The Clock of Dreams

Book 3: Titus Crow

by Brian Lumley

Genres: Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness-the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth. A few puny humans cannot possibly stand against these otherworldly evil gods, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came. The Clock of Dreams is the third book in the Titus Crow series.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: October 6, 1999

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 324

Sample

TITUS CROW VOL. 2

THE CLOCK OF DREAMS
For Barzai the Not-So-Wise, who proved--however involuntarily--that what goes up need not necessarily come down again.
Introduction
Myself, I've never been much of a dreamer, never traveled far past Ulthar; but I have watched caravans fording the Skai, and I have sat in the smokeroorn of the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats and listened to the tales of my betters. I suppose most dreamers have. It's true, though, that there seem to be fewer of us around these days. Time was when a man of the waking world could guarantee that if he boarded at an inn in the land of Earth's dreams, sure enough he would find a fellow dreamer or two from the world of waking mortals; and wouldn't the tales fly thick and fast then? Yes, they surely would.
You would hear magical names of men and places--names to set your pulses pounding and your imagination tingling--and thrill to the telling of tales of heroic and fantastic deeds. And someone would be bound to mention Kuranes or Randolph Carter ... or Richard Upton Pickman. And while you might shudder at the hinted fate of the latter, certainly you would also gasp in awe at the adventures of the others. Ah, those were the dreams ...
Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain too bitterly, for when I come to think of it I heard two of my favorite tales quite recently, and as coincidence would have it I heard them at the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats ... in Ulthar.
The first was a strange tale and complicated, a tale of all the worlds of space and time, of strange dimensions and planes of existence beyond the ken of most men. A tale of motes in the multiverse swirling beyond barriers neither spacial nor temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by mortal man except in the wildest theories of science and metaphysics. A tale of paths between the spheres, dim corridors leading to equally dim and conjectural lands of elder myth ... And yet all of these seemingly inaccessible places were just around the corner to the time-clock.
Indeed "time-clock," as Titus Crow had long since recognized the fact, was a completely inadequate misnomer for that--machine? A plaything of the Elder Gods come down the ages from lands beyond legend, from a time beyond time as men reckon it, the clock was agateway on--on everything! It was a door to worlds of wonder, joy and beauty--but it was also a dark pothole entrance to caves of innermost, alien evil and shrieking, unnameable horror.
The first tale I heard was the story of how the clock came into Henri-Laurent de Marigny's hands in the first place, and it is a tale already told. But for the sake of the unacquainted I will briefly reiterate it before taking up the second of the two stories proper. Before even that, however, I had better tell what little is known of the time-clock itself.
Certainly the clock's history is strange and obscure enough to whet the mental appetite of any lover of mysteries or would-be sounder of unfathomable wonders (which you must be, else you would not be reading this). First, tracing the existence of the weird--conveyance?--back as far as possible in the light of incomplete knowledge, it seems to have belonged to one Yogi Hiamaldi, an Indian friend of the ill-fated Carolina mystic Harley Warren. Hiamaldi had been a member, along with Warren, of a psychic-phenomenist group in Boston about 1916--18; and he had sworn before all other members of that group that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, crumbling remnant of eons long lost, and that he had borne away certain things from that grim and leering necropolis.
For reasons unknown, the Yogi had made a gift of the clock to one Etienne-Laurent de Marigny (perhaps the greatest ever American occultist and the father of one of the heroes of the story to follow), who kept it at the New Orleans retreat where his studies of the arcane sciences formed his primary purpose in life. How much he discovered of its secrets remains unknown, but after the elder de Marigny died the clock was sold, along with many another antique curiosity, to a French collector.
Here there is a gap in the history, for while many years later Titus Crow bought the clock at an auction of antique furniture in London, all of his subsequent attempts to discover the whereabouts of its previous Parisian owner were doomed to failure; it was as though the man had simply vanished off the face of the Earth.
Now then, of Titus Crow himself--a man with a positive genius for the discovery of dark lore, lost legends, and nighted myth-patterns, who will also feature prominently in my tale--much is known; but for now suffice it to mention that his protracted studies of the clock over many years of his life were such that the device became something of an obsession with him. Often in his earlier years Crow would sit in his study in the night, his chin in his hands as he gravely pondered the enigma of the peculiar, coffin-shaped, oddly tickingmonstrosity in the corner of the room; a "clock," of sorts, whose four hands moved in patterns patently divorced from any chronological system known or even guessed at by man, and his eyes would rove over the strange hieroglyphs that swept in intricate designs around the great clock's face.
When he was not at work on less baffling cases, always Titus Crow would return his attentions to the clock, and though usually such studies were in vain, they were not always complete failures. Often he believed himself on the verge of a breakthrough--knowing that if he were right he would finally understand the alien intricacies governing his "doorway on all space and time"--only to be frustrated in the final hour. And once he actually had the doubtful privilege of seeing the clock opened by two men of equally doubtful repute and intent, whose affairs in the world were fortunately soon terminated ... but then at long last there came a genuine clue.
It was while he was working for the Wilmarth Foundation--a far-flung body of erudite men whose sole avowed intent and purpose was to rid the world, indeed the entire universe, of all remaining traces of an aeon-old evil, the surviving demonic forces and powers of the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth--that Titus Crow visited Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. There, in one of the carefully guarded, great old occult volumes in the university's world-renowned library, he finally recognized a sequence of odd glyphs which at first he was startled, then delighted to note bore a striking resemblance to the figures on the dial of his huge clock. Moreover, the book bore translations of his own hieroglyphed passages in Latin!
Armed with this Rosetta-Stone knowledge, Crow had returned to London, where soon he was at work again disinterring many of the clock's centuries-buried mysteries. And he had been right, for that incredible device was indeed a vehicle: a space-time machine of sorts with principles more alien than the centers of stars, whose like we may at least conjecture upon.
Of his work on the clock at this time, he wrote to his friend and colleague, Henri-Laurent de Marigny: "I am in the position of a Neanderthal studying the operational handbook of a passenger-carrying aircraft--except I have no handbook!" And Henri was unable to assist his learned friend, for while his father had once owned the selfsame clock, that had been when he was a boy, and he could remember nothing of it. Titus Crow, however, was never a man to be denied anything once he set his mind after it, and so he had persevered.
And little by little he discovered all of the clock's peculiar secrets. He learned how to open its frontal panel, without suffering any of themany possible consequences, allowing the strange lights that invariably illumined its interior to flood out in eerie shades that dappled his study with alien hues. He knew how to attune himself "telepathically" to the device's sub-ethereal vibrations: how to "make himself one," as he had it, with the clock. He was aware of the nature of the "commands" he must give to the clock to guide it on its journeyings through temporal and spacial voids, so that the time soon came when he believed he might attempt his first flight in the weird vehicle.
All of this knowledge came to Titus Crow in the very nick of time, for no sooner was he physically ready to test his theories than just such a test was forced upon him. It happened when he and his young friend de Marigny (also a member of the Wilmarth Foundation) were staying at Blowne House, Crow's sprawling bungalow home on Leonard's Heath in London.
The two of them had grown to be very painful thorns in the sides of the deities or demons of the Cthulhu Cycle, and at last the prime member of that cycle, dread Cthulhu himself, had discovered a way to strike back at them. Dreaming hideously in R'lyeth, his "house" drowned somewhere in the vast Pacific, Cthulhu worked his evil plot through Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, Lord of the Snows. For while Ithaqua himself was unable to go abroad beyond barriers immemorially imposed by the Elder Gods--that is, while he was restricted in his movements to the Arctic Circle and its adjacent environs, and to strange Boreal starlanes and alien worlds--nonetheless he was still undisputed master of all the world's winds. And now he sent elementals of the air from the four corners of the sky to attack Titus Crow's home.
Left with no choice but to risk the doubtful sanctuary of the timeclock--as eerie shapes of evil formed beyond the shattering windows, monstrous forces that pounded at the shuddering frame of his bungalow retreat until Blowne House fell about his ears--Crow stepped beyond the open front panel of his vehicle and bade de Marigny follow him. And when that "freak localized storm" had expired and the house was discovered in ruins, perhaps not surprisingly no trace could be found of the two friends; neither of them, nor of the weird clock.
Well, to cut a long story short, Titus Crow made good his escape from those monstrous minion winds of Ithaqua into the far future, traveling almost to the End of Time itself before finally he mastered the clock's many intricacies to control its flight. But as for de Marigny, he was not the adept that his friend was. Barely was their craft "out of port," as it were, before de Marigny was "washed overboard" into terrible temporal tides--to be fished from the Thames more dead thanalive ten years later! Though the flight in the time-clock had seemed to last mere seconds, and while Crow's younger friend had aged not at all, nevertheless ten years had sped by; which caused de Marigny to wonder just how far his friend had finally traveled--and was he perhaps still traveling?
It was not long before he was to learn the answers to these and to other questions.
Upon recovering from his fantastic ordeal, de Marigny went back to his old London home, and there one night a short time later Titus Crow also returned to the world of men. Ah, but this was a much-changed Titus Crow, for he had undergone a transition. Younger, stronger, wiser (though de Marigny found the latter hardly credible), the new Crow had seen marvels beyond belief, had traced his own lineage back to the very Elder Gods themselves. And now lie had returned to Earth for one reason only: to offer Henri-Laurent de Marigny the opportunity to join him in Elysia, the home of the Great Gods of Eld. As an inducement, if such were needed, this is how Crow had told his friend of his adventures:
" ... I've been trapped on the shores of a prehistoric ocean, Henri, living on my wits and by hunting great crabs and spearing strange fishes, dodging the dinosaurs which in turn hunted me. And a billion years before that I inhabited a great rugose cone of a body, a living organism which was in fact a member of the Great Race that settled on Earth in unthinkable aybsses of the past. I've seen the cruel and world-spanning empire of Tsan-Chan, three thousand years in the future, and beyond that the great dark vaults that loom at the end of time. I've talked telepathically with the super-intelligent mollusks of soupy Venusian oceans, which will not support even the most primitive life for another half-billion years; and I've stood on the bleak shores of those same seas ten million years later when they were sterile, after a great plague had destroyed all life on the entire planet ...
"Why, I've come close to seeing the very birth of the universe, and almost its death!--and all of these wonders and others exist still just beyond the thin mists of time and space. This clock of mine sails those mists more bravely and surely than any Viking's dragonship ever crossed the gray North Sea. And you ask me what I mean when I talk of another trip, one involving yourself?
"When I return to Elysia, Henri, to the home of the Elder Gods in Orion, there will be a place for you in my palace there. Indeed, you shall have a palace of your own. And why not? The Gods mated with the daughters of men in the old days, didn't they? And won't you onlybe reversing the process? I did, my friend, and now the universe is mine. It can be yours, too ..."
Soon after that Titus Crow took his departure from Earth yet again, but this time he used the time-clock more properly as a "gateway," passing through it but yet leaving it behind until de Marigny should make up his mind one way or the other. If he decided to brave the machine's dark unknown, the way would not be easy. De Marigny knew that. But visions previously undreamed of had opened in his mind, and wonders beckoned and enticed him more magnetically than ever the Sirens lured Ulysses.
For de Marigny was a lover of mysteries no less than you, the reader, and as such could he possibly refuse the proffered challenge? Could you?

Part One
I
The Call of Kthanid
De Marigny had first flown the time-clock two weeks earlier under Titus Crows expert tutelage. Now Crow was gone--back to Elysia and the incredible girl-goddess he loved there, Tiania--and de Marigny had decided to follow him, alone.
Crow had done a marvelous job of instruction during the brief flights he had shared with his friend in the clock, and de Marigny was by no means lost in regard to controlling that fantastic machine. It was simply a matter of "meshing oneself" with the thing, so that the clock became an extension of its passenger's body and mind, an extra limb or sixth sense ... or both.
Thus, while half the world slept and darkness covered the land, Henri-Laurent de Marigny set out to prove himself worthy of a new and higher life in Elysia; and he did so in the only way open to him, by pitting himself and his vessel against all the currents of space and time. The world, all unawares, dwindled behind him as he cruised out into the void in his strangely hybrid craft, his almost "human" machine, and a wild enthusiasm and exhilaration filled him as he piloted that vessel in the direction of Orion. Somewhere out there--somewhere in the distant void, behind invisible hyperdimensional barriers--he knew that faerie Elysia waited for him, and it seemed only reasonable to de Marigny that since Elysia lay "adjacent" to Orion, that star should mark his starting point.
On one thing de Marigny had already and irreversibly made up his mind: though Titus Crow had told him that in the event of insurmountabledifficulties he could always contact him through the clock, he would not do so unless his life itself were threatened. From what he knew of it there seemed to be only one way into Elysia for a creature not born to it, and that was the way of peril. Only those who deserve Elysia may ever enjoy her elder wonders, and de Marigny did not intend to be dependant upon Titus Crow for his--birthright?
His birthright, yes--Elysia was his birthright, Crow had hinted as much. What was it his friend had said to him? "Lover of mysteries you are, Henri, as your father before you. And I'll tell you something, something which you really ought to have guessed before now. There's that in you that hearkens back into dim abysses of time, a spark whose fire burns still in Elysia. And one more thing you should know.
"Those places of fantasy and dream I've mentioned--they're all as real and solid in their way as the very ground beneath your feet. The Lands of Dream, after all, are only dimensions lying parallel to the Worlds of Reality. Ah, but there are dreamers and there are dreamers, my friend, and your father was a great dreamer. He still is--for he is a Lord of Ilek-Vad, Counselor to his great friend Randolph Carter, who is himself a just and honored king!
"I intend to visit them there one day, in Ilek-Vad deep in Earth's dreamland, and when I do you can be with me ..."
Musing on these things that Crow had told him, physically and emotionally weary now that the initial stage of his flight was successfully completed and the journey safely underway, de Marigny lay back and watched with his mind's eye--which was now a part of the timeclock's equipment, a mental "scanner" of sorts--as the stars visibly moved in the inky blackness about him, so tremendous was the velocity of his craft as it hurtled through the airless, frozen deeps.
"As real and solid as the very ground beneath your feet," Crow had said of dreams. Well, if Titus Crow said it was so, then it was so. And hadn't Gerhard Schrach hinted much the same thing back in the thirties, and other great thinkers and philosophers before him? Certainly they had. De Marigny could remember Schrach's very words on the subject:
" ... My own dreams being particularly vivid and real--to such an extent that I never know for sure whether or not I am dreaming until I wake up--I would not like to argue which world is the more vital: the waking world or the world of dream. Certainly the waking worldappears to be the more solid--but consider what science tells us about the atomic make-up of so-called solids ... and what are you left with?"
And with thoughts such as these swirling in his head, and the fascinating panoply of vasty voids sprinkled with a myriad jewels in his mind's eye, de Marigny bade the clock speed on and drifted into a sleep; a sleep which seemed eagerly to open its arms to him, and one which was far from dreamless.


Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt the slumbering de Marigny's dreams were not natural ones, and but for his previous knowledge of Elysia, passed on to him through Titus Crow--particularly of the Hall of Crystal and Pearl, wherein Kthanid the Elder God Eminence had his seat in an inviolable sanctuary beneath a great glacier--certainly he must have considered himself the victim of a vilest nightmare. For the thing upon which he suddenly found himself gazing was a shape of primal horror, the blasphemous shape of Cthulhu himself--except that it was not Cthulhu but Kthanid, and where the former was black as the pit the latter shone with the light of stars.
Thus, while his subconscious body hurtled through the star-voids within the spacetime-defying matrix of the great clock, de Marigny's dreaming mind was present in that very Hall of Crystal and Pearl which Titus Crow had described to him in so much detail. And he saw that Crow had painted an almost perfect picture of that magnificently alien palace beneath the ice of Elysia's "polar" regions.
Here was the massive high-arched ceiling, the Titan-paved floor of great hexagonal flags, the ornate columns rising to support high balconies which glowed partially hidden in rose-quartz mists and pearly hazes. And everywhere were the white, pink, and blood hues of crystal, strangely diffused in all those weird angles and proportions that Crow had spoken of. Even the hall's centerpiece--the vast scarlet cushion with its huge, milky crystal ball--was just as Crow had described it. And of course, Kthanid was there, too ...
Kthanid the Eminence, Elder God and cousin to Great Cthulhu--indeed of the same strain of cosmic spawn that bred the Lord of R'lyeh--moved massively in the Cyclopean hall. His body was mountainous! And yet his folded-back, fantastic wings trembled in seeming agitation as Kthanid paced the enormous flags, his great octopoidhead, with its proliferation of face-tentacles, turning this way and that in what was plainly consternation.
But for all that this Being was alien beyond words, what might easily have been horrific was in fact magnificent! For this great creature, bejeweled and glittering as though dusted with diamonds, stared out upon the hall through huge eyes that glowed like molten gold; eyes filled with compassion and love--yes, and fear--almost impossible to imagine as existing within so terrible a fleshly house. And those eyes returned again and again to peer intently at the lustrous crystal upon its scarlet cushion.
It was because of Kthanid's eyes that de Marigny knew--was certain--that there was nothing to fear here, and he knew too that this was much more than merely a dream. It was as if he had been called into the Elder God's presence, and no sooner had this thought occurred to the dreamer than the Eminence turned and stared straight at him where his disembodied being "stood" invisible within the vast subterranean vault.
"Henri-Laurent de Marigny," a rumbling but infinitely kindly voice spoke in the dreamer's mind. "Man of Earth, is it you? Yes, I see that it is. You have answered my summons, which is good, for that was a test I had intended to set you before--before--" The mental voice faded into uncertain silence.
"Kthanid," de Marigny spoke up, unsure as to how to address the mythical Being, "I see that you are ... disturbed. Why have you called me here? Has the trouble to do with Titus Crow?"
"With Titus, yes, and with Tiania, whom I love as a father. But come," the great voice took on urgency, "look into the crystal and tell me what you see."
Disembodied, nevertheless de Marigny found that he was capable of movement. He followed Kthanid to the edge of the great cushion, then moved on across its silken expanse to the center. There the huge, milky crystal ball reposed, its surface opaque and slowly mobile, as a reflection of dense clouds mirrored in a still lake.
"Look!" the Eminence commanded yet again, and slowly the milky clouds began to part, revealing ...
The dreaming de Marigny gazed upon a scene that filled him with icy dread, a scene he could understand even less than he could believe it. The crystal on its scarlet cushion now burned with red fires of its own, and dark shadows danced as flames leaped high above fourhugely flaring, blackly-forged flambeaux. These torches stood at the corners of a raised dais or altar, atop which a great reddish mass--a living, malignant jewel at least three feet across--pulsed evilly as it reflected the ruddy light of the torches. The thing seemed to be an impossibly vast ruby; and guarding it, patroling the round-cobbled square in which the dais stood, were several squat, strangely turbaned figures with awful wide-mouthed faces. At their belts these guardsmen wore viciously curving scimitars, and as they moved about the foot of the raised altar de Marigny saw that they paused occasionally to torment two ragged figures whose limbs were roped to irons hammered into the steps of the dais.
The horror and sick shock that de Marigny experienced had its source in these two figures; for one of them was certainly his great friend of olden adventures, Titus Crow, while the other--ruddily illumined in the light of the flaring flambeaux, fantastically beautiful even in her present distress--must be the girl-goddess Tiania, late of Elysia. Then, as suddenly as it had come, while de Marigny tried desperately to commit all the vision's details to memory, the milky clouds rolled back across the crystal's surface and all was gone.
Away in the time-clock, still hurtling through the star-voids half a universe away in space and time, de Marigny's recumbent form sweated, tossed and turned; while in the great Hall of Crystal and Pearl his disembodied subconscious turned imploringly to Kthanid the Eminence to ask: "But what does it mean? Where are they? And how did this--"
"Hold!" The great Being turned abruptly and for a moment his huge eyes were slits, glittering with something other than compassion or love. Kthanid was every inch a God, and de Marigny sensed that for a moment he had been very close to witnessing the release of awesome energies. The Elder God's frustration was a living force that the dreamer felt as surely as his waking body would feel the warmth of sunlight or the chill of a bitter wind. Then the golden eyes blinked rapidly and Kthanid's towering form trembled violently as he fought to bring his emotions under control.
"Hold, de Marigny," the mental voice finally rumbled again, this time less forcefully, "and I will explain all. But understand that every wasted moment increases their peril ..."
Then the great voice seemed almost to become resigned, as if giving a telepathic shrug. "Still, what other way is there? I must tell youas much as I know, for of course you are their one hope of salvation. Indeed, you will be the instrument of that salvation--if you are able. Have you the strength, de Marigny? Are you the man Titus Crow believes you to be? Would you really presume to enter Elysia? I tell you now. I am not unjust--hut I love those two. Bring them back to me, and I will welcome you to Elysia as a son. Fail me, and--" again the mental shrug, "and you remain a child of Earth all your days--if you live through your ordeal!"
"Whatever needs to be done to help Titus Crow--yes, and his Tiania--I' ll try to do it," the dreamer fervently answered. "Wherever I need to go, I'll go there."
"You will need to do more than merely try, de Marigny, and indeed there is far to go. When I have told you all I am able to tell, then you must be on your way--immediately."
"And my destination?"
"Earth!"
"Earth?" the dreamer gaped. "But--"
"Earth, yes, for your own homeworld is the only safe stepping-stone to your ultimate destination, to the place where even now Titus Crow and Tiania face unknown terrors." For a brief moment Kthanid paused, then he turned his golden eyes in the dreaming de Marigny's direction. "Obviously your mind is receptive to telepathic attraction, man of Earth, else I could not have called you here to Elysia. But tell me, can you dream? Can you truly dream?"
"Can I dream? Why, I--"
"Your father was a great dreamer."
"Titus Crow has told me much the same thing, but--" de Marigny began, then paused as an astounding thought came to him. "Are you trying to tell me that Titus and Tiania are--"
The great Being nodded: "Yes, they are trapped in Earth's dreamworld, de Marigny. To find them, free them, and return them to Elysia unscathed, that is your quest. One man against all Earth's dreamworld--which is also the land of her nightmares!"
II
Dreams of Doom
"There is a way," the Eminence continued, "by means of which I can rapidly impress upon your mind all that I know of your ... destination. It may be unpleasant in that you could be left with a headache, but other than that it is not dangerous. There is also a way to speed the process up immeasurably, and ... But no, I fear your mind is not ready for that. It would probably destroy you."
"Crow has told me how you--revealed--certain things to him," de Marigny answered. "Right here in this hall, I believe. I am ready for whatever it is you have to do to me."
"Titus Crow's capacity was unbelievably high, even taking into account the fact that the strains of Eld ran strong in his blood. With him the process was very quick, almost instantaneous, but I would not dare to attempt such a process with you. That is not to belittle you, de Marigny: it is simply that if you are incapacitated, then nothing can save Titus Crow and Tiania. But in any case, your education will not take too long; my knowledge of Earth's dreamland is regrettably limited. The reason for this will soon become amply clear to you. Now come to me ..."
As the dreamer drifted toward the alien Eminence, so that great Being's face-tentacles seemed to reach out to touch his disembodied mind. "Steel yourself," came Kthanid's warning in the instant before contact was made.
... And immediately gates of strange knowledge opened in de Marigny's mind, through which streamed fantastic visions of nighted myth and legend, released from Kthanid's mental storehouse of lore concerning Earth's dreamland. And though it was perfectly true that the Eminence knew comparatively little of that subconscious dimension, still it seemed to the disembodied Earthman that the Elder God must surely be omniscient in the ways of human dreams.
For as rapidly as his mind could accept it, de Marigny became heir to a wealth of information previously known only to certain seasoned travelers in dreamland, a dimension whose very fabric existed for and was sustained only by the minds of Earth's dreamers. He saw the continents,hills and mountains, rivers and oceans of dream, her fabulous countries, cities, and towns, and he saw the peoples who inhabited those ethereal regions Amazingly, he even recognized some of the places he saw, remembering now adventures believed forgotten forever in olden dreams, just as the night is forgotten in the light of dawn's rays.
And so knowledge passed from the mind of the great Being into the mind of Henri-Laurent de Marigny. He was shown the Cavern of the Flame where, not far from the gates of the waking world, the bearded, pshent-bearing priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah offer up prayers and sacrifices to the capricious gods of dream that dwell in the clouds above Kadath. Yes, and an instant later, whirled away to the Cold Waste, he even glimpsed Kadath itself, forbidden to men, but was offered no guarantee of that hideous region's location. Not even Kthanid knew for certain in which area of spacetime Kadath lay.
Snatched away from Kadath in the