Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 8 — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

DREAMS ARE SACRED ulsing repetition: loud then soft, a surging ypnotic echo: “Destroy your SOUL, DESTROY your-soul_ SOUL—” Craswell pointed with his sword.His voice was exultant. “There is a Veil, Nelpar—and -you must tear it lest it become. your shroud! The Mist—the Sentient Mist. of the Citadel!” lll admit that, for a few seconds, he’d had me a little groggy. I felt—subdued. And I understood for the first time his power as a word-spinner. I knew that it was vital for me to reassert myself. A thick, gray mist was rolling, wreathing slowly towards us, filling the tunnel to roof- height, puffing out thick, groping tentacles. “It lives on Life itself,’ Craswell shouted. “It feeds, not on flesh, but on the vital principle that animates ali flesh. I am safe, Nelpar, fer-I have the Sword. Can your magic save you?” ~— “Magic!” I said. “There’s—no gas in- vented yet that'll get through a Mark $_ mask,” Gas-drill—face-piece first, straps behind the ears. No, I hadn't forgotten the old routine. I adjusted the n mask comfortably. “And if it’s not gas,” I added, “this will fix it.” I felt over my shoulder, unclipped a nozzle, brought it round into the “ready” position. I had only used a one-man flame-thrower once—in training—but the experience was etched on my memory. This was a de luxe model. At the first thirty-foot oily, searing blast, the Mist curled in on itself and rolled back the way it had come. Only quicker. - I shucked off the trappings. “You were in the Army for a while, Craswell. Re- member?” 3 The shining translucency of the walls dimmed suddenly, and beyond them I glimpsed, as in a movie close-up through an unfocused projector, the square, intense face of Steve Blakiston. Then the walls re-formed, and Craswell, still the bronzed, naked-limbed giant of his imagination, was looking at me again, frowning, worried. “Your words are strange, O Nelpar. It seems you are master of mysteries-beyond-even my knowing.” I put on the sort of face I-use when the sports editor queries my expenses, aggrieved, pleading. “Your trouble, Craswell, is that you don’t want to know. You just won’t remember. That’s why you're here. But life isn’t bad if you oil it a little. Why not snap out of this and come with me for a drink?” “I do not understand,’ he muttered. “But we have a mission to perform. Follow.” And he strode off. - Mention of drink reminded me. There was nothing. wrong with my memory. And that tunnel was as hot as the green desert. I remembered a very smal! pub just off the 29 street-car. depot end of .Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland. A ginger-whiskered ancient, an exile from the Highlands, who’d listened to me enthusing over a certain brand of Scotch. “If ye think that’s guid, mon, yell no’ hae tasted the brew frae ma ain private deestillery. Smack ye’re lips ower this, laddie—”’ And he’d produced an antique silver flask and poured a generous measure of golden whisky into my glass. 1 had never tasted such mellow nectar before or since. Until I was walking down the tunnel behind Crasswell. I nearly envisaged the glass, but changed my mind in time to make it the antique flask. I raised it to my lips. Imagination’s a wonderful thing. = Craswell was talking. I’d nearly forgotten im. “'. . near the. Hall of Madness, where strange music assaults the brain, weird harmonies that enchant, then kill, rupturing the very cells by a mixture of subsonic and supersonic frequencies. Listen!” We had reached the end of the tunnel and stood at the top of a slope which, broadening, ran gently downwards, veiled by a blue haze, like the smoke from fifty million cigarettes, filling a vast circular hall. The haze eddied, moved by vagrant, sluggish currents of air, and revealed on the farther side, dwarfed by distance but obviously enormous, a complex structure of pipes and consoles. A dozen Mighty Wurtlitzers rolled into’ one would have appeared as a miniature piano at the foot of this towering sae machine. At its many consoles which, even at that distance, I could see consisted of at least half-a-dozen manuals each, were multi- limbed creatures—spiders of octopuses or Poliloflipops—I didn’t ask at Craswell called them—I was listening. The opening bars were strange enough, but innocuous. Then the multiple tones and harmonies began to sweil in volume. I picked out the curious, sweet harshness of oboes and bassoons, the eldritch, rising ululation of a thousand violins, the a shrilling of a hundred demonic onic fies sobbing of many ‘cellos. Ss. Music’s my hobby, and I don’t want to et carried away in describing how that ¢ symphony nearly carried me away. - But if Craswell ever reads this, rd like him to know that he missed his vocation. He should have been a musician. His dream- music showed an amazing intuitive grasp of orchestration and harmonic theory. If he could do anything like it consciously, he would be a great. Yet not too muc to have the effects The insidious rhvth - he had warned about. . and wild melodies modern “Decaueeit began uch like it. Because it began in COMME WOO KSnEO)