Robert Price: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

The trouble began April 13, 1940. I was visiting my friend that day, and during a rambling conversation he hinted that he had discovered on the piano several combinations of musical tones that disturbed him. It was evening and we were alone in the huge, two- story house that stands there today, mouldy and empty beneath a giant maple, gaunt reminder of the horror we unleashed within it.

Baldwyn was a pianist of great ability, and I admired the talent which dwarfed my own musical skill. The wild, weird music he loved often drove me into fits of melancholy I could not fathom. It is indeed a pity that none of those original manuscripts were saved, for many of them were classics of horror, and others so fantastic that I would hesitate to call them music at all.

His statement troubled me; heretofore he had had utter confidence in his mad keyboard wanderings. I offered assistance. Saying nothing, he went to the piano, switched on a nearby floor-lamp and sat down. His dark eyes fastened on the keys; his lithe, white fingers poised above them for an instant, and descended.

There was a weird cascade of sound as he ran the whole-tone scales from one end of the piano to the other, followed by a series of intricate variations that startled and amazed me. I had never heard anything to compare with it; it was utterly “out of the world.” I listened, entranced, as his flying fingers wove a curious symphony of horror. I cannot describe that music any other way. The strains were eerie and unearthly, and stirred the very reaches of my soul. It resembled no standard classical music such as Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead,” or Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre.” It was tortuous, musical madness.

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 men 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 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 momentous 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 by 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.

He said the preliminary work would require solitude for a week, at least. That would give him sufficient time to decipher the sinister formulae in the ancient book, and to make adjustments on his Luna- chord upstairs. He was a master technician, and had found on his instrument tonal combinations that baffled fellow musicians. Milt Herth, of radio fame, has done the same thing on a Hammond Organ, which the Lunachord closely resembles. Since a Lunachord’s tones are actually electrical impulses, controlled by fifteen dials on the intricate panel above the two keyboards, and capable of imitating anything from a bass horn to a piccolo, the variations are endless. Baldwyn estimated that there were roughly over a million tonal possibilities, although many would possess no distinction. I wondered at first how he had planned to invent such outre music on a mere piano; but here, ready-made, was the solution — a scientific achievement awaiting exploration.

Walking homeward beneath a pale half-moon, my enthusiasm waned. He had not mentioned precisely what he intended to summon with his alarming music. Yergler himself was singularly vague on that point, or else Sheffield had deleted sections of the hideous text — an entirely logical premise. Indeed, what earthly music — i.e., musical tones audible to the human ear — could call from the gulf something totally unearthly? My better judgment revolted. Baldwyn was lighting dangerous fires, but the very limits of man’s knowledge regarding space, time and infinity would keep him from getting his fingers burned. Still, Yergler had done it; or something just as bad, and I recalled Sheffield’s preface, which gave a guarded account of the alchemist’s mysterious death in the madhouse.

During a severe thunderstorm there was heard outside and above his room a hideous cacophony, seeming to come from the very heavens. There had been a broken shutter, a wild scream; and Yergler had been found slumped in a corner of the room in an attitude of extreme terror, dead eyes bulging upward, his face and body pitted with holes that resembled burns but were not. However, I knew that many early historians had possessed the grievous fault of gross exaggeration and verbal distortion.

I could scarcely wait for the ensuing week to pass, realizing that Baldwyn was alone in that upstairs room, browsing in a blasphemous book from the past and composing weird music on his devil’s machine. But at last Saturday came, and I approached his door about one o’clock in the afternoon, because I knew he hadn’t seen the sun rise for years. Encouraged by seeing a finger of smoke twist from the leaning chimney, 1 opened the sagging wooden gate, crossed the shadow of the maple and knocked on the door.