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Acolyte, vol 1, issue 3, whole 3, Spring 1943
Page 8
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At last the thing ended with a crash of discord, and a strained silence fell over the shadowy room. Baldwyn turned, face taut, and put his fingers to his lips. He pointed at the wall beyond the piano. At first I thought he was jesting, but when I saw his pale, handsome face drawn and worried, I glanced at the darkened walls and listened. For a while I heard nothing; then a faint, insidious rustling disturbed the silence. It could have been a mouse running across the floor upstairs. But this sound came from the walls. The patter of tiny claws on wood, the rustle of small bodies. . . rats! Many rats scrambling in the walls. Gradually the squeaking and scratching diminished and became a trickle of sound that faded away in the direction of the cellar. I stood up, trembling. Baldwyn faced me, eyes gleaming, jaw set. "I've done it, Rambeau; I always thought I could. There's a music that stirs every kind of beast, even ourselves. Look at the Pied Piper.... I've made history repeat itself! But I'm going further; I'm going to compose the music that makes even med go mad, learn the music of the stars . . . even if I have to use special instruments to do it." I tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was quite serious. Baldwyn had always been willful, and I knew that argument was futile. However, I will admit that the very idea began to fascinate me, and what mental barriers I had built were weakening as I listened further to his strange plan. For the weird and macabre are as much a part of me as they were a part of him, and the odd music had cast a curious spell over me. Yet I was skeptical, and told him so. I failed to grasp his ultimate ambition; perhaps he hadn't thought of it then, but the possibilities of the thing were staggering. We had read that strange story of Erich Zann and the fate he met tinkering with musical threads of the ultimate void. Nor were we ignorant of the savage music with which certain tribes in Haiti summon their evil Gods. We had tried for years to find copies of various forbidden tomes of ancient lore; the Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, the strange Book of Eibon, and Ludvig Prinn's hideous De Vermis Mysteriis---but in vain. We had lived the simpler weird excitements--- nights in haunted houses and mouldy graveyards...digging corpses by candle-light... But we wanted the real thing, though always it was just beyond our fingertips. Even our learned friend in Providence could not help us. He had read passages from a few of the less terrible books, and cautioned us time and time again. Now I am glad we never found them, for what we did unearth was bad enough. I am tempted to believe that our friend, with his wide influence among the fantaisiste, made an effort to keep those selfsame books from reaching us. Certainly, several good leads vanished into thin air. On one of my rounds of book-shops in Spokane I had found, by sheer accident, an English translation of the Chronike von Nath, by the blind German mystic, Rudolf Yergler, who in 1653 finished his momentious work just before his sight gave out. The first edition sent its author to a madhouse in Berlin, and earned for itself a public suppression. Although modified the translator, James Sheffield (1781), the text was wild beyond imagination. As Baldwyn gradually disclosed his scheme for composing the music of the stars, he referred again and again to passages in the Chronicle of Nath. And this frightened me, for I too had read it, and knew that it contained odd musical rhythm patterns designed to summon certain star-born monsters from the earth's core and from other worlds and dimensions. For all that, Yergler had not been a musician, and whether he had copied the formulae from older tomes or was himself their father, I was never able to find out. Surely Baldwyn had dreamed a strange dream. -- 8 --
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At last the thing ended with a crash of discord, and a strained silence fell over the shadowy room. Baldwyn turned, face taut, and put his fingers to his lips. He pointed at the wall beyond the piano. At first I thought he was jesting, but when I saw his pale, handsome face drawn and worried, I glanced at the darkened walls and listened. For a while I heard nothing; then a faint, insidious rustling disturbed the silence. It could have been a mouse running across the floor upstairs. But this sound came from the walls. The patter of tiny claws on wood, the rustle of small bodies. . . rats! Many rats scrambling in the walls. Gradually the squeaking and scratching diminished and became a trickle of sound that faded away in the direction of the cellar. I stood up, trembling. Baldwyn faced me, eyes gleaming, jaw set. "I've done it, Rambeau; I always thought I could. There's a music that stirs every kind of beast, even ourselves. Look at the Pied Piper.... I've made history repeat itself! But I'm going further; I'm going to compose the music that makes even med go mad, learn the music of the stars . . . even if I have to use special instruments to do it." I tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was quite serious. Baldwyn had always been willful, and I knew that argument was futile. However, I will admit that the very idea began to fascinate me, and what mental barriers I had built were weakening as I listened further to his strange plan. For the weird and macabre are as much a part of me as they were a part of him, and the odd music had cast a curious spell over me. Yet I was skeptical, and told him so. I failed to grasp his ultimate ambition; perhaps he hadn't thought of it then, but the possibilities of the thing were staggering. We had read that strange story of Erich Zann and the fate he met tinkering with musical threads of the ultimate void. Nor were we ignorant of the savage music with which certain tribes in Haiti summon their evil Gods. We had tried for years to find copies of various forbidden tomes of ancient lore; the Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, the strange Book of Eibon, and Ludvig Prinn's hideous De Vermis Mysteriis---but in vain. We had lived the simpler weird excitements--- nights in haunted houses and mouldy graveyards...digging corpses by candle-light... But we wanted the real thing, though always it was just beyond our fingertips. Even our learned friend in Providence could not help us. He had read passages from a few of the less terrible books, and cautioned us time and time again. Now I am glad we never found them, for what we did unearth was bad enough. I am tempted to believe that our friend, with his wide influence among the fantaisiste, made an effort to keep those selfsame books from reaching us. Certainly, several good leads vanished into thin air. On one of my rounds of book-shops in Spokane I had found, by sheer accident, an English translation of the Chronike von Nath, by the blind German mystic, Rudolf Yergler, who in 1653 finished his momentious work just before his sight gave out. The first edition sent its author to a madhouse in Berlin, and earned for itself a public suppression. Although modified the translator, James Sheffield (1781), the text was wild beyond imagination. As Baldwyn gradually disclosed his scheme for composing the music of the stars, he referred again and again to passages in the Chronicle of Nath. And this frightened me, for I too had read it, and knew that it contained odd musical rhythm patterns designed to summon certain star-born monsters from the earth's core and from other worlds and dimensions. For all that, Yergler had not been a musician, and whether he had copied the formulae from older tomes or was himself their father, I was never able to find out. Surely Baldwyn had dreamed a strange dream. -- 8 --
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