Lost Worlds, Unknown Horizons, page 4
His eyes scrutinised the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry.
For example, if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort of shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the precipice that came below the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit snow there, and halfway up to the crest of those beautiful desolations.
He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it steadfastly.
He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
He turned again towards the mountain wall, down which the day had come to him.
Then very circumspectly he began to climb.
When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. He had been higher, but he was still very high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.
From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The little details of the rocks near at hand were drenched with a subtle beauty—a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, the flash of crystal faces here and there, a minute, minutely beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There were deep mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite inactive there, smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind in which he had thought to be King.
The glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay peacefully contented under the cold stars.
The Third Level
JACK FINNEY
Every moment a mighty door swings shut on another segment of our past. The past is the great lost world; we can no more revisit yesterday than we can tour the London of Henry VIII or the bazaars of vanished Atlantis. And yet we return to the past in memory and in the reveries of fantasy. No writer has been more concerned with the irretrievability of the past than Jack Finney, as in the moving and ingenious novel Time and Again and in such short stories as “Second Chance,” “I’m Scared,” and the delicious little “The Third Level”—in which yesterday is just around the four-dimensional corner.
The presidents of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroads will swear on a stack of timetables that there are only two. But I say there are three, because I’ve been on the third level at Grand Central Station. Yes, I’ve taken the obvious step: I talked to a psychiatrist friend of mine, among others. I told him about the third level at Grand Central Station, and he said it was a waking-dream wish fulfillment. He said I was unhappy. That made my wife kind of mad, but he explained that he meant the modern world is full of insecurity, fear, war, worry, and all the rest of it, and that I just want to escape. Well, hell, who doesn’t? Everybody I know wants to escape, but they don’t wander down into any third level at Grand Central Station.
But that’s the reason, he said, and my friends all agreed. Everything points to it, they claimed. My stamp collecting, for example—that’s a “temporary refuge from reality.” Well, maybe, but my grandfather didn’t need any refuge from reality; things were pretty nice and peaceful in his day, from all I hear, and he started my collection. It’s a nice collection, too, blocks of four of practically every United States issue, first-day covers, and so on. President Roosevelt collected stamps, too.
Anyway, here’s what happened at Grand Central. One night last summer I worked late at the office. I was in a hurry to get uptown to my apartment, so I decided to subway from Grand Central because it’s faster than the bus.
Now, I don’t know why this should have happened to me. I’m just an ordinary guy named Charley, thirty-one years old, and I was wearing a tan gabardine suit and a straw hat with a fancy band—I passed a dozen men who looked just like me. And I wasn’t trying to escape from anything; I just wanted to get home to Louisa, my wife.
I turned into Grand Central from Vanderbilt Avenue and went down the steps to the first level, where you take trains like the Twentieth Century. Then I walked down another flight to the second level, where the suburban trains leave from, ducked into an arched doorway headed for the subway—and got lost. That’s easy to do. I’ve been in and out of Grand Central hundreds of times, but I’m always bumping into new doorways and stairs and corridors. Once I got into a tunnel about a mile long and came out in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel. Another time I came up in an office building on Forty-sixth Street, three blocks away.
Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots. There’s probably a long tunnel that nobody knows about feeling its wav under the city right now, on its way to Times Square, and maybe another to Central Park. And maybe—because for so many people through the years Grand Central has been an exit, a way of escape—maybe that’s how the tunnel I got into . . . but I never told my psychiatrist friend about that idea.
The corridor I was in began angling left and slanting downward and I thought that was wrong, but I kept on walking. All I could hear was the empty sound of my own footsteps and I didn’t pass a soul. Then I heard that sort of hollow roar ahead that means open space, and people talking. The tunnel turned sharp left; I went down a short flight of stairs and came out on the third level at Grand Central Station. For just a moment I thought I was back on the second level, but I saw the room was smaller, there were fewer ticket windows and train gates, and the information booth in the center was wood and old-looking. And the man in the booth wore a green eyeshade and long black sleeve-protectors. The lights were dim and sort of flickering. Then I saw why: they were open-flame gaslights.
There were brass spittoons on the floor, and across the station a glint of light caught my eye: a man was pulling a gold watch from his vest pocket. He snapped open the cover, glanced at his watch, and frowned. He wore a dirty hat, a black four-button suit with tiny lapels, and he had a big, black, handle-bar mustache. Then I looked around and saw that everyone in the station was dressed like 1890 something; I never saw so many beards, sideburns and fancy mustaches in my life. A woman walked in through the train gate; she wore a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts to the top of her high-buttoned shoes. Back of her, out on the tracks, I caught a glimpse of a locomotive, a very small Currier & Ives locomotive with a funnel-shaped stack. And then I knew.
To make sure, I walked over to a newsboy and glanced at the stack of papers at his feet. It was the World; and the World hasn’t been published for years. The lead story said something about President Cleveland. I’ve found that front page since, in the Public Library files, and it was printed June 11, 1894.
I turned toward the ticket windows knowing that here—on the third level at Grand Central—I could buy tickets that would take Louisa and me anywhere in the United States we wanted to go. In the year 1894. And I wanted two tickets to Galesburg, Illinois.
Have you ever been there? It’s a wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawns, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all around, in a peaceful world. To be back there with the First World War still twenty years off, and World War II over forty years in the future . . . I wanted two tickets for that.
The clerk checked the fare—he glanced at my fancy hatband, but he figured the fare—and I had enough for two coach tickets, one way. But when I counted out the money and looked up, the clerk was staring at me. He nodded at the bills. “That ain’t money, mister,” he said, “and if you’re trying to skin me you won’t get very far,” and he glanced at the cash drawer beside him. Of course the money was old-style bills, half again as big as the money we use nowadays, and different-looking. I turned away and got out fast. There’s nothing nice about jail, even in 1894.
And that was that. I left the same way I came, I suppose. Next day, during lunch hour, I drew $300 out of the bank, nearly all we had, and bought old-style currency (that really worried my psychiatrist friend). You can buy old money at almost any coin dealer’s but you have to pay a premium. My $300 bought less than $200 in old-style bills, but I didn’t care: eggs were thirteen cents a dozen in 1894.
But I’ve never again found the corridor that leads to the third level at Grand Central Station, although I’ve tried often enough.
Louisa was pretty worried when I told her all this and didn’t want me to look for the third level any more, and after a while I stopped; I went back to my stamps. But now we’re both looking, every weekend, because now we have proof that the third level is still there. My friend Sam Weiner disappeared! Nobody knew where, but I sort of suspected because Sam’s a city boy, and I used to tell him about Galesburg—I went to school there—and he always said he liked the sound of the place. And that’s where he is, all right. In 1894.
Because one night, fussing with my stamp collection, I found—well, do you know what a first-day cover is? When a new stamp is issued, stamp collectors buy some and use them to mail envelopes to themselves on the very first day of sale; and the postmark proves the date. The envelope is called a first-day envelope. They’re never opened; you just put blank paper in the envelope.
That night, among my oldest first-day covers, I found one that shouldn’t have been there. But there it was. It was there because someone had mailed it to my grandfather at his home in Galesburg; that’s what the address on the envelope said. And it had been there since July 18, 1894—the postmark showed that—yet I didn’t remember it at all. The stamp was a six-cent, dull brown, with a picture of President Garfield. Naturally, when the envelope came to Granddad in the mail, it went right into his collection and stayed there—till I took it out and opened it.
The paper inside wasn’t blank. It read:
941 Willard Street
July 18, 1894
Galesburg, Illinois
Charley:
I got to wishing that you were right. Then I got to believing you were right. And, Charley, it’s true: I found the third level!
I’ve been here two weeks, and right now, down the street at the Daly’s, someone is playing a piano, and they’re all out on the front porch singing Seeing Nellie Home. And I’m invited over for lemonade. Come on back, Charley and Louisa. Keep looking till you find the third level! It’s worth it, believe me!
The note was signed Sam.
At the stamp and coin store I go to, I found out that Sam bought $800 worth of old-style currency. That ought to set him up in a nice little hay, feed, and grain business; he always said that’s what he really wished he could do, and he certainly can’t go back to his old business. Not in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1894. His old business? Why, Sam was my psychiatrist.
The City of the
Ringing Flame
CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), poet, sculptor, and fantasist, was born in the gold-rush country of California, in the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Auburn, and spent most of his life there. In the 1920’s and 1930’s he was a member—perhaps the most gifted—of the circle of writers in contact with the great weird-tales author H. P. Lovecraft, and in those years Smith produced more than a hundred eerie, shimmering stories set in the lost continents of Atlantis and Hyperborea, on the yet unborn continent Zothique, and on worlds of other solar systems. His style—lush, evocative, extravagant in its use of uncommon words—must have seemed baffling and difficult to the readers of the pulp adventure magazines that published his work, and yet he won a devoted following and lived to see his stories collected in book form, books that now are cherished rarities.
One of Smith’s most famous stories is “The City of the Singing Flame,” which demonstrates the power of Smith’s imagination without suffering from the fondness for strange adjectives that sometimes marred his work. Although regarded as a classic of fantasy, it has been out of print for many years. I hope it leads some readers to further discovery of the bizarre, haunting, altogether original tales of this neglected master of fantasy.
We had been friends for a decade or more, and I knew Giles Angarth as well as anyone could be said to know him. Yet the thing was no less a mystery to me than to others at the time; and it is still a mystery.
Sometimes I think that he and Felix Ebbonly had designed it all between them as a huge, insoluble hoax; that they are still alive somewhere, and are laughing at the world that has been so sorely baffled by their disappearance. And sometimes I make tentative plans to re-visit Crater Ridge and find, if I can, the boulders mentioned in Angarth’s narrative as having a vague resemblance to broken-down columns.
In the meantime no one has uncovered any trace of the missing men or has heard even the faintest rumor concerning them. The whole affair, it would seem, is likely to remain a most singular and exasperating riddle.
Angarth, whose fame as a writer of fantastic fiction will probably outlive that of most other magazine contributors, had been spending the summer among the Sierras, and had been living alone until Ebbonly went to visit him. Ebbonly, whom I had never met, was well known for his imaginative paintings and drawings, and he had illustrated more than one of Angarth’s novels. Neighboring campers became alarmed over the prolonged absence of the two men and searched the cabin for some possible clue. A package addressed to me was found lying on the table. I received it in due course of time, after reading many newspaper speculations regarding the double vanishment. The package contained a small, leather-bound notebook. Angarth had written on the flyleaf:
Dear Hastane:
You can publish this journal sometime, if you like. People will think it the last and wildest of all my fictions—unless they take it for one of your own. In either case, it will be just as well.
Good-by.
Faithfully,
Giles Angarth
I am now publishing the journal, which will doubtless meet with the reception Angarth predicted. But I am not so certain myself, as to whether the tale is truth or fabrication. The only way to make sure will be to locate the two boulders; and anyone who has ever seen Crater Ridge, and has wandered over its miles of rock-strewn desolation, will realize the difficulties of such a task.
July 31st, 1930
I have never acquired the diary-keeping habit, mainly, I suppose, because of my uneventful mode of existence, in which there has seldom been anything to chronicle. But the thing which happened this morning is so extravagantly strange, so remote from mundane laws and parallels, that I feel impelled to write it down to the best of my understanding and ability. Also, I shall keep an account of the possible repetition and continuation of my experience. It will be perfectly safe to do this, for no one who ever reads the record will be likely to believe it.
I had gone for a walk on Crater Ridge, which lies a mile or less to the north of my cabin near Summit. Though differing markedly in its character from the usual landscapes roundabout, it is one of my favorite places. It is exceptionally bare and desolate, with little more in the way of vegetation than mountain sunflowers, wild currant bushes, and a few sturdy wind-warped pines and supple tamaracks.
Geologists deny it a volcanic origin. Yet its outcroppings of rough, nodular stone and enormous rubble-heaps have all the air of scoriaceous remains—at least, to my non-scientific eye. They look like the slag and refuse of Cyclopean furnaces, poured out in prehuman years to cool and harden into shapes of limitless grotesquery.
Among them are stones that suggest the fragments of primordial bas-reliefs, or small prehistoric idols and figurines. Others seem to have been graven with lost letters of an indecipherable script. Unexpectedly there is a little tarn lying on one end of the ridge, a tarn that has never been fathomed. The hill is an odd interlude among the granite sheets and crags, and the fir-clothed ravines and valleys of this region.
It was a clear, windless morning and I paused often to view the magnificent perspectives of varied scenery that were visible on every hand. I marveled at the titan battlements of Castle Peak, the rude masses of Donner Peak, with its dividing pass of hemlocks, the remote, luminous blue of the Nevada Mountains, and the soft green of willows in the valley at my feet. It was an aloof, silent world, and I heard no sound other than the dry, crackling noise of cicadas among the currant bushes.
I strolled on in a zigzag manner for quite some distance. Presently, coming to one of the rubble-fields with which the ridge is interstrewn, I began to search the ground closely, hoping to find a stone that was sufficiently quaint and grotesque in its form to be worth keeping as a curiosity. I had found several such in my previous wanderings.
Suddenly I came to a clear space amid the rubble, in which nothing grew—a space that was as round as an artificial ring. In the center were two isolated boulders, queerly alike in shape, and lying about five feet apart. I paused to examine them. Their substance, a dull, greenish-gray, seemed to be different from anything else in the neighborhood. I conceived at once the weird fancy that they might be pedestals of vanished columns, worn away by incalculable years till there remained only these sunken ends.
Certainly the perfect roundness and uniformity of the boulders were peculiar. And, though I possess a smattering of geology, I could not identify their smooth, soapy material.
