Генри Каттнер: Lands of the Earthquake

Boyce drew his breath in a long gasp.

“Something’s missing,” he said softly. “ This! ”

The crystal he had carried for two years was cold in his fingers as he lifted it in a gesture that was virtually a conditioned reflex. He held it before the candle and the flame struck sparks from the facets of the stone. The room for an instant was full of shooting fireflies as the lights danced wildly on floor and walls and ceiling. Boyce’s hand shook.

He remembered, now, out of that lost year, how he had held up this crystal before, while she— she …

There were suddenly shadows upon the walls. Shadows that moved and grew stronger as Boyce gazed. A strange, dim richness was gathering and growing all around him, a dance of shadow–tapestries blowing like ghosts in a ghostly wind whose draft he could not feel. Dim jewels flashed from the unreal folds.

The bare boards still rose around him, gray and splintered and dusty, but a clothing of tapestried hangings was taking shadow–form upon the walls, silently rustling in that silent, unreal breeze. Thicker and thicker the shadows grew. Now the boards were half–hidden behind their ghostly richness, like the bare bones of a skeleton that gathered ephemeral flesh about it out of a phantom–world.

With every flicker of the candle–flame the tapestries grew richer and more real. The jewels caught the light more clearly. There was a rug like thick, soft dust underfoot, opulently patterned. Overhead the ceiling billowed with dim silks like the webs of fabulous spiders, woven into flowery garlands. And yet behind all the richness he could still see the naked ribs of the room, grey boards, dust, desolation.

Boyce held the crystal to the light, his hand now steady. And the candle flame, falling through it in broken refractions, cast a web of light upon the one surface of the wall that was not shadow–hung. But no longer did the bare boards show there. Where the light fell a crystalline pattern formed upon the wall, intricately woven in designs as delicate and clear as the pattern of a snowflake.

It seemed to brighten as he watched. The ghostly tapestries blew about them, the silken garlands overhead billowed, but the pattern on the wall held steady and grew deeper and more brilliant, deeper and deeper. Light poured powerfully from the flame through the crystal, was strengthened as through a lens and sank like some tangible substance into the wall beyond. It permeated the wall, dissolved it, etched the pattern of the crystal as if with some strange, bright acid that set its mark forever upon the surface where the light–pattern lay.

The wind blew through the pattern…. Boyce was aware of it dimly. The tapestries blew both ways from that delicately etched design upon the wall, as if the light had dissolved an opening into the outer air and a breeze from another world blew through it.

It must be a breeze from another world, for he could not feel its breath.

Suddenly his hand began to shake. This was impossible. This could not be happening. It was hallucination, alcohol–born, and he would waken in a moment in some dingy booth in a bar with the noise of tin–pan music in his ears and crowds moving about him—not with these silent tapestries that looked so frighteningly familiar upon the walls.

His hand shook—yes. But the light upon the wall did not shake. Unbelievingly, he lowered the crystal slowly. The light held steady. He closed his fingers about the crystal—it was colder than ever now, with a chill that sank into his hand—and dropped the smooth, shining thing back into his pocket, his eyes still unwaveringly fixed upon the wall.

The beautiful, shining pattern was a refraction no longer. It was real. It was a great glittering design of crystal, cold and perfect as a snowflake, and as fragile. He knew it was fragile. How he knew it he was not sure.

But it was the only real thing in the room. The bare bones of the walls, the dust and the splintered boards were not there at all. The tapestries were more real than he, blowing in a scented breeze from the crystalline wall. But neither tapestries nor the unfelt breeze had the compelling reality of the pattern.

There was something—he fought to grasp it.

She had gone before him. That was it! That was what had haunted him for so long, driving him along devious paths to this moment and this sorcerous room.

He could see her as she had stood here months ago—a moment ago—time lost all meaning as he remembered. But he could not see her face. She had stood with her back to him in this rich, gleaming room, a silhouette against the great shining pattern on the wall. A tall silhouette, lovely, dangerous….

Light flashed in his mind. He saw as if a shutter had snapped open the way she turned for one brief instant and glanced across her shoulder into his eyes.

She had smiled. He saw the red lips curve, and the white flash of her teeth and the brilliance of her eyes, violet fire in the richly tinted face. Danger was in her smile, and bright, blinding color. An invitation and a threat. And then she had stepped forward and—and …

Yes, it had been invitation. It might have happened a year ago—it might have happened only the moment before this. Time meant nothing to her . She meant terror and something worse than terror. She meant the thing his mind had gone blank to shut away forever. But where she went, he must follow.

He had completely forgotten everything but that.

Blindly he stepped forward. The pattern upon the wall loomed above him, exquisitely etched in infinities of tiny crystalline panes. Beyond it he could see dim things moving. He did not care. He thought they meant danger, but he did not care. The bright, laughing, terrible face was in his eyes like a flash of light that blotted out all other vision. He saw nothing now, but her.

By instinct he put up both arms to protect his face—and plunged blindly through the glass.

He heard it splinter around him with a sound like thousands of tiny musical bells tinkling. He felt their sharp edges cutting through his sleeves. He felt a gust of keen, cold air, and then the world failed beneath his feet and he was falling.

After that he remembered nothing at all.

Someone was laughing. It sounded far away. Boyce opened his eyes and looked up dazedly at a drift of blue–grey mist floating before his face. Beyond and above it he could see more mist, layer upon layer hanging in the dim cool air, and above them—mountains?—great walls of rock that vanished into the fog.

The laughter came again. It was not far away—it was close by, and there was a snarl in it. He sat up stiffly, wondering where he was.

There was clear glass, broken into glittering fragments, lying all around him. Boyce remembered.

But now he lay upon a shelf of stone, cold and a little damp, and behind him when he twisted to look was a grey rocky wall rising sheer into clouds. Window? There was none. Yet he must have emerged here, upon this ledge, for here lay the splintered glass of his passage through the pattern. Whatever door he had come through was closed behind him now.

The ledge was narrow. To right and left it led downward over a trail along the face of the cliff. Mist floated to hide what lay below. But before him, far away over the drifting mist, a great walled city lifted its towers. And it was a curiously shaped city. He blinked through the dim air that lay between.

Clouds formed and tore apart and reformed over the whole valley floor, but the city’s roofs rose too high to be hidden. He could see that some of them were made of jagged rock, and some of clear glass. Many were of bright stuff like the roofs of tents, striped and patterned or of clear, glowing colors that billowed a little in the wind.