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Updated: June 3, 2025
In their place was nothing but joyous anticipation, a supernal freedom from even the shadow of the shadow of care or sorrow; not now did anything matter Olaf or his haunted, hate-filled eyes; Throckmartin or his fate nothing of pain, nothing of agony, nothing of striving nor endeavour nor despair in that wide outer world that had turned suddenly to a troubled dream.
The moon had again broken through the clouds, and this time much nearer. Not a mile away was the patch of light that it threw upon the waves. Back of it, to the rim of the sea was a lane of moonlight; a gigantic gleaming serpent racing over the edge of the world straight and surely toward the ship. Throckmartin stiffened to it as a pointer does to a hidden covey.
Or why I did not call upon members of the University staffs of either Melbourne or Sydney for assistance. At the least, why I did not gather, as Throckmartin had hoped to do, a little force of strong men to go with me to the Nan-Matal. To the first two questions I answer frankly I did not dare. And this reluctance, this inhibition, every man jealous of his scientific reputation will understand.
It had drawn me to it in search of Throckmartin and its shadow had fallen upon the soul of Olaf the Norseman; and upon what thousands upon thousands more I wondered, since the brains that had conceived it had vanished with their secret knowledge? What lay beyond it? I stretched out a shaking hand and touched the surface of the slab.
Try as I would I could not see them nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by the Dweller. "Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me. I felt Lakla's light touch. "Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help them now! Steady and watch!"
Throckmartin still stood at the open port. Over his shoulder I saw a gleaming pillar racing along the moon path toward us. Through the window cascaded a blinding radiance. It gathered Throckmartin to it, clothed him in a robe of living opalescence. Light pulsed through and from him. The cabin filled with murmurings A wave of weakness swept over me, buried me in blackness.
"There," he said, "under those walls is the Moon Pool and the seven gleaming lights that raise the Dweller in the Pool, and the altar and shrine of the Dweller. And there in the Moon Pool with it lie Edith and Stanton and Thora." "The Dweller in the Moon Pool?" I repeated half-incredulously. "The Thing you saw," said Throckmartin solemnly.
Through me passed a trembling as one who has stood on the very verge of the gulf wherein the men of the Louisades says lurks the fisher of the souls of men, and has been plucked back by sheerest chance. Throckmartin passed an arm around me. "It is as I thought," he said. In his voice was a new note; the calm certainty that has swept aside a waiting terror of the unknown. "Now I know!
What did that smooth stone, whose wan deadness whispered of ages-old corridors of time opening out into alien, unimaginable vistas, hide? It had cost the world of science Throckmartin's great brain as it had cost Throckmartin those he loved.
Down upon it, swift and straight, a radiant torrent cleaving the waves, raced the moon stream. "Good God!" breathed Throckmartin, and if ever the words were a prayer and an invocation they were. And then, for the first time I saw it! The moon path stretched to the horizon and was bordered by darkness.
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