Dr. Creepen's Dungeon - S1 Ep5: Episode 5: The One in the Fourth Dimension

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

In tonight's episode, we delve into the terrifying depths of the fourth dimension with two old-school classic tales from the one and only Clark Ashton Smith. We begin with the horrors of 'Murder in the Fourth Dimension' before rounding off with 'The Hunters from Beyond.' https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Murder_in_the_Fourth_Dimension https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hunters_from_Beyond

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We believe OCT scans are so important they're included with every standard eye exam. Book an eye exam at Spexsavers.cavers.ca.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Visit Spexsavers.cavers. to Dr. Creepen's Dungeon. In tonight's episode, we delve into the fourth dimension. Now, it has been said that time is not the fourth dimension for the sufficient reason that the fourth dimension is a collection of three words without meaning. But we try and discover that meaning tonight's two stories, both from the mercurial pen of Clark Ashton Smith. We begin tonight's episode with The Hunters from Beyond.

before concluding with murder in the fourth dimension. Now, as ever, before we begin, a word of caution. Tonight's episode may contain strong language, as well as descriptions of violence and horrific images. If that sounds like your kind of thing, then let's begin.

I've seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore, particularly one that's well supplied with rare and exotic items. Therefore, I turned in at Tolmans to browse around for a few minutes. I'd come to San Francisco for one of my brief biannual visits and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincor, a sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, who might not seen for several years. The studio was only a block from Tolmans,

and there seemed to be no especial object in reaching it ahead of time. Cyprian had offered to show me his collection of recent sculptures, but remembering the smooth mediocrity of his former work, amid which there were a few banal efforts to achieve horror and grotesquery, I did not anticipate anything more than an hour or two of dismal boredom. The little shop was empty of customers. Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden shells.

Washed in between other but lesser lurid. titles, I found a luxury edition of Goya's proverbs, and began to turn the heavy pages and was soon engrossed in the diabolic art of these nightmare nurtured drawings. It had always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror when I happened to look up from the volume, and saw the thing that was crouching in a corner of the bookshelves before me. I could not have been more hideously startled if some hellish conception of Goya had suddenly He had come to life and emerged from one of the pictures in the folio.

What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin grey figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, ittollied rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-caneer mouth and jaw and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor. The thing was infinitely bestial, and at the same time macabre, for its parchment skin had shriveled, corpse-like, mollified in a manner impossible to convey, and from eye-sockets well-nined deep as those of a skull, they glimmered evil slits of yellowish phosphorescence, like burning sulphur. Fangs that were stained as if with poison or gangrene issued from the slavering half-open mail, and the whole attitude of the creature was that of some maleficent monster in readiness to spring.

Though I had been for years a professional writer of stories that often dealt with the cult phenomena, with the weird and the spectral, I was not at this time possessed of any clear and settled belief regarding such phenomena. I'd never before seen anything that I could identify as a phantom, nor even an hallucination. And I should hardly have said offhand that a bookstore on a busy street in full summer daylight was the the lightliest places to see one. But the thing before me was assuredly nothing that could ever exist among the permissible forms of a sane world. It was too horrific, too atrocious to be anything but a creation of unreality.

Even as I stared across the goya, sick with half incredulous fear, the apparition moved toward me. I say that it moved, but its change of position was so instantaneous, is so utterly without effort or visible transition that the verb is hopelessly inadequate. The foul spectre had seemed five or six feet away, but now it was stooping directly above the volume that I held in my hands, with its loathomely lambent eyes peering upward at my face, and a grey-green slime drooling from its mouth on the broad pages. At the same time I breathed an insupportable fetter, like a mingling of rancid serpent stench

with the moldiness of antique charnels and the fearsome reek of newly decaying carrion. In a frozen timelessness that was perhaps no more than a second or two, my heart appeared to suspend its beating while I beheld the ghastly face. Gasping, I let the goyer drop with a resonant bang on the floor, and even as it fell, I saw that the vision had vanished. Tolman, a tonsured gnome with shell-rimed goggles, rushed forward to retrieve the falling volume, exclaiming,

What is wrong, Mr. Hestain? Are you ill? From the meticulousness with which he examined the binding in search of possible damage, I knew that his chief solicitude was concerning the goyer. It was plain that neither he nor his clerk had seen the phantom, nor could I detect aught in their manner, to indicate that they had noticed the mephitic odor that still lingered in the air like an exhalation from broken graves. And, as far as I could tell, they did not even perceive the grayish slime that still polluted the open folio.

I do not remember how I managed to make my exit from the shop. My mind had become a seething blur of muddled horror, of crawling, sick revulsion from the supernatural vileness I'd beheld, together with the direst apprehension for my own sanity and safety. I recall only that I found myself on the street above Tolman's, walking with feverish rapidity toward my cousin's studio, with a neat parcel containing the goya volume under my arm. Evidently in my effort to atone for my clumsiness, I must have bought and paid for the book by a sort of automatic impulse,

without any real awareness of what I was doing. I came to the building in which was my destination, but went on around the block several times before entering. All the while I fought desperately to regain my self-control and equipoise. I remember how difficult it was to moderate the pace at which I was walking or refrain from breaking into a run, for it seemed to me that I was fleeing all the time from an invisible pursuer. I tried to argue with myself to convince the rational part of my mind

that the apparition had been the product of some evanescent trick of light and shade, or a temporary dimming of eyesight. But such sophistries were useless, for I'd seen the garg-oilish terror all too distinctly in an unforgettable fullness of grisly detail. What could the thing mean? I'd never used narcotic drugs or abused alcohol. My nerves, as far as I knew, were in sound condition.

But either I'd suffered a visual hallucination that might mark the beginning of some obscure cerebral disorder or have been visited by a spectral phenomenon by something from the realms and dimensions that are past the normal scope of human perception. It was a problem either for the alienist or the occultist. Though I was still damnably upset, I contrived to regain a nominal composure of my faculties.

Also, it occurred to me that the unimaginative portrait busts and tamely symbolic figure groups of Cyprian sin call might serve admirably to soothe my shaken nerves. Even his grotesques would seem sane and ordinary by comparison with the blasphemous gargoy that had drool before me in the bookshop. I entered the studio building and climbed a worn stairway to the second floor,

where Cyprian had established himself in a somewhat capacious suite of rooms. As I went up the stairs, I had the peculiar feeling that somebody was climbing them just ahead of me, but I could neither see nor hear anyone, and the hall above was no less silent and emptied than the stairs. Cyprian was in his atelier when I nodded. After an interval which seemed unduly long,

I heard him call out, telling me to enter. I found him wiping his hands on an old cloth and surmise that he'd been modelling. A sheet of light burlap had been thrown over what was plainly an ambitious but unfinished group of figures, which occupied the centre of the long room. All around were other sculptures, and clay, bronze, marble, and even the terracotta and stetite, which he sometimes employed for his

less conventional conceptions. At one end of the room there stood a heavy Chinese scream. At a single glance I realised that a great change had occurred, both in Cyprian Sincol and his work. I remembered him as an amiable, somewhat flabby-looking youth, always dappily dressed with a trace of the dreamer or visionary. It was hard to recognise him now, for he had become lean, harsh vehement, with an air of pride and penetration that was almost Luciferian. His unkempt mane of hair was already shot with white, and his eyes were electrically brilliant with a strange knowledge, and yet somehow they were vaguely furtive, as if they dwelt behind them a morbid and macabre of fear. The change in his sculptures was no less striking, the respectable tameness and pompous and pompous and Polish mediocrity were gone, and in their place, incredibly, was something little short of genius.

More unbelievable still, in view of the laboriously ordinary grotesques of his earlier phase, was the trend that his art had now taken. All around me were frenetic, murderous demons, satire's mad with nymphilepsy, ghouls that seemed to sniff the odors of the charnel, lamias voluptuously coiled about their victims, and less nameable things that belong to the outland realms of evil myth and maligned superstition. Sin, horror, blasphemy, diablery, the lust and malice of pandemonium, all had been caught with impeccable art. The potent nightmarishness of these creations was not calculated to reassure my

trembling nerves, and all at once I felt an imperative desire to escape from the studio to flee from the baleful throng of frozen cacao demons and chiseled chimeras. My expression must have betrayed my feelings to some extent. Pretty strong work, can't they? Said Cyprian in a loud, vibrant voice with a note of harsh pride and triumph. I can see that you're surprised. You didn't look for anything of the sword, I dare say. No, candidly I didn't, I admitted.

Good Lord, man. You will become the Michelangelo. of diabolism if you go on at this rate where on earth do you get such stuff yes i've gone pretty far said cyprian seeming to disregard my question further even you think probably if you could know what i know could see what i have seen you might make something really worthwhile out of your weird fiction philip you were very clever and imaginative of course but you've never had any experience well i was startled and and puzzled. Experience. What do you mean? Precisely that. You try to depict the occult and the supernatural without even the most rudimentary first-hand knowledge of them. I tried to do something of

the same sort in sculpture years ago, without knowledge, and doubtless you recall the mediocre mess that I made of it, but I've learned a thing or two since then. Sounds as if you made the traditional bond with the devil or something of the sort. I observed. with a feeble and perfunctory levity. Cyprian's eyes narrowed slightly with a strange, secret look. I know what I know. Never mind how or what.

The world in which we live isn't the only world, and some of the others lie closer at hand than you think. The boundaries of the scene and the unseen are sometimes interchangeable. Recalling the malevolent phantom, I felt a peculiar disquietude as I listened to, to his words. An hour before his statement would have impressed me as mere theorizing, but now it assumed an ominous and terrifying significance. What makes you think I have no experience of the occult? I asked. Your stories hardly show anything of the kind, anything factual or personal.

They are all palpably made up. When you've argued with a ghost or watched the ghouls of mill-time or fought with an incubus or suckled a vampire, you may achieve some genuine and characterization and color along such lines. Well, for reasons that should be fairly obvious, I had not intended to tell anyone of the unbelievable thing at Tolman's. Now with a singular mixture of emotions, of compulsive, eerie terrors, and desire to refute the animadversions of Cyprian, I found myself describing the phantom.

He listened with an inexpressive look, as if his thoughts were occupied with other matters than my story. Then, when I'd finished, "'You're becoming more psychic than I imagine. "'Was your apparition anything like one of these?' "'With the last words, he lifted the sheet of Burlap "'from the muffled group of figures beside which he'd been standing. "'I cried out involuntarily with the shock of that appalling revelation

"'and almost tottered as I stepped back. "'Before me, in a monstrous semicircle, "'were seven creatures who might all have been modeled from the gar-go, that had confronted me across the folio of Goya drawings. Even in several it was still amorphasing incomplete. Cyprian had conveyed with a damnable art, the peculiar mingling of primal bestiality and notary putrescence that had signalled the phantom.

The seven monsters had closed in on a cowering, naked girl, and were all clutching foully toward her with their hyena claws. This dark, frantic, insane terror on the face of the girl And the slavering hunger of her assailants were alike unbearable The group was a masterpiece In its consummate power of technique But a masterpiece that inspired loathing rather than admiration And following my recent experience

The sight of it affected me with indescribable alarm It seemed to me that I'd gone astray from the normal, familiar world into a land of detestable mystery, of prodigious and unnatural menace. Helped by an abhorrent fascination, it was hard for me to wrench my eyes away from the figurepiece. At last I turned from it to Cyprian himself. He was regarding me with a cryptic air, beneath which I suspected a covert gloating. How do you like my little pets? he inquires. I'm going to call the composition of the hunters from be.

beyond. Before I could answer, a woman suddenly appeared from behind the Chinese screen. I saw that she was the model for the girl in the unfinished group. Evidently, she'd been dressing, and she was now ready to leave, for she wore a tailored suit and a smart talk. She was beautiful, in a dark, semi-Latin fashion, but her mouth was sullen and reluctant, and her wide liquid eyes were wells of strange terror as she gazed at Cyprian, myself, and the uncovered statue piece. Cyprian did not introduce me. He and the girl talked together in low tones for a minute or two, and I was unable to overhear more than half of what they said.

I gathered, however, that an appointment was being made for the next sitting. There was a pleading, frightened tone in the girl's voice, together with an almost maternal concern, and Cyprian seemed to be arguing with her. or trying to reassure her about something. At last she went out, with a clear, supplicative glance at me. A glance who was meaning I could only surmise and could not wholly fathom.

That was martyr, said Cyprian. She's half Irish, half Italian. Good model, but my new sculpture seemed to be making her a little nervous. He laughed abruptly with a mirthless, jarring note that was like the cationation of a sorcerer. Oh, in God's name, what are you trying to do here? I burst out.

What does it all mean? Do such abominations really exist on earth or in any hell? He laughed once again, with an evil subtlety and became evasive all at once. Anything may exist in a boundless universe with multiple dimensions. Anything may be real or unreal. Who knows? It's not for me to say. Figure it out for yourself, if you can.

There's a vast field for speculation, and perhaps more than speculation. With this, he began immediately to talk of other topics. Baffled, mystified with a solely troubled mind and nerves that were more unstrung than ever by the black enigma of it all. I ceased to question him. Hey, Ontario, come on down to Bed MGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The price is right, fortune pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show.

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A mindless whirlwind panic that prompted me to run pell-mell from the room and down the stairs into the wholesome normality of the common 20th century streets. It seemed to me that the rays which fell through the skylight were not those of the sun, but of some darker orb. That the room was touched with unclean webs of shadow where shadow should not have been, that the stone satin's, the bronze lamias, the terracocctor setters, and the clay gargoles had somehow increased in number and might spring to malignant life at any instant.

hardly knowing what I said, I continued to converse for a while with Cyprian, then excusing myself on the score of a non-existent luncheon appointment, and promising vaguely to return for another visit before my departure to the city, I took my leave. I was surprised to find my cousin's model in the lower hall at the foot of the stairway. From her manner and her first words, it was plain that she had been waiting. You're Mr. Philip Hastine, aren't you? She said, an eager, agitated voice. I'm Marta Fitzgerald. Cyprian's often mentioned you, and I believe he admires you a lot.

Maybe I think I'm crazy, she went on, but I had to speak to you. I can't stand the way that things are going here, and I'd refuse to come to the place anymore if it wasn't that I like Cyprian so much. I don't know what he's done, but he's altogether different from what he used to be. His new work is so horrible You can't imagine how it fronds me The sculptures he does are more hideous, more hellish all the time Those drooling dead grey monsters in that new group of his

I can hardly bear to be in the studio with him It isn't right for anyone to depict such things Don't you think they're awful, Mr. Hastane? They look as if they broke loose from hell Make you think that hell can be very far away It is wrong and wicked for anyone to even imagine them, and I wish that Cyprian would stop. I'm afraid that something will happen to him, something terrible, to his mind if he goes on, and I'll go mad too if I have to see those monsters many more times.

My God, no one could keep sane in that studio. She paused and appeared to hesitate. Then, can't you do something, Mr. Hastane? Can't you talk with him and tell him how wrong it is and how dangerous to his mental health? You must have a lot of influence with Cyprian. I mean, you are his cousin, aren't you? Oh, and he thinks you are very clever, too. I wouldn't ask you if I hadn't been forced to notice so many things that aren't as they should be.

I wouldn't bother you either if I knew anyone else to ask. He shut himself up in that awful studio for the past year and he hardly ever sees anybody. You're the first person he's invited to see his new sculptures. He wants them to be a complete surprise for the critics in the public when he holds his next exhibition. You'll speak to Cyprian, won't you, Mr. Stain? I can't do anything to stop him. He seems to exult in the mad horrors he creates. And he merely laughs at me when I try to tell him the danger.

However, if, well, I think that those things are making him a little nervous sometimes, that he's growing afraid of his own morbid imagination. Perhaps he'll listen to you. Well, if I'd needed anything more to unnerve me, the desperate pleading of the girl and her dark, obscurely baffled hintings, would have been enough. I could see that she loved Cyprian, that she was frantically anxious concerning him,

and hysterically afraid, otherwise she would not have approached an utter stranger in this fashion. But I haven't any influence with Cyprian, I protested, feeling a queer embarrassment. And what am I to say to my... His new sculptures are magnificent, and I've never seen anything more powerful of the kind. And how could I advise him to stop doing them? I mean, there would be no legitimate reason.

He would simply laugh me out of the studio. An artist has the right to choose his own subject matter, even if he takes it from the nether pits of limbo and erebus. Well, the girl must have pleaded and argued with me for many minutes in that deserted hall. Listening to her and trying to convince her of my inability to fulfill her request was like a dialogue in some futile and tedious nightmare. During the course of it, she told me a few details that I am unwilling to record in this narrative, details that were too morbid and too shocking for relief,

regarding the mental alteration of Cyprian and his new subject matter and method of work. There were direct and oblique hints of a growing perversion, but somehow it seemed that much more was being held back that, even in her most horrifying disclosure she was not wholly frank with me at last with some sort of hazy promise that i would speak to cyprian that i'd remonstrate with him i succeeded in getting away from her and return to my hotel the afternoon and evening that followed were tinged as by the tyrannous adumbration of an ill dream i felt that i'd stepped from the solid earth into a gulf of seething menacing madness haunted shadow and was lost head

hence forward to all rightful sense of location or direction. It was all too hideous and too doubtful and unreal. The change in Cyprian himself was no less bewildering and hardly less horrifying than the vile phantom of the bookshop and the demon sculptures that displayed a magisterial art. It was as if the man had become possessed by some satanic energy or entity. Everywhere that I went, I was powerless to shake off the feeling of an intangible pursuit of a frightful, unseen vigilance.

It seemed to me that the worm-gray face and sulphurous eyes would reappear at any moment, that the semi-canine mouth with its gangrene dripping fangs might come to slavre above the restaurant table at which I ate, or upon the pillow of my bed. I did not dare reopen the purchase Goya volume, for fear of finding that certain pages were still defiled with a spectral slime. I went out and spent the evening cafes, theatres, wherever people thronged and the lights were bright.

It was after midnight when I finally ventured to brave with the solitude of my hotel bedroom. Then there were the endless hours of nerve-run insomnia, of shivering, sweating apprehension beneath the electric bulb that I had left burning. Finally, a little before dawn, by no conscious transition and with no premonitory drowsiness, I fell asleep.

I remember no dreams, only the vast incubus-like oppression that persisted even in the depth of slumber, as if to drag me down with its formless, ever-clinging weight into gulfs beyond the reach of created flight, or the fathoming of organised entity. It was almost noon when I awoke, and I found myself staring into the verminous, apish, mummy-dead face and hell-illumined eyes of the gargall that had crouched before me in the corner of Tollments.

The thing was standing at the foot of my bed, and behind it, as I stared, The wall over the room, which was covered with a floral paper, dissolved in an infinite vista of greyness, teeming with ghoulish forms that emerged like monstrous misshapen bubbles from plains of algalent ooze and skies of serpenting vapour. It was another world, and my very sense of equilibrium was disturbed by an evil vertigo as I gazed. It seemed to me that my bed was heaving dizzily,

was turning slowly, deliriously, toward the gulf, that the feculent vista and the vile apparition was swimming beneath me, that I would fall toward them in another moment and be precipitated forever into that world of abysmal monstrosity and obscenity. In a start of profound alarm, I fought my vertigo, thought the sense that another will the mind was drawing me, that the unclean gargoy was luring me by some unspeakable mesmeric spell, as a serpent is said to lure its prey. I seemed to read a nameless purpose in its yellow-slitted eyes

in the soundless moving of its oozy lips and my very soul recoiled with nausea and revulsion as I breathed its pestilential fetal. Apparently, the mere effort of mental resistance was enough. The vista and the face receded. They went out in a swirl of daylight. I saw the design of tea roses on the wallpaper beyond. and the bed beneath me was sanely horizontal once more.

I lay sweating with my terror, all adrift on a nightmare surmise of unearthly threat and whirlpool madness, till the ringing of the telephone bell record me automatically to the known world. I sprang to answer the call. It was Cyprian, though. I should hardly have recognised the dead, hopeless tones of his voice from which the mad pride and self-assurance of the previous day had wholly vanished. "'I must see you at once,' he said.

"'Can you come to the studio?' I was about to refuse, to tell him that I'd been called home suddenly, that there was no time that I must catch the noon train, anything to avert the ordeal of another visit to that place of Methodic hell, when I heard his voice again. "'You simply must come, Philip. "'I can tell you about it over the phone. "'A dreadful thing has happened.

"'Mard of has disappeared.' "'I consented, telling him that I would start "'for the studio as soon as I dressed. "'The whole nightmare had closed in, "'had deepened immeasurably with his last words. "'But remembering the haunted face of the girl, "'her hysteric fears, her frantic plea, "'and my vague promise I could not very well decline to go.

"'I dressed and went out with my mind "'in a turmoil of abominable conjecture, of ghastly doubt and apprehension all the more hideous because I was unsure of its subject. I tried to imagine what had happened, tried to piece together the frightful, evasive, half-admitted hints of an unmoaned terror into a tangible, coherent fabric, but found myself involved in a chaos of shadowy menace. I couldn't have eaten any breakfast, even if I'd taken the necessary time. I went at once to the studio and found Cyprian standing aimlessly amid his bail-fell.

statuary. His look was that of a man who'd been stunned by the blow of some crushing weapon or was gazed on the very face of Medusa. He greeted me in a vacant manner with dull, toneless words. Then, like a charge machine, as if his body rather than his mind were speaking, he began at once to pour forth the atrocious narrative. "'They took her,' he said, simply. Maybe you didn't know it or weren't sure of it, but I've been doing all my new sculptures from life, even that last group. Marda was posing for me this forenoon, only an hour ago or less. I'd hoped to finish her part of the model in today, and she wouldn't have had to come again for this particular piece. I hadn't called the things this time, since I knew she was beginning to fear them more or more.

Oh, I think she feared them on my account more than her own. They were making me a little uneasy, too, by the boldness with which they sometimes lingered when I'd ordered them to leave, and the way they would sometimes appear when I didn't want them to. I was busy with some final touches on the girl figure, and wasn't even looking at Marta, when suddenly I knew the things were there. The smell told me, if nothing else, I guess, you know what that smell is like.

I looked up and found the studio was for them. They'd never before appeared in such numbers. While they were surrounding mudder, they were crowding and unjustling each other, were all reaching toward her with their filthy talents. But even then, I didn't think they could harm her. Well, they are material beings in the sense that we are, and they really have no physical power outside their own plane.

All that they do have is, well, sort of snaky mesmerism. they'll always try to drag you down to their own dimension by means of it. God help anyone who yields to him, but you don't have to go unless you're weak or willing. I've never had any doubt of my power to resist them, and I didn't really dream they could do anything to martyr. It startled me, though, when I saw the whole crowd in Halpac, I ordered them to go pretty sharply. I was angry, somewhat alarmed, too, but they merely grimaced and slavoured with that slow, twisting movement of their lips that's like a voiceless gibbering, and then they closed in on martyr, just as I represented them doing in that accursed group of sculpture. Only there were scores of

them now, instead of merely seven. I can't describe how it happened, but all at once their foul talons had reached the girl. They were pouring her, but pulling her hands or arms, her body. She screamed, and I hope I'll never hear another scream so full of black agony, and soul unhinged and fright. Then I knew that she'd yielded to them, either by choice or from excessive terror. And I knew that they were taking her away. For a moment the studio wasn't there at all,

only a long, great ooze in plain, beneath skies that were the fumes of hell, writhing like a million ghostly and distorted dragons. Marta was sinking into that ooze, and the things were all about her, gathering in fresh hundreds from every side, fighting each other for place, sinking with her like bloated, misshaped fang creatures into their native slime. And then everything vanished.

And I was standing here in the studio all alone with these damn sculptures. He paused for a little, and then stared with dreary, desolate eyes at the floor. And then? It was awful, Philip. And I'll never forgive myself for having anything to do with those monsters. I must have been a little mad, but I've always had a strong ambition to create some real stuff in the field of the grotesque and visionary and macabre. I don't suppose you ever suspected back in my stodgy face that I had a veritable

appetence for such things. I wanted to do in sculpture what Po and Lovecraft and Baudelaire done in literature, what Robson Goya did in pictorial art. And this was what led me into the occult. when I realized my limitations I knew that I had to see the dwellers of the invisible worlds before I could depict them I wanted to do it

I long for this power of vision and representation more than anything else and then all at once I found that I had the power of summoning the unseen there was no magic involved in the usual sense of the word no spells and circles no pentacles and burning gums from old sorcery books

But bottom, it was just willpower, I guess, a will to divine the satanic, to summon the innumerable malignites and grotesqueries of people from other planes and ours or mingled unperceived with humanity. You have no idea what I have beheld, Philip. These statues of mine, these devils, vampires, lamias, the satyrs were all done from life, or at least from recent memory. The originals are what the occultists would call elementals, I suppose. There are endless worlds, contiguous to our own, or coexisting with it, that such beings inhabit. All the creations of myth and fantasy, all the familiar spirits that sorcerers have evoked are resident in these worlds. I made myself their master. I levied upon them at will. and then from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others

a little nearer the ultimate nadir of hell I called the ennominate beings who pose for this new figure piece I don't know who they are but I have surmised a good deal they are hateful as the worms of the pit they are malevolent as harpies they drew with a poisonous hunger not to be named or imagined but I believe they were powerless to do anything outside their own and I've always laughed at them when they try to entice me,

even though that snakeish metal pull-of-thairs was rather creepy at times. It was as if soft, invisible, gelatinous arms were trying to drag you down from the firm shore into a bottomless bark. Oh, they are hunters, I am sure of that, hunters from beyond. God knows what they'll do to Mard, and now they have her with their mercy. Oh, that vast, vis-id, myasma, horn, place to which they took her is awful beyond the imagining of Satan. Perhaps even there, they couldn't harm her body, but bodies aren't what they want. It isn't for human flesh that they grope with those ghoulish claws, and gape and slavre with

those gangrenous mouths. The brain itself and the soul, too, is their food. They are the creatures who prey on the minds of madmen and madwomen, who devour the disembodied spirits that have fallen from the cycles of incarnation. have gone down beyond the possibility of rebirth. Oh, to think of martyr in their power, it is worse than hell or madness. Marta loved me, and I loved her too. Though we didn't have the sense to realize it, wrapped as I was in my dark, baleful ambition

and impious egotism. She was afraid for me, and I believe she surrendered voluntarily to the things. She must have thought they'd leave me alone if they secured another victim in my place. He ceased and began to pace idly and feverishly about. I saw that his hollow eyes were alight with torment, as if the mechanical telling of this horrible story had in some manner served to re-quicken his crush mind. Utterly and starkly appalled by his hideous revelations, I could say nothing, but could only stand and watch his torture-twisted face.

Incredibly, his expression changed, with a wild startled look that was instantly transfigured, into joy. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Marta was standing in the centre of the room. She was nude, apart from a Spanish shore that she must have worn while posing. Her face was bloodless as the marble of a tomb, and her eyes were wide and blank as if she'd been drained of all life, of all thought or emotional memory, as if even the knowledge of horror had been taken away from her. It was the face of the living.

dead and the soulless mask of ultimate idiocy, and the joy faded from Cyprian's eyes as he stepped toward her. He took her in his arms. He spoke to her with a desperate, loving tenderness, with cajoling and caressing words. She made no answer, however, no movement of recognition or awareness, but stared beyond him with her blank eyes, to which the daylight and the darkness, the void air and her lover's face would henceforward be the same. He and I both knew in that instant that she would never again respond to any human voice

or to human love or terror, that she was like an empty ceremony, retaining the outward form of that which the worms have eaten in their mausolean darkness, of the noisome pits, wherein she'd been of that bornless realm in its pollulating phantoms. she could tell us nothing.

Her agony had ended with the terrible mercy of complete forgetfulness. Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carved satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede. The walls and floors dissolved into a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo, like a devil-laden hurricane from the Malabulch. Outlined against that boiling, measureless cauldron of a malignant storm,

Martyr stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, The abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary. I like to think that I alone beheld it, that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead face of martyr. He drew her close. He repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery, and then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, He snatched a heavy sculptor's mallet from the table on which it was lying,

and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modelled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the Terra Madden Girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay. We now move on to the second work by Clark Ashton Smith. Murder in the fourth dimension. The following pages are from a notebook that was discovered, lying at the foot of an oak tree beside the Lincoln Highway between Balman and Oberyn. They would have been dismissed immediately as the work of a disordered mind if it had not been

for the unaccountable disappearance eight days before of James Buckingham and Edgar Halpin. Experts testified that the handwriting was undoubtedly that of Buckingham. The silver dollar and a handkerchief marked with Buckingham's initials were also found not far from the notebook. Not everyone perhaps will believe that my ten years hatred for Edgar Harpin was the impelling force that drove me to the perfecting of a most unique invention. Only those who have detested and loathed another man with the black further of the feeling I had conceived will understand the patience with which I sought to devise a revenge that

should be safe and adequate at the same time. The wrong he had done me was one that must be expiated sooner or later, and nothing short of his death would be sufficient. However, I did not care to hang, not even for a crime that I could regard as nothing more than the mere execution of justice, and, as a lawyer, I knew how difficult how practically impossible was the commission of a murder that would leave no betraying evidence. Therefore, I puzzled long and fruitlessly as to the manner in which Halpin should die, before my inspiration came to me. I had reason enough to hate Edgar Halpin. We had been bosom friends all through our school days, and, through the first years of our professional life as law partners.

But when helping marry the one woman I'd ever loved with complete devotion, all friendship ceased on my side and was replaced by an ice-like barrier of inexorable enmity. Even the death of Alice, five years after the marriage, made no difference, for I could not forgive the happiness of which I had been deprived, the happiness that they'd shared during those years, like the thieves they were. I felt that she would have cared for me if it had not been for Halpin. Indeed, she and I had been almost engaged before the beginning of his rivalry. It must not be supposed, however, that I was indiscreet enough to betray my feelings at any time.

Harpin was my daily associate in the open law firm to which we belonged, and I continued to be a most welcome and frequent guest at his home. I doubt if he ever knew that I cared greatly for Alice. I am secretive and undemonstrative by temperament, and also I am proud. No one, except Alice herself, ever surmised my suffering, and even she knew nothing of my resentment. Halpin himself trusted me, and nurturing as I did the idea of retaliation at some future time, I took care that he should continue to trust me. I made myself necessary to him in all ways.

I helped him when my heart was a cauldron of seething poisons. I spoke words of brotherly affection and clapped him on the back when I would rather have driven a dagger through him. I knew all the tortures and all the nausea of a hypocrite. And day after day, year after year, I made varying plans for an ultimate revenge. Apart from my legal studies and duties during those ten years, I apprised myself of everything available that dealt with

methods of murder. Crimes of passion allured me with a fateful interest, and I read untiringly the records of particular cases. I made a study of weapons and poisons, and as I studied them, I pictured to myself the death of helping in every conceivable way. I imagined the deed as being done at all hours of the day and night in a multitude of places. The only flaw in these dreams was my inability to think of any spot that would assure perfect safety from subsequent detection. It was my bent towards scientific speculation and experiment that finally gave me the clue I sought. I had long been familiar with the theory that other worlds or dimensions may coexist in the same space with ours by reason of a different molecular structure and vibrational

rate, rendering them intangible to us. One day when I was indulging in a murderous fantasy, in which for the thousandth time I imagined myself throttling, helping with my bare hands, it occurred to me that some unseen dimension, if one could only penetrate it, would be the ideal place for the commission of a homicide. All circumstantial evidence, as well as the corpse itself, would be lacking, in other words,

one would have a perfect absence of what is known as the corpus delicti. The problem of how to obtain entrance to this dimension was, of course, an unsuptial. solved one, but I did not feel that it would necessarily prove insoluble. I set myself immediately to a consideration of the difficulties to be overcome and the possible ways and means. There are reasons why I do not care to set forth in this narrative the details of the various experiments to which I was drawn during the next three years. The theory that underlay my tests and researches was a very simple one, but the processes

involved were highly intricate. In brief, the premise from which I worked was that the vibratory rate of objects in the fourth dimension could be artificially established by means of some mechanism, and that things or persons exposed to the influence of the vibration could be transported thereby to this alien realm. For a long time, all my experiments were condemned to failure, because I was groping among mysterious powers and recondite laws whose motive principle I had not wholly grasped.

I will not even hint at the basic nature of the device which brought my ultimate success, for I do not want others to follow where I have gone and find themselves in the same dismal predicament. I will say, however, that the desired vibration was attained by condensing ultraviolet rays in a refractive apparatus made of certain very sensitive materials which I will not name. The resultant power was stored in a kind of battery, and could be emitted from a vibratory disc suspended above an ordinary office chair, exposing everything beneath the disc to the influence of the new vibration. The range of the influence could be closely regulated by means of an insulating attachment.

By the use of the apparatus, I finally succeeded in precipitating various articles into the fourth dimension. A dinner plate, a bust of Dante, a Bible, a French novel and a house cat. All disappeared from sight and touch in a few instances when the ultraviolet power was turned upon. I knew that henceforth they were functioning as atomic entities in a world where all things had the same vibratory rate that had been artificially induced by means of my mechanism. Before venturing into the invisible domain myself, it was of course necessary to have some way of returning. I invented a second battery and a second vibratory disk, through which, by the use of certain infrared rays, the vibrations of our own world could be established. By turning the force from the disc on the very same spot where the dinner plate and other articles had disappeared,

I succeeded in recovering all of them. All were absolutely unchanged, and though several months had gone by, the cat had not suffered in any way from its fourth-dimensional incarceration. The infrared device was portable, and I meant to take it with me on my visit to the new realm in the company of Edgar Halpin. I, but not Halpin, would return anon to resume the threads of mundane existence. My experiments had all been carried on with utter secrecy. To mask their real nature, as well as to provide myself with the needful privacy, I built a small laboratory in the woods of an uncultivated

ranch that I owned, lying midway between Oben and Bowman. Here I retired at varying intervals when I had the requisite leisure, ostensibly to conduct some chemical experiments of an educative but far from unusual type. I never admitted anyone to the laboratory, and no great amount of curiosity was evinced by friends and acquaintances regarding its contents or the tests I was carrying on. Never did I breathe a syllable to anyone that could indicate the true goal of my researches. I shall never forget the jubilation I felt when the infrared device had proven its practicality by retrieving the plate, the bust, the two volumes, and the cat. I was so eager for the consummation of my long-delayed revenge that I did not even consider

a preliminary personal trip into the fourth dimension. I had determined that Edgar Halpin must precede me when I went. I did not feel, however, that it would be wise to tell him anything concerning the real nature of my device, or the proposed excursion. Halpin at this time was suffering from recurrent attacks of terrific neuralgia. One day, when he complained more than usual, I told him under the seal of confidence that I'd been working on a vibratory invention for the relief of such maladies and had finally perfected it. I'll take you out to the laboratory tonight.

You can try it, I said. It'll fix you up in a jiffy. All you'll have to do will be to sit on the chair and let me turn on the current. but don't say anything to anybody. Thanks, old man, he rejoined. I'll certainly be grateful if you can do anything to stop this damnable pain. It feels like electric drills boring through my head all the time. I had chosen my time well, for all things were favourable to the maintenance of the secrecy I desired.

Harpin lived on the outskirts of the town, and he was alone for the nonce. his housekeeper having gone away on a brief visit to some sick relative. The night was murky and foggy, and I drove to Halpin's house and stopped for him shortly after the dinner hour when few people were abroad. I did not think anyone saw us when we left the town. I followed a rough and little used by road for most of the way to my laboratory, saying that I did not care to meet other cars in the thick fog, if I could avoid it.

We passed no one, and I felt this was a good. good omen and that everything combined to further my plan. Halpin uttered an exclamation of surprise when I turned on the lights in my laboratory. I didn't dream he had so much stuff here, he remarked, peering about with respectful curiosity as the long array of unsuccessful appliances which I had thrown aside in the course of my labours. I pointed to the chair above which the ultraviolet vibrator was suspended. Take a seat head. I enjoined him. We'll soon cure everything that ails you. Sure you ain't going to electrocube me, he joked as he obeyed my direction.

A thrill of fierce triumph ran through me like the stimulation of some rare elixir when he had seated himself. Everything was in my power now in the moment of recompense for my ten years' humiliation and suffering was at hand. Halpin was so unsuspecting. The thought of any danger to himself, of any treachery on my part, would have been fantastically incredible to him. Putting my hand beneath my coat, I caressed the hilt of the hunting knife that I carried. All set, I asked him, Sure, Mike, go ahead and shoot.

I'd found the exact range that would involve all of Halpin's body without affecting the chair itself. Fixing my gaze upon him, I pressed the little knob that turned on the current of vibratory rays. The result was practically instantaneous, for he seemed to melt like a puff of thinning smoke. I could still see his outlines for a moment, and the look of a phantasmal astonishment on his face, and then he was gone, utterly gone. Perhaps it will be a source of wonderment that, having annihilated howpiness, as far as all earthly existence was concerned, I was not content merely to leave him in the unseen, intangible plane to which he had been transposed. Would that I had been content to do so?

But the wrong I'd suffered was hot and cankerous within me, and I could not bear to think that he still lived in any form or upon any plane. Nothing but absolute death would suffice to assuage my resentment and the death must be inflicted by my own hand it now remained to follow Halpin into that realm which no man had ever visited before and of whose geographical conditions and characteristics I had formed no idea whatsoever I felt sure however that I could enter it and return safely after disposing of my victim the return of the cat left no apparent room for doubt on that score I turned out the lights seating myself in the chair with a portable infrared vibrator in my arms, I switched on the ultraviolet power.

The sensation I felt was that of one who falls with nightmare velocity into a great golf. My ears were death with the intolerable thunder of my descent. A frightful sickness overcame me, and I was near to losing all consciousness for a moment in the black vortex of roaring space and force that seemed to draw me in a deerwood through the ultimate pits. Then the speed of my fall was gradually retarded, and I came gently down to something that was solid beneath my feet.

There was a dim glimmering of light that grew stronger as my eyes accustomed themselves to it, and by this light I saw help in standing a few feet away. Behind him were dark, amorphous rocks, and the vague outlines of a desolate landscape of low mounds and primordial treeless flats. Even though I'd hardly known what to expect, I was somewhat surprised by the character of the environment in which I found myself. I guess I would have said that the fourth dimension would be something more colourous and complex and varied a land of multifield, hues and many angled forms. However, in its drear and primitive desolation, the place was truly ideal for the commission of the act I had intended. Halpin came toward me in the doubtful light.

There was a dazed and almost idiotic look on his face, and he stuttered a little as he tried to speak. Oh, what happened? He articulated at last. Never mind what happened. It isn't a circumstance to what's going to happen now. I laid the portable vibrator aside on the ground as I spoke. The day's look was still on Halpin's face when I drew the hunting knife

and stabbed him through the body with one clean thrust. In that thrust, all the stifled hatred, all the cankering resentment of ten insufferable years, was finally vindicated. He fell in a twisted heap, twitched a little, and lay still. The blood ooze very slowly from his side and formed a puddle. I remember wondering at its slowness even then, for their oozing seemed to go on through hours and days.

Somehow, as I stood there, I was obsessed by a feeling of utter unreality. No doubt the long strain I'd been under, the daily stress of injurious and decade-deferred hopes had left me unable to realize the final consummation of my desire when it came. The whole thing seemed no more than one of the homicidal daydreams in which I'd imagined myself stabbing howp and to the heart and seeing his hateful body lie before me. At length, I decided that it was time to affect,

my return, for surely nothing could be gained by lingering any longer inside Halpin's corpse amid the unutterable dreariness of the fourth-dimensional landscape. I erected the vibrator in a position where its rays could be turned upon myself, and pressed the switch. I was aware of a sudden vertigo, and felt that I was about to begin another descent into fathomless vertical gulfs. But, though the vertigo persisted, nothing happened. and I found that I was still standing beside the corpse in the same dismal milieu.

Unfoundment and growing consternation crept over me. Apparently, for some unknown reason, the vibrator would not work in the way I'd so confidently expected. Perhaps in these new surroundings there was some barrier to the full development of the infrared power. I do not know, but at any rate, there I was, in a truly singular and far from a gruelessing, I do not know how long I fooled in a mounting frenzy with the mechanism of the vibrator, in the hope that something had temporarily gone wrong and could be remedied if the difficulty were homely found. However, all my tinkrings were of no avail. The machine was in perfect working order, but the required force was wanting. I tried the experiment of exposing small articles to the

influence of the rays. A silver coin in a handkerchief dissolved and disappeared very slowly. I felt they must have regained the levels of mundane existence, but evidently the vibrational force was not strong enough to transport a human being. Finally, I gave it up and threw the vibrator to the ground. In the surge of a violent despair that came upon me, I felt the need of muscular action, a prolonged movement, and I started off at once to explore the weird realm in which I had involuntarily imprisoned myself. It was an unearthly land, a land such as might have existed before the creation of life. There were undulating blanks of desolation beneath the uniform grey of a heaven without moon or sun or stars or clouds, from which an uncertain

and diffused glimmering was cast upon the world beneath. There were no shadows, for the light seemed to emanate from all directions. The soil was a grey dust in place. and a grey vicinity of slime in others, and the mounds I've already mentioned were like the backs of prehistoric monsters heaving from the primal ooze. There were no signs of insect or animal life. There were no trees, no herbs, not even a blade of grass, a patch of moss or lichen, or a trace of algae. Many rocks were strewn chaotically through the desolation, and their forms were such as an

idiotic demon might have devised in aping the handy work of God. The light was so dim that all things were lost at a little distance, and I could not tell whether the horizon was near or far. It seems to me that I must have wandered on for several hours, maintaining as direct a course of progression as I could. I had a compass, a thing that I always carry with me, but it refused to function. I was driven to conclude that there were no magnetic poles in this new world. suddenly, as I rounded a pile of the vast amorphous boulders, I came to a human body that lay huddled on the ground and say, incredulously, that it was helping.

The blood still oozed from the fabric of his coat, and the pool it had formed was no larger than when I'd begun my journey. I felt sure that I'd not wandered in a circle, as people are said to do amid unfamiliar surroundings. How, then, could I have returned to the scene of my crime? The problem nearly drove me mad as I pondered it, and I set off with frantic vigour in an opposite direction from the one I'd first taken. For all intents and purposes, the scene which I now passed was identical with the one

that lay on the other side of Halpin's course. It was hard to believe that the low mounds, the drear levels of dust and ooze and the monstrous boulders were not the same as those among which I'd made my form away. As I went, I took out my watch with the idea of timing my progress, but the hands had stopped at the very moment when I'd taken my plunge into the unknown space from the laboratory, and though I wound it carefully, it refused to run. After walking an enormous distance, during which, to my surprise, I felt no fatigue whatever, I came once more to the body I had sought to leave. I think that I went really mad then for a little while.

Now, after a duration of time or eternity which I have no means of computing, I am writing this pencilled account on the leaves of my notebook. I'm writing it beside the corpse of Edgar Harpin, from which I have been unable to flee. For a score of excursions into the dim realms on all sides have ended by bringing me back to it after a certain interval. The corpse is still fresh, and the blood has not dried. Apparently, the thing we know as time is well-nigh non-existence in this world,

or at any rate is seriously disordered in its action, and most of the normal concomitants of time are likewise absent, and space itself has the property of returning always to the same point. The voluntary movements I've performed might be considered as a sort of time-seat, but in regard to involuntary things there is little or no time movement I experience neither physical weariness or hunger but the horror of my situation is not to be conveyed in human language and hell itself can hardly have devised a name for it when I finished writing this narration I shall precipitate the notebook into the levels of

mundane life by means of the infrared vibrator some obscure need of Confessing my crime and telling my predicament to others has led me to an act which I should never have believed myself capable, for I am the most uncommunicative of men by nature. Apart from satisfying this need, the composition of my narrative is something to do. It's a temporary reprieve from the desperate madness that will surge upon me soon, and the grey, eternal horror of the limbo to which I have doomed myself beside the unresolved. undecane body of my victim. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Dr. Creepin's Dungeon. This evening we listened to two fabulous works by the classic Clark Ashton Smith. We began with the hunters from beyond and we finished with murder in the fourth dimension. That's it for this episode, but I do so hope you'll join me again soon.

Until next time, very, very sweet dreams and bye-bar.