Shadows Out of Time

“Time isn’t just weirder than we know, Roy,” Connie said earnestly. “It’s weirder than we can know. Einstein and relativity only started proving that. It can be slowed down. It can be accelerated too. Maybe in less drastic ways than near lightspeed or the g-field of a neutron star. There are convincing cases of personalities being transferred across time, not all of them human personalities. Experiments have been done right here at Miskatonic. Wingate Peaslee carried them out in the 1950s. He had a strong interest because his own father had been a victim of transferred personality for five years. Wingate was the only one who stood by him; his wife got a divorce. Just about unthinkable in New England before the Great War! It’s a family matter, you know. Wingate’s sister Hannah was my great-grandma. I’ve read Wingate’s record of what his father found and saw in Australia in ’35. You should too. I’m worried about these dreams you’re having, and I think you ought to be careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “No, I’m not humoring you, I meant it, Connie. The dreams bother me too. If they happen much more, or get more intense, I’ll stop working with those rock samples.” I didn’t say for how long. “Meanwhile, you know, could you translate some of Huang Jing’s masterpiece?”

II

We worked on it for hours. That Chinese student really had mastered German, it seemed, and his translation of von Junzt’s chapters seemed accurate, which I knew from reading an accurate English version of Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The first one was that shoddy Bridewall effort of 1845, worthless to any real scholar, and the early twentieth century Golden Goblin edition, expurgated to the bone, was merely ornamental. Then it was forgotten for about sixty years. When hippie mysticism came in, though, and pious conventional horror lost a lot of its power, a real, complete translation into English came from Maelstrom Press, first in stiff covers and then in paperback, with Secret Mysteries of Asia for a companion volume. When Connie and I were an item I’d read them both.

Huang Jing’s sections of Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, interspersed with his translations of von Junzt’s chapters, said nothing much about the German’s last journey. What he’d written on that subject came from the Mongols who had accompanied von Junzt to Leng, but deserted him before he arrived there. Pure hearsay, no doubt, which Huang had got third or fourth hand, and decades after everybody involved was dead.

I was disappointed, to be truthful. Huang gave no clue as to where Leng was situated. He even suggested it was part of the dreamlands, a notion I’d read about before, and he stated as fact that the stars of Leng were unlike Earth’s. His more realistic details described Leng as a dry, cold, stony plateau, very difficult of access. He recounted a story that the Qianlong Emperor, in the eighteenth century, filled with the pride of his conquests, had sent an army eight thousand strong to subdue Leng, and fewer than a hundred came back. That was expunged from the imperial records, and it was made a capital crime to repeat the story or set it down in writing.

Connie told me that was possible. The Qianlong Emperor had been quite a book-burner, destroying thousands of volumes, especially ones that said too much about problems with defense, or failed frontier campaigns. A few dozen indiscreet writers in his reign were sentenced to nasty deaths by the Literary Inquisition. Charming.

“Huang was lucky to be born after that emperor died,” I said. “Would it be true that he sent a force to conquer Leng?”

“Can’t confirm it. He might have. The approaches are supposed to be harsh, and of course disease might have destroyed the army. Huang does say here that nobody finds Leng by the same route twice.”

This was no help. Huang also recounted the same legends about Leng I had heard before. It was supposedly the original home of the Tcho-Tcho people, held in disrepute throughout Asia, and Huang described them with the same disdain. According to him they were horrid quasi-humans, squat and powerful in form, their abundant body hair more like stiff black bristles, their mouths grotesquely wide, stretching almost from ear to ear. Their manners and customs were appalling, their closest approach to religion a corpse-eating cult with a winged canine sphinx for its symbol, and they killed strangers on sight, quickly if they were fortunate.