二楼例行，sammy英文原文输入。
The Lost Dreamers —— Part Six: Journey of Unknown Kadath
sammy
Gregory Gry returned home with the silver key to find that the painting had changed. No longer did it depict the image of John Henry Price. Rather, it showed a dirty, exhausted image of himself, pausing for breath in a forest he had never seen before.
Had Twila been in the room, painting, whi1e he was gone? Was he going insane?
Gregory plunged into bed with the silver key clutched tightly in his grasp. He fell asleep immediately. And almost immediately, he was sitting up, feeling awake. The painting was gone, but the seventy steps of light slumber had returned. Gregory threw back the sheets and rushed down the steps. It was all as he remembered: the marble staircase, the Cavern of Flame, the guardians of the chamber. It felt as if no time had passed since his last visit. With the silver key in hand he walked boldly past the guardian priests, and they nodded a familiar greeting to him. as he began his descent down the second marble staircase.
Seven hundred steps later, he was in the Dreamlands.
Sites, colors, sounds... all seemed sharper, more vivid, and more distinct than anything he had ever experienced. He was standing in a clearing. Around him was a thick forest where the trees had the colors of autumn but the life of spring, and they seemed to whisper an almost sentient song as their finger-like branches swayed in the breeze. The air had a pleasant smell he could almost feel in his lungs; Gregory recalled a bonfire on a brisk night. An overgrown path led away from the cleanng, into the heart of the forest.
As he walked, it seemed to Gregory that there was a feminme form in a glowing white gown making her way through the forest ahead of him, remaining just on the periphery of his awareness. Occasionally, he caught a glimpse of her bare shoulder, noticed the bounce of her long dark hairs, or saw the line of her calf as she danced away and out of sight. Try as he might, however, he could not catch up to her. As he struggled to move faster, to close ground between himself and the woman, he had the sense that the forest had come alive around him. Small, scunying things were moving through the branches above, following him, entertained and amused by his frantic chase. Eventually, the forest grew
sparse, and then Gregory found himself running out into a vast prairie of luminescent blue grass. After a dozen or so steps, he realized that the woman was no longer there. Turning back to the forest, he saw her phantom, a wraith-like mist-shrouded form that somewhat resembled Twila Katherine Price, but was not her.
Turning away, Gregory crossed the blue plains, upon which he saw other ghosts and other dreams. Some resembled Twila, some did not, but they always led him onward, as if the object of his search were just beyond the horizon. The wild grasses on the plains turned from blue to a deep purple to a majestic red, and the plains turned to hills and the hills turned to a marvelous range of jagged crystalline mountains. One morning, Gregory woke up with the realization that he had almost forgotten his life at the Clover Club. He also realized that even if he had wanted to, he would not be able to retrace his journey and find the way back.
And so Gregory Gry wandered the Dreamlands for what seemed like many years, seeing many spectacular things. He visited the cities of Ulthar, Baharna, and Celephais, and was greeted warmly by their eccentric, superstitious inhabitants. He saw glowing musical fountains that sang with an otherworldly voice, hanging marble trees that grew from the sides of cliffs, and strange phosphorescent orbs that were too small and too low in the sky to be moons, but too large to be anything else. Once, he even wandered through the lush, murmuring forest in which he had originally seen himself depicted, in Twila's secret painting.
Everywhere he asked about Twila Katherine Price, and the answer was always the same: he would find that which he sought at Unknown Kadath.
"Sometimes I doubt that she even exists," he said one night to another wanderer with whose path his own had crossed. They were sitting beside a campfire, conversing about their dreams. "It's like she was a demon, a ghost sent by the Dreamlands to lure me here until I myself was trapped."
"She exists, at least within your mind. And you are in the Dreamlands. It is not a matter of going to her, but of bringing her to yourself."
Later that night Gregory dreamt of Unknown Kadath, of his arrival at the distant, mysterious castle, and of the woman he was bound to find there: a woman like Twila, as he remembered her, before this all began. She would be convincing, real enough, painting by moonlight atop the mountain fortress, and all would be well... but would it really be her? The ability to breathe life into his dreams, that was the beauty of the Dreamlands...
He woke with a start. The campfire had gone out, and his fellow traveller was gone. "The beauty of the dreamlands?" He asked himself, and a birdsong rang out, almost mockingly, in the distance. "Or the horror?"
Gregory Gry laid down again, and started to dream.
