ARTHUR MACHEN Ultimate Collection: The Greatest Occult & Supernatural Classics in One Volume (Including Translations, Essays & Autobiography). Arthur Machen

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СКАЧАТЬ the story of the finding the stone.

      ‘Dear me!’ said Phillipps, ‘this is extremely curious; you have had a find indeed. Why, it looks to me even more ancient than the Hittite seal. I confess the character, if it is a character, is entirely strange to me. These whorls are really very quaint.’ ‘Yes, but I want to know what they mean. You must remember this tablet is the ‘black heaven’ of the letter found in Sir Thomas Vivian’s pocket; it bears directly on his death.’

      ‘Oh, no, that is nonsense! This is, no doubt, an extremely ancient tablet, which has been stolen from some collection. Yes, the hand makes an odd coincidence, but only a coincidence after all.’

      ‘My dear Phillipps, you are a living example of the truth of the axiom that extreme scepticism is mere credulity. But can you decipher the inscription?’

      ‘I undertake to decipher anything,’ said Phillipps. ‘I do not believe in the insoluble. These characters are curious, but I cannot fancy them to be inscrutable.’

      ‘Then take the thing away with you and make what you can of it. It has begun to haunt me; I feel as if I had gazed too long into the eyes of the Sphinx.’

      Phillipps departed with the tablet in an inner pocket. He had not much doubt of success, for he had evolved thirty-seven rules for the solution of inscriptions. Yet when a week had passed and he called to see Dyson there was no vestige of triumph on his features. He found his friend in a state of extreme irritation, pacing up and down in the room like a man in a passion. He turned with a start as the door opened.

      ‘Well,’ said Dyson, ‘you have got it? What is it all about?’

      ‘My dear fellow, I am sorry to say I have completely failed. I have tried every known device in vain. I have even been so officious as to submit it to a friend at the Museum, but he, though a man of prime authority on the subject, tells me he is quite at fault. It must be some wreckage of a vanished race, almost, I think — a fragment of another world than ours. I am not a superstitious man, Dyson, and you know that I have no truck with even the noble delusions, but I confess I yearn to be rid of this small square of blackish stone. Frankly, it has given me an ill week; it seems to me troglodytic and abhorred.’

      Phillipps drew out the tablet and laid it on the desk before Dyson.

      ‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘I was right at all events in one particular; it has formed part of some collection. There is a piece of grimy paper on the back that must have been a label.’

      ‘Yes, I noticed that,’ said Dyson, who had fallen into deepest disappointment; ‘no doubt the paper is a label. But as I don’t much care where the tablet originally came from, and only wish to know what the inscription means, I paid no attention to the paper. The thing is a hopeless riddle, I suppose, and yet it must surely be of the greatest importance.’

      Phillipps left soon after, and Dyson, still despondent, took the tablet in his hand and carelessly turned it over. The label had so grimed that it seemed merely a dull stain, but as Dyson looked at it idly, and yet attentively, he could see pencil-marks, and he bent over it eagerly, with his glass to his eye. To his annoyance, he found that part of the paper had been torn away, and he could only with difficulty make out odd words and pieces of words. First he read something that looked like ‘inroad’, and then beneath, ‘stony-hearted step ——’ and a tear cut off the rest. But in an instant a solution suggested itself, and he chuckled with huge delight.

      ‘Certainly,’ he said out loud, ‘this is not only the most charming but the most convenient quarter in all London; here I am, allowing for the accidents of side streets, perched on a tower of observation.’

      He glanced triumphant out of the window across the street to the gate of the British Museum. Sheltered by the boundary wall of that agreeable institution, a ‘screever’, or artist in chalks, displayed his brilliant impressions on the pavement, soliciting the approval and the coppers of the gay and serious.

      ‘This,’ said Dyson, ‘is more than delightful! An artist is provided to my hand.’

      The Artist of the Pavement

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      Mr. Phillipps, in spite of all disavowals — in spite of the wall of sense of whose enclosure and limit he was wont to make his boast — yet felt in his heart profoundly curious as to the case of Sir Thomas Vivian. Though he kept a brave face for his friend, his reason could not decently resist the conclusion that Dyson had enunciated, namely, that the whole affair had a look both ugly and mysterious. There was the weapon of a vanished race that had pierced the great arteries; the red hand, the symbol of a hideous faith, that pointed to the slain man; and then the tablet which Dyson declared he had expected to find, and had certainly found, bearing the ancient impress of the hand of malediction, and a legend written beneath in a character compared with which the most antique cuneiform was a thing of yesterday. Besides all this, there were other points that tortured and perplexed. How to account for the bare knife found unstained beneath the body? And the hint that the red hand upon the wall must have been drawn by some one whose life was passed in darkness thrilled him with a suggestion of dim and infinite horror. Hence he was in truth not a little curious as to what was to come, and some ten days after he had returned the tablet he again visited the ‘mystery-man’, as he privately named his friend.

      Arrived in the grave and airy chambers in Great Russell Street, he found the moral atmosphere of the place had been transformed. All Dyson’s irritation had disappeared, his brow was smoothed with complacency, and he sat at a table by the window gazing out into the street with an expression of grim enjoyment, a pile of books and papers lying unheeded before him.

      ‘My dear Phillipps, I am delighted to see you! Pray excuse my moving. Draw your chair up here to the table, and try this admirable shag tobacco.’

      ‘Thank you,’ said Phillipps, ‘judging by the flavour of the smoke, I should think it is a little strong. But what on earth is all this? What are you looking at?’

      ‘I am on my watch-tower. I assure you that the time seems short while I contemplate this agreeable street and the classic grace of the Museum portico.’

      ‘Your capacity for nonsense is amazing,’ replied Phillipps, ‘but have you succeeded in deciphering the tablet? It interests me.’

      ‘I have not paid much attention to the tablet recently,’ said Dyson. ‘I believe the spiral character may wait.’

      ‘Really! And how about the Vivian murder?’

      ‘Ah, you do take an interest in that case? Well, after all, we cannot deny that it was a queer business. But is not “murder” rather a coarse word? It smacks a little, surely, of the police poster. Perhaps I am a trifle decadent, but I cannot help believing in the splendid word; “sacrifice”, for example, is surely far finer than “murder”.’

      ‘I am all in the dark,’ said Phillipps. ‘I cannot even imagine by what track you are moving in this labyrinth.’

      ‘I think that before very long the whole matter will be a good deal clearer for us both, but I doubt whether you will like hearing the story.’

      Dyson lit his pipe afresh and leant back, not relaxing, however, in his scrutiny of the street. After a somewhat lengthy pause, he startled Phillipps by a loud breath of relief as he rose from the chair by the window and began to СКАЧАТЬ