Ramsey Campbell - The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

When I rounded the curve which brought me in sight of the telephone box, the door swung open and Cart-wright ran into the road. He reached the car as I began to slow and, running alongside, he yelled through the open window: 'Open the door on this side! Keep driving — I can jump in at this speed.'

I did not intend him to be injured, and stopped the car. 'Now will you stop acting like someone in a movie and explain?'

'All right, I'm in,' he assured me. 'Now let's get down to the lake.'

'To the lake? ' I repeated, surprised. 'The way you were going on, I thought… Oh, all right, if you're in such a hurry.'

As I was starting the engine, I heard him muttering beside me. Some of it escaped me, but I caught: '—tried to phone the police, but I couldn't get through — wires must have been down. Must have been an accident, though. Couldn't have been their work— they could never get that far in the sunlight. The Green Decay — it's in the Revelations … Could they?'

I ignored this, not turning to look at him. 'Listen, Thomas, I'd like some explanation. I thought you wanted to get away from the lake before nightfall? What's happened up there that's scared you off so suddenly?'

He left my second question for a moment. 'I certainly must get away before nightfall, but I want to bring the Revelations with me. If I leave the house empty tonight and come back tomorrow they'll get in and take it. We can get down there before 4 o'clock and grab the bookcase. We'll be well towards Brichester before dark. The tree-creatures up the road may get more active after dark, but there's a ritual which I can repeat to subdue them if I can draw on your consciousness. Once we're in Brichester, we ought to be beyond their influence.'

'But you weren't like this before. You may have believed in all this, but you weren't frightened of it. What's happening to change your feelings?'

He fumbled a little, then: 'One of them might have been a dream, but the other… As for the thing I might have dreamed, it happened about one o'clock this morning. I was only half-asleep — I kept dreaming of strange things: that black city among the weeds down there, with a shape under a crystal trapdoor, and further back to Yuggoth and Tond — and that kept me awake. At the time I'm speaking of I kept half-opening my eyes; I got the feeling that someone was watching me, but I could never see anyone. Then I started noticing something pale which seemed to float at the edge of my vision. I realised it was near the window. I turned quickly and saw a face staring in at me.

'It was the face of a corpse; what was worse, it was the face of Joe Bulger.'

We had reached the last stretch of road towards the lake before he continued. 'He didn't look at me; his eyes were fixed on something at the other side of the room. All that was over there was that bookcase containing the eleven volumes of the Revelations of Glaaki . I jumped up and ran over to the window, but he began to move away with that horrible deliberate tread. I'd seen enough, though. His shirt had been torn open, and on his chest was a livid red mark, with a network of lines radiating from it. Then he moved off between the trees.'

I stopped the car at the beginning of the lakeside pavement. As I approached the house, he was still muttering behind me: ' They'd taken him to Glaaki — that must have been all the splashing that night. But that was at eleven o'clock and Joe left about four. My God, what were they doing to him in the other seven hours?'

I stood back to let him open the front door; he had even found a padlock somewhere and augmented the lock's strength with it. As we entered the front room I noticed the canvas-covered painting in one corner. I began to lift the canvas off, but Cartwright stopped me. 'Not yet — that's part of the other. I want to show you something else when you see that.'

He went over to the bookcase which stood on the floor opposite the window, and took out the last book. 'When — Joe — had gone, I finally had a look at these books. I had a good idea of what he'd been looking at, but I wanted to make sure. Somehow I knocked the lot down. No damage, luckily, except to the eleventh book; but that one had fallen so that the cover had been torn off. As I was trying to fit it together again, I noticed the back cover was bulging outward a lot. When I looked closer, this is what I found.'

He passed me the volume he had selected. Opening the cover, I saw that the back had been slit open; a sort of pocket existed, and inside it I found a folded sheet of canvas and a piece of cardboard.

'Don't look at those for the moment,' ordered Cart-wright. 'Remember I painted The Thing In The Lake from my nightmare? This is it. Now, go ahead and compare it with those two.'

By the time I had unfolded the canvas, he had uncovered the painting. The piece of canvas was also a painting, while the card was a photograph. The background of each was different; Cartwright's depicted the lake as surrounded by a black pavement in the middle of a desolate plain, the painting I held — inscribed 'Thos. Lee pinxit'—possessed a background of half-fluid demons and many-legged horrors, while the photograph simply showed the lake as it was now. But the focus of each was the same totally alien figure, and the one that disturbed me most was the photograph.

The centre of each picture was, it was obvious, the being known as Glaaki. From an oval body protruded countless thin, pointed spines of multicoloured metal; at the more rounded end of the oval a circular, thick-lipped mouth formed the centre of a spongy face, from which rose three yellow eyes on thin stalks. Around the underside of the body were many white pyramids, presumably used for locomotion. The diameter of the body must have been about ten feet at its least width.

Not only the coincidence of the pictures, but also the total abnormality of the creature, disturbed me. However, I tried to sound unconvinced as I remarked, 'Look, you said yourself that the other business was only a dream. As for the rest — what does it amount to, anyway? A few nightmares and the documents of a superstitious cult whose beliefs happen to coincide with your dreams. The photograph's very realistic, of course, but these days you can do almost anything with special photography.'

'You still think it's my imagination?' he inquired. 'Of course you don't explain why anyone would go to the trouble of faking a photograph like that and then leave it here. Besides, remember I did that painting from my dream before I saw those. It's Glaaki sending his image from the lake.'

I was still searching for an answer when Cartwright looked at his watch. 'Good God, it's after four o'clock! We'd better get going if we want to leave before dark. You go and start the car while I get the bookcases. I don't think they'll touch my pictures, except the latest one, and I'll bring that one with me. Tomorrow, maybe, we can come back from Brichester and get them.'

As I climbed into the driving seat I saw Cartwright struggling across the pavement with the bookcase-handle over one arm and the picture held in front of him. He slid into the back seat as I turned the ignition key.

There was no sound from the engine.

Cartwright ran and threw up the bonnet. Then he turned to stare at me, his face pale. 'Now will you bloody well believe!' he screamed. 'I suppose it's my imagination that wrecked your engine!'

I got out to look at the mass of torn wires. He did not notice whether I was listening as he continued:

' They've been at it — but how? It's not dark yet out here, and they can't come by daylight — but they must have done it—' This seemed to worry him more than the engine's actually been wrecked. Then he slumped against the car. 'My God, of course — Joe only just joined them , and the Green Decay doesn't affect them for sixty years or so. He can come out in the light — he can follow me — he is part of Glaaki now, so he won't spare me—'