«No, I'm sorry. My reading has been in other areas.»
«Read them, my friend! You will see that this little band of writers and poets had somehow learned to catch at least glimpses of what is out there somewhere, in the X dimensions. And you will see that they had met, out there, the Ngaa. In 1973 the Mirage Press published a collection of fragmentary essays and letters of Clark Ashton Smith entitled Planets and Dimensions. Here, let me show you.» He rummaged through the stack and came up with an unpretentious white-jacketed paperback.
J took the book and read, «'About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest's card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from the air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror and loathsomeness.»
«He saw it,» insisted Colby. «He saw it in broad daylight. Clark Ashton Smith saw the Ngaa, as it chose to show itself to him. I have spent my every spare moment since coming to America in places like the Rosicrucian Library, the Bancroft Library of the University of California, the California Room of the Oakland Public Library and Oakland's Jack London Room at the Jack London Museum in Glen Ellen, where Russ Kingman, the curator, has helped me track down obscure information unknown to all but the most devoted Jack London aficionados. Bit by precious bit, a picture has formed. Yes, bit by bit, like a man reconstructing a dinosaur from a million tiny bones, I have reconstructed the lives of those men and women who, in the early years of the twentieth century, found a route into another world.
«It was all part of what Jack London termed a 'search for a natural explanation for the supernatural.' London, you know, had a mother who was a spirit medium, yet he early fell under the influence of Marxist dialectical materialism. For him, at least, some way of harmonizing the spiritual with the material was a psychological necessity. The others, each in a different way, felt the same need.
«The search was part hobby, part obsession, and it led them into researches into the occult, pursued off and on over most of their adult lives. Together with H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Smith carried on an extensive correspondence, they evolved the theory that there were creatures of some sort trapped in another dimension who had once ruled Earth and sought to return and rule it again, and that attempts by these beings to break through into our world explained all the various strange events usually ascribed to supernatural causes. These writers formed a kind of brotherhood, vowed to secrecy and, if and when any one of them sensed the Ngaa coming for them, to suicide.»
J was surprised. «Suicide, Dr. Colby?»
«Yes, suicide. One thing they found out which you may not yet have guessed is that the Ngaa, under certain conditions, has the power to kidnap someone from our dimension and return with him to its own dimension. Against such an abduction, death was their only defense.»
«What finally happened to them all?»
«About DeCastries I know almost nothing. He is such an obscure figure he may be a fictional character, invented by the others, or a pen name for someone. Jack London's Wolf House mansion in the wilderness of the Valley of the Moon burst into flames and was totally gutted the night before London was to move into it, and the fire remains unexplained to this day. Not long after, London died, and London buffs are still debating whether it was by natural causes, suicide or murder. Nora May French and George Sterling poisoned themselves. Ambrose Bierce wrote a postcard to a friend from Mexico saying 'Pray for me-real loud,' then vanished without a trace, though the U.S. government searched for him for years.»
«What about Clark Ashton Smith?»
«After a brief career as a writer of weird tales, he abandoned literature and became a hermit, spending the rest of his life sculpting horrible yet frightfully lifelike statues of monsters.»
Of the mansion's former use as a ballet school, there remained only a few reminders. One of these was the floor to ceiling mirrors in the gymnasium. These mirrors faced each other in such a way that J, when he looked into one of them, seemed to see a line of replicas of himself, a line that stretched in two directions to infinity. It was a vaguely disquieting illusion, but nevertheless it was in the gym that J installed his scrambler phone, on the wall, plugging in to a pre-existing outlet. The room was almost never used during the summer, when the patients could get their exercise out of doors, and California was at this time suffering a kind of out-of-season summer, one of the worst droughts in its history. There were, of course, no telephone outlets in the patients' rooms, and J was now living in one of these rooms.
On his first day at Dr. Saxton Colby's sanitarium, J had telephoned Copra House, «keeping in touch,» as he put it. He had phoned again on the second day, the third and the fourth. It was not until the fifth day that he had finally phoned Lord Leighton at the Project. He had reasoned, on a conscious level, that Copra House would inform him if there was any trouble in the underground computer complex, but perhaps on an unconscious level he was afraid of what Leighton might have to tell him, afraid that the Ngaa had not left London but had remained behind to work some new mischief.
«Lord Leighton here.»
«This is J, old boy.»
«Don't 'old boy' me. You took your bloody time ringing me up. Been too busy sunning yourself at the seaside with those American film stars, I fancy.»
«No such luck. Tell me Leighton, how has it been going there?»
«If you mean by that, have I been having trouble with things that go bump in the night, the answer is no. Since you left, everything's been quiet. Quiet as a tomb, you might say. How about at your end?»
«Quiet here, too. We had a bit of trouble with the Ngaa immediately after takeoff, but since then nothing.»
«That's good news at any rate.»
«I'm not so sure.»
«Oh? The Ngaa has picked up its toys and gone home, and now you miss it?»
«No, no, but I'm getting a feeling about how the Ngaa operates. For example, I saw a picture of Dr. Colby's daughter Jane, the one who might have committed suicide.»
«And she looked exactly like the little girl you saw from the window of my study?»
«No, she looked completely different. Colby's daughter had black hair in bangs. The girl I saw was a blonde with a pony tail.»
«My word! Then who was it that you saw?»
«It was the Jane Colby I had expected to see. MacMurdo never actually described her, so I put together an image in my head of what a girl of that age, living in the states at that time, ought to look like. The Ngaa plucked that image out of my mind and presented it to me as a reality, knowing I'd accept it because it fulfilled my preconceived ideas. You see what I'm driving at?»
«Not really.»
«The Ngaa believes in giving people what they want. That's how it ropes people in, you see. That's how it roped in Dr. Colby, by allowing him to believe his daughter had returned to him.»
«Does Colby still believe that?»
«No, his researches have convinced him the so-called ghost he saw in Scotland was a pure illusion. He didn't like that conclusion, but he accepted it when the evidence became overwhelming. He's a father, Leighton, but he's also a scientist, and the scientist in him finally won the argument. It was a brutal disillusionment.»
«A pity, but I still don't see. «
«Think, Leighton, think! What do we want most now? To be rid of the Ngaa! So the Ngaa, like a good genie, is granting our wish, but only until we drop our guard. Then I promise you the Ngaa will be back, and with a few surprises we may find decidedly unpleasant.»