Avon Fantasy Reader 18 (1952) (Wolfhound)

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OUT OF THE EONS 63 cians, reporters, and. police— concurred at the period of the horror itself At the same time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic importance should not remain wholly unrecorded— hence this account which I have prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my executors. Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks have led me to believe that my life— as well as that of other museum officials— is in some peril through the enmity of several widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heteroge- neous mystical devotees'*, hence it is possible that the work of the executors may not be long postponed. [Executor’s note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart- failure on April 22nd, 1955. Wentworth Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared around the middle of the preceding month. On February i8th of the same year Dr. William Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the back, dying the following day.] The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879— long before my term as curator- when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt of un- known origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the Pacific’s floor. On May nth, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound from Wel- lington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly out of the sea in the form of a tmn- cated cone. A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersion on the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent destruc- tion, as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artifi- cial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclo- pean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle. Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt— judged to have been part of a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground— in one corner of which the frightful miunmy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic, caused partly by certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, though it was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thmst into its clothes, was a cyl- inder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-white membrane of equally un- known nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish, indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus suf- ficiently powerful to move it. The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder. Curator Pickman made a personal