Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 28

For the first part of his extended prison stay, so he related, Shaver suffered incessant mental torment courtesy of the dero. (“I know those dero only let me live because my life was a burden to me,” he declared, “and because my torture was a delight to them and they feared no retribution.”) Finally, however, the harassment ceased suddenly. He felt better but still was uneasy about the prospect of its resumption. Then he had a vivid dream of a woman who sat on the edge of his coat as he slept. “Her features were not out of the ordinary,” Shaver related, “but strangely and beautifully exaggerated. … She had that strange, wise quality men have sung of as the witch maid’s alone since Time began.” Shaver realized that she was blind.

In their conversation she promised him freedom if he did her bidding without question for a year. In the morning, when Shaver woke up, he found on his bed the pale ribbon she had worn in her hair—proving that she was a real woman who in some unexplained fashion had been able to get past the prison walls and bars. She returned frequently, sometimes “just a kind of protection,” but at other times “her sweet, actual body lay in my arms, I swear.” He called her Nydia, after the blind heroine of a Bulwer-Lytton novel (The Last Days of Pompeii) that he had once read. Shaver learned that his situation had changed because the tero had succeeded in driving out a dero colony which had been situated immediately beneath the prison.

Just before dawn one day soon afterwards, Nydia showed up in apparitional form with a hypnotized prison guard, who unlocked Shaver’s cell door. Shaver was led into a nearby forest, through which the two passed for miles until they reached the side of a mountain. There they came upon a door, well concealed behind bushes, and on the other side, they entered the cavern where Nydia and her fellow tero lived.

He met the real, physical Nydia—of whom the “Nydia” he had known was only a psychic replication—and consummated their relationship in the tero equivalent of a marriage. She was one of 20 tero and one of six who were blind because of the darkness and dim light to which they were constantly exposed inside the cavern. “We are different from the kind of human you are used to,” she told him. “We need men like you to aid us in our constant struggle with the living devils that inhabit [many] of these underground warrens.”

Shaver was shown the wonders abandoned by the ancients. They included distance-ray beams which could see through miles of rock. In the first demonstration, Shaver observed a “scene of utter horror … a real Hell,” with scenes of stomachturning torture of human victims of the dero. “From immemorial times,” Nydia said, the dero “have had such Hells in the underworld. … You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive.” Via abuse of the ancients’ “beneficial rays”—”ben rays” for short—the dero are able to keep their tormented victims alive for as long as 20 years.

Shaver had a dream of a beautiful, but blind, woman, who asked him to do her bidding for one year without question (iStock).

Much more pleasantly, Shaver explored the ancient thought records, stored in a library elsewhere in the cavern. There, he was sat in a chair and a helmet placed on his head. As powerful stored mental images poured into his brain, he “became” a real Atlan named Duli. (Shaver wrote, “Duli became an Elder of the ruling council of the city of Barto on the planet Mu [Lemuria],” without mentioning the surely not coincidental fact that Shaver had lived in the city of Barto, Pennsylvania.) Another thought record allowed him to relive the life of Mutan Mion, whose story became the basis of “I Remember Lemuria!”

Shaver lived in the Cavern World with Nydia and her tero band for eight years. At last, however, the dero reclaimed their old base, killing everyone but Shaver, who managed to escape to the surface to write letters to Ray Palmer.

It is, of course, to state the painfully obvious that none of this could have happened. Still, that point duly made, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the story is impossible even by Shaver’s own account. Put aside the consideration that Shaver’s absence from the world for eight years could not have gone unnoticed. Forget that no one has ever produced evidence of an extraordinary prison break of which both the authorities and the press would certainly have taken notice. Simply consider Shaver’s claim to having been jailed for “many years,” and then being housed in the Cavern World for eight. We have already seen that Shaver’s known biography and whereabouts unambiguously undercut any such assertion. It is virtually certain that in reality Shaver resided in a mental institution during most or all of the mid–1930s and into the early 1940s.