Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 30

Before Shaver and Palmer introduced them to the world, nobody had ever heard of the tero and the dero (or their equivalent as high-tech, super-or sub-human combatants representing subterranean good and evil forces), but as noted, others would step forward to tell tales of them once the news was out. Such yarns gave Shaver’s stories credibility, at least if one didn’t judge them manifest nonsense. A word of caution is in order here, however. As already noted, Palmer was not above manufacturing bogus material under other people’s names, as Fuller learned in the early days of Fate. So while we may note that a man signing his name Ralph B. Fields published a letter in the December 1946 issue of Amazing, we may not automatically presume that a man named Ralph B. Fields existed.

Nonetheless, whatever may or may not be said about Mr. Fields, there is a Lassen Peak, also known as Mount Lassen. It is at the extreme southern edge of the Cascade Range. Situated in Shasta County in northeastern California, it stands at 10,457 feet (3,187 meters), a volcano that last erupted in 1921. To the north is the better known Mount Shasta, which has its own mystical lore dating back to the late nineteenth century. Much of that lore centers on allegations that survivors of the lost continent of Lemuria live within Shasta. Occasionally, almost as an aside, it is remarked without elaboration that another, smaller colony of lost continentals dwells within Lassen.

Mount Lassen, like Mount Shasta, in the Cascade Range is associated with lore about Lemurian survivors who settled there (iStock).

This is the context in which Fields’ supposed experience occurred. He did not make clear when the alleged encounter took place, but his letter states that he and a friend, Joe (no last name), living in the general vicinity of Lassen, decided to go searching for guano (bat droppings used as fertilizer) in caves inside the mountain. On the evening of the third day, having reached an altitude of 7,000 feet (2,134 kilometers), they set up camp beneath a rock outcropping. Fields took the food out of their bags, while Joe went looking for brush with which to get a fire going. A few minutes later Joe returned, an excited expression on his face, to report that on the other side of the rock was a cave entrance.

They ate quickly, then found their way to the cave. They entered it through a small opening. Twenty feet (six meters) in, the cave expanded so that it was now 10 feet (three meters) wide and eight feet (2.4 meters) high. One hundred yards (about 91 meters) later, the tunnel took a turn to the left. The two continued for another mile or two. Their surroundings never changed, which led them to observe that it appeared to have been artificially created. Then Joe thought he had seen a light deeper in the cave. As they walked in that direction, the light returned, shining in their faces and briefly blinding them. When they had regained their sight, Fields pointed his flashlight in that direction. The beam caught three approaching men, dressed in working clothes, thick-soled shoes on their feet. Fields and his friend were shocked and frightened to discover that they were not alone in the cave.

A poster for the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Wells called his subhuman creatures “morlocks,” which is suspiciously similar to the word “horlocks” in a supposedly true story (MGM / GEORGE PAL PRODUCTIONS/Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library).

One of the strangers asked what they were doing there. The answer did not seem to persuade him, and a tense exchange followed. Fields suspected that they had come upon a criminal gang in hiding. Two other strangers joined the first three, and the two explorers were led deeper into the cave and, where the walls expanded, to a toboggan-shaped device. The device flew them silently and rapidly into the cave world. Finally, a similar vehicle, moving fast in their direction, appeared, forcing the one which the original party occupied to come to an abrupt halt. Fields wrote:

One machine had no sooner stopped than our captors leaped from the machine and started to dash away. A fine blue light leaped from the other machine in a fine pencil beam and its sweep caught them and they fell to the cavern and lay still. The figures dismounted from the other machine and came close to us. Then I noticed they carried a strange object in their hands. It resembled a fountain pen flashlight with a large, round, bulb-like affair on the back end and a grip something like a German luger. They pointed them at us. After seeing what had happened to our erstwhile captors I thought that our turn was next, whatever it was.

Instead, one of them inquired if they were surface people. Then he asked, “Where did the horlocks find you?” He went on to say, “You are very fortunate that we came this way. You would also have become horlocks, and then we would have had to kill you also.” Fields improbably quotes verbatim a long paragraph, the core of which is, “The people on the surface are not ready to have the things that the ancients have left. … There are a great many evil people here who create many unpleasant things for both us and the surface people. They are safe because no one on the surface world believes in us or them.”

Fields and Joe were then flown up the cave, and they then made their way to the exterior world by foot. “What is the answer to the whole thing?” Fields asks. “I would like to know.”

Possibly, the answer is as much H.G. Wells as Richard Shaver. In Wells’ famous The Time Machine (1895) the violent, evil underearthers of the distant future are called “morlocks,” a single consonant away from “horlocks.”²