Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/24

appeal, of an attempt to awaken Earth from her dream of security, an entreaty to arrive at some real knowledge of the moon.

Only after understanding and knowledge can come even the remotest policy of a planned defense—and defense against such terrible neighbors we must have.

There is much which I had no time to write in my journal; much that haunts my memory waking and sleeping. There is the remembered vision of the brilliantly glaring orb hanging in the sky before our approaching space-ship—of things noted swiftly and in terror, that live again more clearly in the memory.

The vampire-demons, the monster-ghouls who inhabit the moon—our near neighbor in the heavens!—have, I think, given a ghastly life-in-death to the satellite herself, as maggots creeping in the bare skull of a corpse vivify it. The face of the "man in the moon"—ah, when it hung before us it grinned like the face of a skull; and toward an orifice lined with tooth-like crags did the space-ship sink and into it enter, as into a ghastly maw.

The mighty gust of air that swept us out of a connected crater was like the exhalation of a giant's breath, incalculably prolonged; may there be in turn a long inhalation, when air diffused through nearby space is drawn in again through dreadful crater-nostrils?

Those dread forms of nightmare life—Le Noir and his kingdom of monsters—what do they resemble so much as nightmare forms materialized? They inhabit the hollow center of the skull in its vampire death-in-life; the skull that is the moon. Only in the realm of metaphysics might one even conjecture the nature of the relationship between moon and moon-monsters.

This is the wildest conjecture only; I have come to feel that our dead satellite is in itself a wicked, menacing thing. Have we not always felt it? Do not astronomers regard our moon with unease, and point out that some day she will perhaps fall toward the earth, to our destruction? Do not poets paint word pictures attributing malign influences to the orb of night, even while they recognize the sentimental potency of her white light? There was the moon of Oscar Wilde's Salome, that moon that rode the sky in quest of dead things. . . .

My space is limited. I feel that never again will I or mine be in extreme peril from Le Noir and those who inhabit the moon; though as to that, only God knows. But I cry out to the world to waken from the dream of false security, into which they strike at times—and may strike more widely and terribly.

At least, let us be on guard!

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