh ”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connection that it is small wonder she pursued young Maquette with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the Equestrian Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St Lusitano. Professor Tongues, as befitted one of her authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations, and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged, earth-pony mare who had travelled all the way from New Oatleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. Her name was Green Grass, and she was by profession an inspector of police. With her she bore the subject of her visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin she was at a loss to determine.
It must not be fancied that Inspector Green Grass had the least interest in hippopology. On the contrary, her wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the Hayseed Swamps south of New Oatleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than anypony among them had suspected possible. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Green Grass was scarcely prepared for the sensation which her offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled mares of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around her to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and blueish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from mare to mare for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmareship. It represented a monster of vaguely equine outline, but with a wedge shaped head whose short muzzle bristled with sharp fangs, a slim, stretched body, long spindly legs, tendril-like hair, and wide membranous wings lined with feathers behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat emaciated gauntness, and curled evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the body of the thing lay curled on it’s side in the centre, whilst the long, curved hooves of the hind legs folded, spring-like beneath the bony flanks. The serpentine head was bent forward and and downward, so that the muzzle brushed the backs of slim fore-hooves which gripped the front edge of the block. The creeping tendrils of the mane fell forward toward the center of the body to cover the part of the shoulder and block. The tail similarly swirled and snaked it’s way around the left side of the block, obscuring some of the hieroglyphics. The aspect of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with any known type of art belonging to civilization's youth — or indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, blueish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from ponykind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one mare in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle she knew. This pony was the late Tangled Web, professor of hippopology in Percheron University, and an explorer of no slight note.
Professor Web had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of the Opal Coast and the Isle of Ice in search of some Runic inscriptions which she failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Opal Coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate pegasi whose religion, a curious form of demon-worship, chilled her with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other nearby tribes knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the earth was made. Besides nameless rites and equine sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder demon or sugnta ; and of this Professor Web had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged shamare or wizard-priestess, expressing the sounds in the common alphabet as best she knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced and flew when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as she could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Green Grass; and she began at once to ply her informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers her mares had arrested, she besought the professor to remember as best she might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist pegasai. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the pegasai wizards and the Hayseed Swamp-priestesses had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this — the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase a s chanted aloud;
“Cu'atyhv ztyj'ansu Mimiteh E'ruylt jtnu'anty pguhyuh”
Green Grass had one point in advance of Professor Web, for several among his miserable prisoners had repeated to her what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
“In her house at E'ruylt, dead Mimiteh lies dreaming.”
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Green Grass related as fully as possible her experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my aunt attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such unlettered outcasts as might be least expected to possess it.
On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Oatleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The locals there, mostly uneducated but good-natured descendants of Lafillyette's mares, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their stallions and foals had disappeared since the malevolent drum had begun its incessant beating far within the dark haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing demon-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the ponies could stand it no more.
So a herd of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering local as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and after the sun set even the bright light of the full moon seemed distorted; so every pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet lit by the dappled, blue light combined to create. At length the settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers trotted out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of drums was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of moon-dappled forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed locals refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Green Grass and her nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into dim arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by civilized ponies. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless dark polypus thing with luminous eyes; and locals whispered that bat-winged demon-beasts flew down from above the highest clouds to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before New Oatleans, before the tribes of White-Tailed Deer or Buffalo, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made mares dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present depraved ceremony was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the locals more than the shocking sounds and or their missing kin.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Green Grass' mares as they ploughed on through the dim quagmire towards the red glare and the muffled drums. There are vocal qualities peculiar to mares, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those moon-lit woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of uneven voices would rise in singsong chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
“Cu'atyhv ztyj'ansu Mimiteh E'ruylt jtnu'anty pguhyuh”
Then the mares, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the worshippers fortunately deadened. Green Grass dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting mare, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped, twisted, and flapped a more indescribable horde of equine abnormality than any but an artist the like of Catalyst or White Star could paint. Covered in obscene body-paint, this mottled herd were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, heads downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless locals who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped, danced, flew, and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the mares, an excitable unicorn, to fancy she heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This mare, Hearts Trump, I later met and questioned; and she proved distractingly imaginative. She indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous dark bulk beyond the remotest trees — but I suppose she had been hearing too much local superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the mares was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mottled celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Green Grass was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom she forced to fall into line between two rows of policemares. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Green Grass.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners proved to be mares of many sorts. A few were weather workers, while a majority of those who performed the lowest of grunt work on airships filled out the group. Two griffons and a doe, gave a colouring of exoticism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than simple fetishism was involved. Poor and ignorant as they were, the ponies held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before the first mare, and who came to the world out of the sky. These Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and in the sky; but they would return. This cult, the prisoners said, had always existed and always would exist, until the time when the great priest Mimiteh, from her shining house in the mighty city of E'ruylt beyond the void above the clouds, should descend and bring the world again beneath her sway. Some day she would call, when the stars were ready to aid her, and the cult would always be waiting to liberate her.
When they were questioned about the idol all agreed that no pony living could read the old writing on it now, but they all knew it to be the form of the great Mimiteh, though no pony had ever seen her. Likewise the ritual they had chanted was not a secret. The chant meant only this: “In her house at E'ruylt, dead Mimiteh lies dreaming.”
Two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract came mainly from an immensely aged griffon named Castle, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the cloud temples of Trotbet.
Old Castle remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made mares and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth and moon, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, she said the deathless Trotbet-mare had told her, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones high in the remote mountains. They all died vast epochs of time before mares came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castle continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image of the great Mimiteh prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of E'ruylt, preserved by the spells of mighty Mimiteh for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the world might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first mares came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshy minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castle, those first mares formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from distant stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again to aid her, and the secret priestesses would take great Mimiteh from Her tomb to revive Her subjects and resume Her rule of the world. The time would be easy to know, for then ponykind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and friendships thrown aside and all mares shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the world would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen mares had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The bright stone city of E'ruylt, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had risen above the clouds; and the void above the sky, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high priestesses said that the city would descend again when the stars were right. Then came out of the sky the dark spirits of highest reaches, quick and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in the whistling of the high thin winds on the edge of the void.
But of them old Castle dared not speak much. She said only that they were like ponies bred of Nightmares and cut herself off hurriedly. No amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, she curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, she said that she thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Saddle Arabia, where Aysel, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the Gryphonian witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Trotbet-mare said that there were double meanings in the Neighcronomicon of the mad Saddle Arabian Abdul Alhazrein which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Green Grass, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castle, apparently, had told the truth when she said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at the University in New Oatleans could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Opal Coast tale of Professor Web.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Green Grass’ tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Green Grass for some time lent the image to Professor Web, but at the latter's death it was returned to her and remains in her possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Maquette.
That my aunt was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Green Grass had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young mare, who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Opal Coast demon tablet, but had come in her dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by pegasi diabolists and Hayseed Swamp worshipers? Professor Tongues' instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Maquette of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my aunt's expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the unguscript again and correlating the theosophical and hippopological notes with the cult narrative of Green Grass, I made a trip to Fillydelphia to see the sculptor and give her the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged mare.
Maquette still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Two Sisters Street, a hideous Whinnictorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely Coltlonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Geldian steeple in Equestria. I found her at work in her rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that her genius is indeed profound and authentic. She will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great decadents; for she has crystallized in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Caashley evokes in cloth, and Purple Lemons makes visible in painting and in prose.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, she turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told her who I was, she displayed some interest; for my aunt had excited her curiosity in probing her strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge her knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw her out.
In a short time I became convinced of her absolute sincerity for she spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced her art profoundly, and she showed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its dark suggestion. She could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in her own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under her hooves. It was, no doubt, the bright shape she had raved of in delirium. That she really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my aunt's relentless catechism had let fall, she soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which she could possibly have received the weird impressions.
She talked of her dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the sandy Cyclopean city of shining white stone — whose geometry , she oddly said, was all wrong — and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Mimiteh pguhyuh, Mimiteh pguhyuh. ”
These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Mimiteh's dream-vigil in her stone vault at E'ruylt, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Maquette, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of her equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that her imposture upon my aunt had been a very innocent one. The filly was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both her genius and her honesty. I took leave of her amicably, and wish her all the success her talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connections. I visited New Oatleans, talked with Green Grass and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mottled prisoners as still survived. Old Castle, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first hoof, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my aunt had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an hippopologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still were , and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Tongues.
One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know , is that my aunt's death was far from natural. She fell on a narrow hill street leading up from ancient landing yards swarming with ponies whose whole life is spent in the sky, after a careless push from a silent skymare. I did not forget the aeronautical pursuits of the cult-members in the Hayseed Swamps, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Green Grass and her mares, it is true, have been let alone; but in Neighrway a certain skymare who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my aunt after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Tongues died because she knew too much, or because she was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as she did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
III: The Madness from the Sky
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.
I'm a huge fan of both H.P. Lovecraft and MLP: FiM. I'm not sure that excuses this story, but hopefully it at least explains why it exists. Part of my inspiration was the awesome H.P. Hoofcraft "book covers" done by Lilytrader on deviantART . They're beautiful and funny in their own right and they made me think a lot about how the FiM characters align to some of Lovecraft's works.
The Call of Mimiteh is based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story the Call of Cthulhu . I've changed all the actors to ponies (or other creatures native to the setting) and moved the story to a pony inspired world. There are some places and other details I had to fill in because the original story is a bit of a name-dropping, globe-trotting epic.
I've also swapped the genders in the story, partly because "mare" subs much more easily for "man" and partly because one of the things I like about FiM is it lets female characters have adventures. Lovecraft lived in a different era, so I understand why his story is filled with men. I live today and I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy the story in a different way. The gender swapping is a far smaller change than filling it with magical talking horses anyhow. ;)