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Music of the StarsThere are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. I am called a murderer because I destroyed my best friend; killed him in cold blood. Yet I will try to prove that in so doing I performed an act of mercy—removed something that never should have broken through into this three-dimensional world, and saved my friend from a horror worse than death. Men will read this and laugh and call me mad, because much that happened cannot be labeled and proven in a court of law. Indeed, I often wonder if I beheld the truth—I who saw the ghastly finish. There is much in this world and in other worlds that our five senses do not perceive, and what lies beyond is found only in wild imagination and dream. I only hope that I killed him in time. If I can believe what I see in my dreams, I failed. And if I waited too long before I fired that last bullet, I shall welcome the fate that threatens to devour me. Frank Baldwyn and I were comrades for eleven long years. It was a friendship that intensified as time went on, nourished by avid mutual interests in weird music and literature. We were born and raised in the same village, and it was—as a cultured author and correspondent of ours who lived in Providence often remarked—unusual to find two people with such bizarre interests in a village whose population was less than six hundred. It was fortunate, yes; but now I wish we had never probed so far into spheres of the awful unknown. 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. Presently it opened, and I was shocked at the change in my friend’s face. He had aged five years; new lines creased his pale brow. His greeting was mechanical. We sat in the parlor and talked, while he lit one cigarette after another. When I asked him if he’d had any sleep or solid food, he refused to answer. Baldwyn did his own light housekeeping, and unless watched, never ate enough to keep more than half alive. I told him he looked terrible, but he passed it off with a wave of his hand. What hellish thing had made him a gaunt image of his former self? I remonstrated; I demanded that he leave that sinister music and get some rest. He wouldn’t listen. I began to become afraid of what he’d discovered, for it was evident he had met with success of a sort. His very manner said so. Without further conversation, he remarked that he’d be busy all afternoon, and told me to return at ten-thirty that evening. I inquired about the experiment, but it was of no use. I left, promising to come back at the appointed hour. When I rapped on his door again I had in my pocket a .38 revolver I’d bought in town that very afternoon. I cannot say precisely what I planned to shoot; the gesture was prompted by a feeling of impending tragedy. There had been in Baldwyn’s manner a reticence I didn’t like. Always before he had told me of his triumphs and discoveries.
Without a word Baldwyn led me to the upstairs room. Motioning me to a chair near the Lunachord, he sat on the bench and turned the switch that operated the electric motors. The thinness and pallor of his cheeks frightened me. He crushed out his cigarette and faced me. “Rambeau, you’ve been very patient—I know you’re curious. You also think I’m killing myself. I’ll rest up for a while when I get through—here. I think I’ve found what I’m after—the rhythm of space, the music of the stars and the universe that may be very near or very far. You know how we’ve hunted for those other books, the Necronomicon, and so on? This translation of Yergler isn’t very clear, but I’ve tried to bridge the gaps and produce the results he hinted at. “You see, at the very beginning there were two altogether different types of music—the type we know and hear today, and another one that isn’t really earthly at all. It was banned by the ancients, and only the early historians remember it. Now, the negro jazz element has revived some of these outré rhythms. They’ve almost got it! These polyrhythmic variants are close; boogie-woogie has a touch. Earl Hines came near with his improvisation, ‘Child of a Disordered Brain.’ . . . “What will happen I can’t say. Yesterday I had a letter from Lancaster in Providence, and he’s positively scared! I told him my plans the last time I wrote. “He finally admitted that he’d read the original Chronike, which is infinitely more terrible than this book we have. Lancaster warns me repeatedly against playing the music he’s afraid I’ve written. Actually, it can’t be written—there are no such symbols! It would require a new musical language. I’m not going to try that just yet, however . . . “But it can’t be that bad. He says there might even be some violent manifestation—the music might summon a certain thing from the shadows of another dimension. “What I’ve done surely can’t do anything like that . . . but it will be an interesting experiment. And remember, Rambeau, no interruptions.” I wanted to grab him by the neck and shake some sense into his head. My mouth opened twice, but no words came. He had started to play, and the whispering chords silenced me quicker than a hand clapped over my mouth. I had to listen; genius will permit nothing else. I was bewitched, eyes fastened on his flying fingers. The music swelled, following strange rhythm patterns I had never heard before and hope never to hear again. They were unearthly, insane. The music stirred me deeply; goose-pimples raced over me; my fingers twitched. I crouched forward on the edge of the chair—tense, alert. A wave of cold horror swept me as the awful melody and counter-melody rose to a higher pitch. The instrument quivered and screamed as with agony. The mad fantasia seemed to reach beyond the four walls of the room, to quaver into other spheres of sound and movement, as if some of the notes were escaping my ear and going elsewhere. Baldwyn’s pale lips were set in a grim smile. It was madness; the rhythms were older than the dawn of mankind, and infinitely more terrible. They reeked of a nameless corruption. It was evil—evil as the Druid’s song or the lullaby of the ghoul. During a sudden lull in the music, it happened. The skylight above us rattled, and the moonlight splashing the glass seemed to liquify and race downward. A single bolt of intense whiteness smashed the glass, and the entire pane buckled inward. It struck the floor with a crash. The floor-lamp dimmed and went out. Still the mad overture continued, its hideous echoes shaking the entire house, seeming to reach into infinity—to caress the very stars. . . . In the dim uncertain moonlight I saw my friend crouched over the keyboard, oblivious to all else but the music. Then, above his head, I saw something else. At first it was only a deeper shadow. Then it moved. My mouth opened and I screamed, but the sound was lost in that bedlam of horror. The blob of shadow floated downward, a shapeless mass of denser blackness. It thickened and gradually took shape. I saw a flaming eye, a slimy tentacle, and a grisly paw extending downward. The music stopped, and the silence of the utter void enveloped us. Baldwyn leaped to his feet, turned and looked upward. He screamed as the blackness shifted nearer, and a smoky talon seized him. His face in the dim light was a mask of horror. I pawed at the gun in my pocket, gazing transfixed as the writhing shadow from outside slowly encircled his head. Unsteadily, imitating the movements of a zombie, Baldwyn raised his arms to fend off the monstrosity, and they were lost in the heaving shadow. I must have gone slightly mad then, for there is much I cannot remember. I know I leaped at the cloud, drove my fists into it. My hands touched nothing . . . though I recall a foetid odor. The revolver had somehow leaped into my hand and I fired at the mass, five times. The bullets smashed the wall—nothing else. Something struck me on the temple, and I fell backward. It may have been one of Baldwyn’s pawing arms; I do not know. A loud crash of discordant sound brought me to my senses. I lay on my back on the moonlit floor, revolver in hand. A nauseating odor brought me to my knees, gasping for air. Baldwyn had slumped backward over the keyboard, inert. The notes piped on, filling the chamber with hideous discord. The horror I could not see, but I felt it near. Baldwyn’s head rolled and jerked up. It was no longer human—something ghastly and alien. It was dotted with tiny gouts of blood and with holes that looked like burns, but were something else. His lips writhed, and he groaned through clenched teeth “. . . Rambeau! . . . Rambeau! . . . I can’t see . . . Are you there . . . ? It’s got me—part of me! . . . run for your life! . . . Shoot me! Kill me! I can’t let it—get the rest . . .” His command froze me with horror. In that instant I lived ten years. I forgot the impossible shadow and the lurking fear. I saw only my friend’s face and the fond memories it recalled. I thought of peaceful sunny days spent in earnest conversation beneath the huge maple; I thought of saner nights and saner music. But that vision darkened and the horror returned. Baldwyn sank lower, his grip on the instrument gave way, and he tumbled to the floor, face upward in the moonlight. The last ghastly echoes rang in my ears; then silence. I saw the awful shadow near his head, its groping claws outstretched. . . . I waited no longer. I knew he meant what he said. With trembling hand I raised the revolver and shot him in the temple. My last conscious effort was a mad scramble down the twisting stair. I stumbled and fell into a pit of darkness. Hours later I awoke and groped my way through the house, staggered out into the moonlight. My mind was blank; I could remember very little. The terrible events were a chaotic jumble of horror. As I ran I kept looking over my shoulder, staring at the peak of the dark gable near my friend’s upstairs room.
I have confessed, and I suppose the judge and jury will hang me. I really can’t blame them. They would never understand why I killed him. And now I too must pay with my life for meddling in those forbidden realms of nightmare. All of Baldwyn’s manuscripts were burned—including the copy of Yergler’s evil book—by a special court order. It seems the neighbors heard the screams and the savage music. And now another terror haunts me. Often in my dreams I see a nebulous cloud of utter blackness dropping from the nighted sky to engulf me. And in the center of that nimbus I see a face, a hideous distortion of something that once was human and sane—the face of my friend; pitted and burned, even as the grisly face of Yergler’s must have been. |
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