The Book of Iod
Henry Kuttner

Robert M. Price

Robert Bloch

Lin Carter








A Cthulhu Cycle series book.






THE BOOK OF IOD

by Henry Kuttner

with Robert Bloch, Lin Carter and Robert M. Price


Dedicated to the memory of

KARL EDWARD WAGNER,

Knight of Carcosa











The Khut-N’hah Mythos


A few years ago, if one were writing an introduction like this, one would have had to say that we are focusing on the early, neglected period of a writer who is far better known for his mature work in the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Now we cannot say precisely this, as Henry Kuttner’s star shines neither so brightly no so high up in the firmament as it once did. Even Ray Bradbury’s memoir of his friend and mentor in The Best of Henry Kuttner is called “A Neglected Master”, and that was some twenty years ago. Today it is sad but safe to say that just about all of Kuttner’s exceedingly clever fiction is the property of literary nostalgia-lovers and antiquarians. All of it has passed into the category of literary curiosities. And yet the distinction between apprentice and journeyman work is worth preserving. The Cthulhu Mythos specialist is most interested in the Lovecraftian juvenilia of Henry Kuttner.

Henry Kuttner (1914-1958) was a friend of the young Robert Bloch and, like him, a writer just starting out. Both shared the same markets, including Weird Tales and Strange Stories. They even collaborated on a few stories. Another thing both shared was a literary friendship with the Great Old One, er, Grand Old Man, H. P. Lovecraft. Probably Bloch assured Kuttner that the Providence recluse was actually quite approachable and suggested he write him. Kuttner soon became one of the Lovecraft Circle, submitting plot ideas and draft manuscripts to Lovecraft for evaluation, albeit over the brief space of a single year (February 1936 to February 1937) before Lovecraft’s death.

Critic Edmund Wilson once dismissed the juvenile “Lovecraft cult” in much the same spirit as Athens dismissed Socrates as a corrupter of the city’s youth. Lovecraft encouraged a whole stable of young disciples including Bloch, Kuttner, August Derleth, Duane Rimel, Richard F. Searight, Willis Conover, and (posthumously) Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Gary Myers, and others. Many of these young men started out thinking that what they wanted to do was to write like Lovecraft, but what they eventually decided they wanted was to become writers, period. What Bradbury says of Kuttner, “He did not really want to become a minor-league Lovecraft”, was equally true of these others. Most made it and finally found their own voices, major league or minor. Kuttner certainly became, in his era, a major voice. This was after he had put away the childish things of Lovecraftian pastiche. But these are the things, perhaps perversely, that interest you and me. We want to take a closer look at Kuttner’s early Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Indeed, it is good not to pass it by too quickly, for, not only are several of the tales quite enjoyable in their own right, they contain a number of fascinating details that repay study.

The element of Lovecraft that seems to grab many pasticheurs is not so much the Old Gent’s style as it is his intriguing pseudo-mythology. It seems that every one who treads this path gladly yields to the temptation to complicate the Mythos a little bit more, expand the pantheon, add a few more tomes to the sagging shelf of imaginary grimoires. Our Kuttner was by no means immune. Let us occupy ourselves for a moment first with the sources and then with the shape of the Kuttner or (as HPL dubbed his disciple) Khut-N’hah Mythos.

Obviously the chief influence on Kuttner’s pseudo-Lovecraftiana is Lovecraft’s own work. After an initial experiment with Gothic horror (“The Secret of Kralitz”) Kuttner penned a pair of pastiches ofLovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. These are “The Jest of Droom Avista” and “The Eater of Souls.” Though he would reuse a couple of the names and concepts he coined for these stories, he soon abandoned this form and went on to do more “straight” horror stories set in the modern era. In these he makes passing references once or twice to the Lovecraftian names Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, Yuggoth and Yig. But these were strictly marginal and might have been as easily pruned as were the Mythos references in the first draft of Fritz Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit.”

Equally important was the influence of Kuttner’s friend Robert Bloch. Several of Kuttner’s stories for Weird Tales and Strange Stories read much like Bloch’s work of the same period, mixing snappy, crisp narration (reminiscent of 1940’s movie scripts) with the horrors of medieval diabolism—and a wry sense of the incongruity involved. Even in terms of Mythos props, it is significant to note that Kuttner usually eschews Lovecraft’s already hackneyed Necronomicon, preferring instead Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm/De Vermis Mysteriis. And the name given to Kuttner’s Keziah Mason clone in “The Salem Horror”, Abigail Prinn, is obviously a salute to Bloch’s Flemish wizard Ludvig Prinn.

The thing that made Lovecraft’s esoteric lore effective was the impression he gave that it might reflect a genuine ancient tradition. To this end he took care to cast his names like “Yuggoth”, “shoggoths”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “Azathoth”, etc., in the linguistic accents of Hebrew and Arabic, the languages of much medieval and ancient magical literature. “Nug and Yeb” were meant to have a Tartar or Tibetan ring. This kind of piggy-backing on genuine ancient lore was a trick not lost on Kuttner. He proceeded to camouflage his own mythologoumena with references borrowed from ancient religion. His favorite source (perhaps because Lovecraft had not used it) was Persian Zoroastrianism. This is plain in his story, not included here, “Towers of Death” (Weird Tales, November 1939), where we do not meet with any of the familiar Mythos spooks, but we do have a character making a deal with the Zoroastrian anti-god Ahriman. Some of the overt Mythos tales (all of which are included here) make sidelong or disguised references to Zoroastrianism, as we will see in the introductions to particular stories.

Lovecraft was much taken with the lore of Theosophy once his pal Edgar Hoffmann Price introduced him to it. Madame Blavatsky’s erudite yet crackpot volumes Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine were a gold mine of esoterica for fantasy writers of the pulp era. In his fascinating article “John Carter: Sword of Theosophy” (available in the Mirage Press collection of Amra reprints The Conan Swordbook), Fritz Leiber shows in convincing detail how several major building blocks of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books were lifted directly from the pages of Madame Blavatsky. In his introduction to Poseidonis, one of his Clark Ashton Smith collections, Lin Carter suggests a similar dependence of Smith on Blavatsky, and it is Carter who rightly notes that “Madame Blavatsky is really quite an important person in the history of fantasy. In the course of [her] two interminable and all but unreadable tomes of spurious occult lore… she codified fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory, and nonsense into a systematic prehistory of the world… This system, percolating down through sensational popularizations and Sunday supplement articles, was adopted lock, stock, and barrel by writers for the fantasy pulp magazines, who are thus greatly in her debt.”

Perhaps it seemed natural for pulp writers to incorporate the lore of Blavatskianism, since she herself might be viewed as having done just what they were doing: using genuine mystical and mythic lore as an anchor to provide false gravity for her own innovations with which she mixed them.

Lovecraft compares the Cthulhu cult, implicitly or explicitly, to the Theosophical Society in “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories. His stray references to the “Children of the Fire Mist” come directly from Blavatsky, as do his occasional citations of The Book of Dzyan, the supposedly ancient palm-parchment codex in the pre-Sanskrit Senzar language. (In fact, the whole of The Secret Doctrine is ostensibly a massive commentary on this imaginary text.) Probably the most significant case of Theosophical influence on Lovecraft was “The Shadow out of Time” (on this point see my article “Lovecraft’s Use of Theosophy” in my collection H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, 2nd edition, Borgo Press).

Some of Henry Kuttner’s most puzzling occult name-drops turn out to have been cribbed directly from The Secret Doctrine. His most often reprinted Lovecraftian tale “The Salem Horror” features most of them. Have you ever found yourself wondering about the derivation of “the Vach-Viraj incantation” or “the Tikkoun Elixir”? What about the blasphemous Book of Iod itself? Stay with me, now.

The terms “Vach” and “Viraj” come from a footnote on page 9 of Volume 1 of The Secret Doctrine: “See Manu’s account of Brahma separating his body into male and female, the latter the female Vach, in whom he creates Viraj”, this last a variant spelling of the vajra, or irresistible thunderbolt of Indra, often used as a penis symbol in Tantric mysticism.

Whence the Tikkoun Elixir? Well, tikkoun or tikkun refers to ritual acts of piety and purification in Kabbalistic Judaism (see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, page 233: “Extinction of the stain, restoration of harmony—that is the meaning of the Hebrew word Tikkun, which is the term employed by the Kabbalists after the period of the Zohar, for man’s task in this world.”), but I’m guessing Kuttner derived it second-hand from The Secret Doctrine, Volume 2, page 25:

“The ‘Heavenly Man’ (Tetragrammaton) who is the Protogonos [i.e., the firstborn of creation as in Colossians 1:15], Tikkoun, the firstborn from the passive deity and the first manifestation of that deity’s shadow, is the universal form and idea, which engenders the manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four-lettered symbol, in the Kabala, of the Universe itself, also called the second Logos.”

Or perhaps from a footnote on page 706: “The form of Tikkun or the Protogonos, the firstborn, i.e., the universal form and idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.”

In all this, it must not be imagined that Blavatsky is simply laying it on thick. Her genius was in her creative synthesis of many strikingly analogous mythemes drawn from Gnosticism, the Hindu scriptures, the Kabbalah, and who knows what all. MacGregor Mathers performed the same syncretistic feat for the varied Western traditions of ceremonial magic. And of course Lovecraft and Kuttner were doing much the same thing, only for fictional purposes. It is equally obvious, however, that in all these borrowings, Kuttner completely disregarded the original meaning of his terms, merely liking the sound of them.

Though Kuttner will supply his own content for the name Iod, I would suggest that he picked up the name itself from the footnote on page 90 of Volume 1: “In the Kabala the same numbers are a value of Jehovah, viz., 1065, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name—Jod, Vau, and twice He—are respectively 10,6 and 5.” My guess is that Kuttner’s “Iod” is a more phonetic spelling of the Hebrew letter Yodh (“Jod”).

Another piece of Kuttner Mythos esoterica pops up in “Hydra”, namely the Chhaya Ritual (also present in “The Hunt”). We have to page through Madame Blavatsky again for this one. And this time we find what we’re looking for on page 17 of the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, in a dense excerpt from the Book of Dzyan:

“The Seven Hosts, the ‘Will-Born Lords’, propelled by the spirit of life-giving, separated men from themselves, each on his own zone. Seven times seven shadows of future men were born, each of his own colour and kind. Each inferior to his father. The fathers, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny were Bhuta, with neither form or mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya… a shadow with no sense.”

In both “Hydra” and “The Hunt” Kuttner simply employs the word without any of the Theosophic associations. In a Weird Menace tale called “Terror in the House” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1937), he makes it all explicit. The narrator sees a painting a la Pickman, only the picture is titled “The Hunt” (sound familiar?), and “pictured the Chhaya—the ‘boneless ones’ of the Secret Book of Dzyan.” This last is a combination of the titles of Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan and The Secret Doctrine. “The Secret Book of Dzyan speaks of them—‘The Seven Hosts, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny are called the Chhaya.’” Later on someone uses “the Tikkoun motions” to summon them, as well as the Chhaya chant which goes: “Throg Chhaya thrugga—kad’sh Chhaya… Yin Chhaya”, etc. This is apparently part of the Chhaya Ritual of which we read in “The Hunt” and “Hydra.” Note the vocable “kad’sh”, recalling the chant fragment in “The Salem Horror”: “Ya na kadishtu nilgh’ri….” Here is a reference to the Hebrew word “kadesh”, which means “holy.” Another bit of Kabbalah influence.

Henry Kuttner’s own private corner of the Cthulhu Mythos was, then, apparently derived in about equal measure from Lovecraft, Bloch, Zoroastrianism, and Theosophy. But of course there were some original contributions of his own, and they form the real center of his Mythos. And of this center the Book of Iod forms the nucleus. Lovecraft was intrigued (or perhaps pretended to be) as soon as he heard Kuttner’s title: ‘“The Book of Iod’ surely sounds promising in prospect.” (letter of March 12, 1936).

“Some time I’ll quote darkly from your ‘Book of Iod’—which I presume either antedates the human race like the Eltdown shards and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, or repeats the most hellish secrets learnt by early man in the fashion of the Book of Eibon, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the dreaded and abhorred Al Azif or Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” (February 16,1936)

“This must be the [unintelligible pseudo-script] mentioned on the seventh Eltdown Shard— & may very possibly be the ‘volume that cannot be’ hinted at in the Necronomicon (ix, 21—p. 598 of the black-letter German copy (in Latin) in the library of Miskatonic University). Some day I must bring pressure to bear & borrow that Negus translation (into Latin, I presume) in the Huntington Library.” (April 16, 1936)

But Kuttner’s Book of Iod actually made its first appearance exactly three years later in “Bells of Horror” (Strange Stories, April 1939), published under the pseudonym Keith Hammond. Until then he had been satisfied sticking to Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (“The Invaders”) or Lovecraft’s Necronomicon (“The Salem Horror”). The very same month, this time in Weird Tales (“Hydra”), two other occult titles made their debut: the Elder Key, of which we are told nothing else, and the Book of Karnak, which seems to have an Egyptian provenance but may not. We can trace an evolution of this term from the early Dunsanian tales “The Eater of Souls” and “The Jest of Droom Avista”, where we find a place name “Yarnak”, on through “The Salem Horror”, where we hear the word “k’yarnak” as part of a magical incantation, and finally to “Hydra”, where we read of the Book of Karnak. Still, once he had replaced the “Y” with a “K”, it is hard not to believe he didn’t have the occult mysteries of Egypt in mind (though he never once mentions Nyarlathotep).

I have already called attention to the fact that Kuttner made little use of Lovecraft’s own monster deities. Two exceptions are Azathoth, who figures largely in “Hydra”, and Dagon with his deep ones, who are recognizable in “Spawn of Dagon.” In “The Secret of Kralitz” there is a single reference to “leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth.” Kuttner drops this hint, never to pick it up again, but we must wonder if here we do not perhaps discover the origin of August Derleth’s later categorization of Yog-Sothoth as an earth elemental. Certainly nothing in Lovecraft suggests it.

Naturally, Kuttner paid the most attention to his own inventions. Of these the first was Vorvadoss, a being whose cult is restricted to the king (Sindara) of Bel Yarnak. He appears as a dust-devil in the sand in “The Eater of Souls”, where he gives the king advice on how to vanquish the Eater, a local troll who dwells in the Grey Gulf ofYarnak. In “The Invaders” he is hailed by mortals as “Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak! The Troubler of the Sands! Thou Who waiteth in the Outer Dark, Kindler of the Flame.” He even seems to have borrowed an appellation from the Eater of Souls, as he is now called “Vorvadoss of the Grey Gulf of Yamak.” Where did Kuttner get the name “Vorvadoss”? Who knows? But I wonder if he just twisted “Barbados” a bit.

Nyogtha (the Thing that should not be, the Black God of Madness), from “The Salem Horror”, is the best known of the Kuttnerian Old Ones. He is made “brother of the old ones” in Kuttner’s Necronomicon passage, just as Cthulhu himself is made merely “their cousin” in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon text in “The Dunwich Horror.” Nyogtha is said to burrow up from the depths of the earth in answer to an occult summons. Kuttner’s Nyogtha may have served as the inspiration for Brian Lumley’s Shudde-M’elle, the Burrower Beneath. But it is no less likely that Nyogtha was itself an assemblage of themes borrowed from Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark.” Both are inky clouds of blasphemy which the protagonist, a visiting writer, accidentally summons in an old building full of occult associations.

Iod appears personified as a deity in two stories, “The Invaders” and “The Hunt”, and he is dubbed “The Shining Pursuer”, “the Hunter of Souls.” It is a true Lovecraftian deity: “It was a blazing, cosmic horror spawned by an outlaw universe, an abysmal, prehuman entity drawn out of fathomless antiquity by elder magic. A great faceted eye” protrudes from “membranous”, “squamous, semitransparent flesh” from which extended “hideous, plant-like appendages” which “writhed blindly in the air, making hungry little sucking noises.”

Finally, in “Bells of Horror”, Kuttner introduces his demon of darkness, Zuchequon, the Dark Silent One. He is the herald and harbinger of eternal darkness and is scheduled to appear at the end of the age, though foolish mortals may awaken him early if they can conjure up exactly the deep tones that can rouse him. Again we seem to have a twin of Nyarlathotep as the avatar of darkness in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” Interestingly, whereas Kuttner explicitly associates Iod and Vorvadoss with Cthulhu and Yig as gods worshiped on primal Mu, here he just as explicitly excludes Zuchequon from the ranks of the Old Ones. He is not a star-spawned creature, but rather more of a cosmic principle. In this Zuchequon reminds us of Clark Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla, also disassociated from the Old Ones as having been here, native to the steaming earth, before the arrival of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth from the stars. Of course, neither statement stood in the way of Lin Carter numbering Zuchequon and Ubbo-Sathla among the Old Ones. In fact, he made the former the son of the latter! (See his story, “Dead of Night”, in this collection, as well as his “Zoth-Ommog” in Edward Paul Berglund, ed., Disciples of Cthulhu, 1976. The latter will be reprinted under the earlier title “The Horror in the Gallery” in my upcoming Chaosium Carter collection The Xothic Legend Cycle.)

Lin Carter’s great joy was to do for the Mythos exactly what he himself described Helena Petrovna Blavatsky doing: codifying fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory, and nonsense into a grand system. (For a complete treatment of Carter’s Mythos architectonics, see the chapter “The Statement of Lin Carter” in my book Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds, Borgo Press). What is surprising is that he seems never to have noticed the existence of several of the Kuttner Mythos items mentioned here, taking note in his various Mythos glossaries and theogonies of only Nyogtha, “Zulchequon”, and the Book of Iod.

The present volume is in a sense part of Lin Carter’s championing of the Kuttner Mythos legacy. The Book of lod (it was Lin’s idea to call a Kuttner collection that) would have been the second in his series of Lin Carter Fantasy Selections from Zebra Books, the first being the original edition of Robert Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (also resurrected, as the second volume in the present Chaosium fiction series). Indeed, Lin wanted to assemble collections of the Mythos work of each major Lovecraft Circle member. Not a bad idea.






    

Robert M. Price









The Secret of Kralitz

by Henry Kuttner


This eerie tale of an afterlife is surprisingly close in general conception to Lovecraft’s own sequence of Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets XVI, XVII, and XVIII, “The 'Window", “A Memory", and “The Gardens of Yin”, in which a narrator also penetrates the secret of his ancestral manor and enters into an unexpected afterlife populated by lost forebears. Yet surely the similarity is fortuitous. Lovecraft was still at work on the sonnet cycle when Kuttner alerted him to expect the manuscript of “The Secret of Kralitz.” (Could HPL have been influenced by young Kuttner in this instance?) Lovecraft judged Kuttner’s tale a success:

“In spite of the suggestion of youthful overcolouring in spots I like it immensely. It had the Gothic atmosphere touch that I supremely relish—the one intangible element that makes a weird story really potent & fascinating in my eyes. It is a pity that most ‘weird' tales lose this fundamental quality in an effort to be modern and sprightly.” (October 15, 1936)

One wonders what Lovecraft would have thought of the increasingly modem tone of the stories Kuttner published in Strange Stories and Weird Tales after HPL’s death. He may have had some tall explaining to do on that day in 1958 when he passed into the gloomy Valhalla of horror authors to meet HPL.

First publication: Weird Tales, October 1936.

* * *


I awoke from profound sleep to find two black-swathed forms standing silently beside me, their faces pale blurs in the gloom. As I blinked to clear my sleep-dimmed eyes, one of them beckoned impatiently, and suddenly I realized the purpose of this midnight summons. For years I had been expecting it, ever since my father, the Baron Kralitz, had revealed to me the secret and the curse that hung over our ancient house. And so, without a word, I rose and followed my guides as they led me along the gloomy corridors of the castle that had been my home since birth.

As I proceeded there rose up in my mind the stern face of my father, and in my ears rang his solemn words as he told me of the legendary curse of the House of Kralitz, the unknown secret that was imparted to the eldest son of each generation — at a certain time.

“When?” I had asked my father as he lay on his death-bed, fighting back the approach of dissolution.

“When you are able to understand,” he had told me, watching my face intently from beneath his tufted white brows. “Some are told the secret sooner than others. Since the first Baron Kralitz the secret has been handed down—”

He clutched at his breast and paused. It was fully five minutes before he had gathered his strength to speak again in his rolling, powerful voice. No gasping, death-bed confessions for the Baron Kralitz!

He said at last, “You have seen the ruins of the old monastery near the village, Franz. The first Baron burnt it and put the monks to the sword. The Abbot interfered too often with the Baron’s whims. A girl sought shelter and the Abbot refused to give her up at the Baron’s demand. His patience was at an end — you know the tales they still tell about him.

“He slew the Abbot, burned the monastery, and took the girl. Before he died the Abbot cursed his slayer, and cursed his sons for unborn generations. And it is the nature of this curse that is the secret of our house.

“I may not tell you what the curse is. Do not seek to discover it before it is revealed to you. Wait patiently, and in due time you will be taken by the warders of the secret down the stairway to the underground cavern. And then you will learn the secret of Kralitz.”

As the last word passed my father’s lips he died, his stern face still set in its harsh lines.

* * *


Deep in my memories, I had not noticed our path, but now the dark forms of my guides paused beside a gap in the stone flagging, where a stairway which I had never seen during my wanderings about the castle led into subterranean depths. Down this stairway I was conducted, and presently I came to realize that there was light of a sort — a dim, phosphorescent radiance that came from no recognizable source, and seemed to be less actual light than the accustoming of my eyes to the near-darkness.

I went down for a long time. The stairway turned and twisted in the rock, and the bobbing forms ahead were my only relief from the monotony of the interminable descent. And at last, deep underground, the long stairway ended, and I gazed over the shoulders of my guides at the great door that barred my path. It was roughly chiseled from the solid stone, and upon it were curious and strangely disquieting carvings, symbols which I did not recognize. It swung open, and I passed through and paused, staring about me through a gray sea of mist.

I stood upon a gentle slope that fell away into the fog-hidden distance, from which came a pandemonium of muffled bellowing and high-pitched, shrill squeakings vaguely akin to obscene laughter. Dark, half-glimpsed shapes swam into sight through the haze and disappeared again, and great vague shadows swept overhead on silent wings. Almost beside me was a long rectangular table of stone, and at this table two score of men were seated, watching me from eyes that gleamed dully out of deep sockets. My two guides silently took their places among them.

And suddenly the thick fog began to lift. It was swept raggedly away on the breath of a chill wind. The far dim reaches of the cavern were revealed as the mist swiftly dissipated, and I stood silent in the grip of a mighty fear, and, strangely, an equally potent, unaccountable thrill of delight. A part of my mind seemed to ask, “What horror is this?” And another part whispered, “You know this place!”

But I could never have seen it before. If I had realized what lay far beneath the castle I could never have slept at night for the fear that would have obsessed me. For, standing silent with conflicting tides of horror and ecstasy racing through me, I saw the weird inhabitants of the underground world.

Demons, monsters, unnamable things! Nightmare colossi strode bellowing through the murk, and amorphous gray things like giant slugs walked upright on stumpy legs. Creatures of shapeless soft pulp, beings with flame-shot eyes scattered over their misshapen bodies like fabled Argus, writhed and twisted there in the evil glow. Winged things that were not bats swooped and fluttered in the tenebrous air, whispering sibilantly — whispering in human voices.

Far away at the bottom of the slope I could see the chill gleam of water, a hidden, sunless sea. Shapes mercifully almost hidden by distance and the semi-darkness sported and cried, troubling the surface of the lake, the size of which I could only conjecture. And a flapping thing whose leathery wings stretched like a tent above my head swooped and hovered for a moment, staring with flaming eyes, and then darted off and was lost in the gloom.

And all the while, as I shuddered with fear and loathing, within me was this evil glee — this voice which whispered, “You know this place! You belong here! Is it not good to be home?”

I glanced behind me. The great door had swung silently shut, and escape was impossible. And then pride came to my aid. I was a Kralitz. And a Kralitz would not acknowledge fear in the face of the devil himself!

* * *


I stepped forward and confronted the warders, who were still seated regarding me intently from eyes in which a smoldering fire seemed to burn. Fighting down an insane dread that I might find before me an array of fleshless skeletons, I stepped to the head of the table, where there was a sort of crude throne, and peered closely at the silent figure on my right.

It was no bare skull at which I gazed, but a bearded, deadly-pale face. The curved, voluptuous lips were crimson, looking almost rouged, and the dull eyes stared through me bleakly. Inhuman agony had etched itself in deep lines on the white face, and gnawing anguish smoldered in the sunken eyes. I cannot hope to convey the utter strangeness, the atmosphere of unearthliness that surrounded him, almost as palpable as the fetid tomb-stench that welled from his dark garments. He waved a black-swathed arm to the vacant seat at the head of the table, and I sat down.

This nightmare sense of unreality! I seemed to be in a dream, with a hidden part of my mind slowly waking from sleep into evil life to take command of my faculties. The table was set with old-fashioned goblets and trenchers such as had not been used for hundreds of years. There was meat on the trenchers, and red liquor in the jeweled goblets. A heady, overpowering fragrance swam up into my nostrils, mixed with the grave-smell of my companions and the musty odor of a dank and sunless place.

Every white face was turned to me, faces that seemed oddly familiar, although I did not know why. Each face was alike in its blood-red, sensual lips and its expression of gnawing agony, and burning black eyes like the abysmal pits of Tartarus stared at me until I felt the short hairs stir on my neck. But — I was a Kralitz! I stood up and said boldly in archaic German that somehow came familiarly from my lips, “I am Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz. What do you want with me?”

A murmur of approval went around the long table. There was a stir. From the foot of the board a huge bearded man arose, a man with a frightful scar that made the left side of his face a horror of healed white tissue. Again the odd thrill of familiarity ran through me; I had seen that face before, and vaguely I remembered looking at it through dim twilight.

The man spoke in the old guttural German. “We greet you, Franz, Baron Kralitz. We greet you and pledge you, Franz — and we pledge the House of Kralitz!”

With that he caught up the goblet before him and held it high. All along the long table the black-swathed ones arose, and each held high his jeweled cup, and pledged me. They drank deeply, savoring the liquor, and I made the bow custom demanded. I said, in words that sprang almost unbidden from my mouth:

“I greet you, who are the warders of the secret of Kralitz, and I pledge you in return.”

All about me, to the farthermost reaches of the dim cavern, a hush fell, and the bellows and howlings, and the insane tittering of the flying things, were no longer heard. My companions leaned expectantly toward me. Standing alone at the head of the board, I raised my goblet and drank. The liquor was heady, exhilarating, with a faintly brackish flavor.

And abruptly I knew why the pain-racked, ruined face of my companion had seemed familiar; I had seen it often among the portraits of my ancestors, the frowning, disfigured visage of the founder of the House of Kralitz that glared down from the gloom of the great hall. In that fierce white light of revelation I knew my companions for what they were; I recognized them, one by one, remembering their canvas counterparts. But there was a change! Like an impalpable veil, the stamp of ineradicable evil lay on the tortured faces of my hosts, strangely altering their features, so that I could not always be sure I recognized them. One pale, sardonic face reminded me of my father, but I could not be sure, so monstrously altered was its expression.

I was dining with my ancestors — the House of Kralitz!

My cup was still held high, and I drained it, for somehow the grim revelation was not entirely unexpected. A strange glow thrilled through my veins, and I laughed aloud for the evil delight that was in me. The others laughed too, a deep-throated merriment like the barking of wolves — tortured laughter from men stretched on the rack, mad laughter in hell! And all through the hazy cavern came the clamor of the devil’s brood! Great figures that towered many spans high rocked with thundering glee, and the flying things tittered slyly overhead. And out over the vast expanse swept the wave of frightful mirth, until the half-seen things in the black waters sent out bellows that tore at my eardrums, and the unseen roof far overhead sent back roaring echoes of the clamor.

And I laughed with them, laughed insanely, until I dropped exhausted into my seat and watched the scarred man at the other end of the table as he spoke.

“You are worthy to be of our company, and worthy to eat at the same board. We have pledged each other, and you are one of us; we shall eat together.”

And we fell to, tearing like hungry beasts at the succulent white meat in the jeweled trenchers. Strange monsters served us, and at a chill touch on my arm I turned to find a dreadful crimson thing, like a skinned child, refilling my goblet. Strange, strange and utterly blasphemous was our feast. We shouted and laughed and fed there in the hazy light, while all around us thundered the evil horde. There was hell beneath Castle Kralitz, and it held high carnival this night.

* * *


Presently we sang a fierce drinking-song, swinging the deep cups back and forth in rhythm with our shouted chant. It was an archaic song, but the obsolete words were no handicap, for I mouthed them as though they had been learned at my mother’s knee. And at the thought of my mother a trembling and a weakness ran through me abruptly, but I banished it with a draft of the heady liquor.

Long, long we shouted and sang and caroused there in the great cavern, and after a time we arose together and trooped to where a narrow, high-arched bridge spanned the tenebrous waters of the lake. But I may not speak of what was at the other end of the bridge, nor of the unnamable things that I saw — and did! I learned of the fungoid, inhuman beings that dwell on far cold Yuggoth, of the cyclopean shapes that attend unsleeping Cthulhu in his submarine city, of the strange pleasures that the followers of leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth may possess, and I learned, too, of the unbelievable manner in which Iod, the Source, is worshipped beyond the outer galaxies. I plumbed the blackest pits of hell and came back — laughing. I was one with the rest of those dark warders, and I joined them in the saturnalia of horror until the scarred man spoke to us again.

“Our time grows short,” he said, his scarred and bearded white face like a gargoyle’s in the half-light. “We must depart soon. But you are a true Kralitz, Franz, and we shall meet again, and feast again, and make merry for longer than you think. One last pledge!”

I gave it to him. “To the House of Kralitz! May it never fall!”

And with an exultant shout we drained the pungent dregs of the liquor.

Then a strange lassitude fell upon me. With the others I turned my back on the cavern and the shapes that pranced and bellowed and crawled there, and I went up through the carved stone portal. We filed up the stairs, up and up, endlessly, until at last we emerged through the gaping hole in the stone flags and proceeded, a dark, silent company, back through those interminable corridors. The surroundings began to grow strangely familiar, and suddenly I recognized them.

We were in the great burial vaults below the castle, where the Barons Kralitz were ceremoniously entombed. Each Baron had been placed in his stone casket in his separate chamber, and each chamber lay, like beads on a necklace, adjacent to the next, so that we proceeded from the farthermost tombs of the early Barons Kralitz toward the unoccupied vaults. By immemorial custom, each tomb lay bare, an empty mausoleum, until the time had come for its use, when the great stone coffin, with the memorial inscription carved upon it, would be carried to its place. It was fitting, indeed, for the secret of Kralitz to be hidden here.

Abruptly I realized that I was alone, save for the bearded man with the disfiguring scar. The others had vanished, and, deep in my thoughts, I had not missed them. My companion stretched out his black-swathed arm and halted my progress, and I turned to him questioningly. He said in his sonorous voice, “I must leave you now. I must go back to my own place.” And he pointed to the way whence we had come.

I nodded, for I had already recognized my companions for what they were. I knew that each Baron Kralitz had been laid in his tomb, only to arise as a monstrous thing neither dead nor alive, to descend into the cavern below and take part in the evil saturnalia. I realized, too, that with the approach of dawn they had returned to their stone coffins, to lie in a death-like trance until the setting sun should bring brief liberation. My own occult studies had enabled me to recognize these dreadful manifestations.

I bowed to my companion and would have proceeded on my way to the upper parts of the castle, but he barred my path. He shook his head slowly, his scar hideous in the phosphorescent gloom.

I said, “May I not go yet?”

He stared at me with tortured, smoldering eyes that had looked into hell itself, and he pointed to what lay beside me, and in a flash of nightmare realization I knew the secret of the curse of Kralitz. There came to me the knowledge that made my brain a frightful thing in which shapes of darkness would ever swirl and scream; the dreadful comprehension of when each Baron Kralitz was initiated into the brotherhood of blood. I knew — I knew — that no coffin had ever been placed unoccupied in the tombs, and I read upon the stone sarcophagus at my feet the inscription that made my doom known to me — my own name, “Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz.”




The Eater of Souls

by Henry Kuttner


Of this brief tale, Lovecraft was more restrained in his praise: “It has some good touches.” Ouch. As a writer of Dunsanian pastiches himself Lovecraft might have had a good bit more to say of this one had he liked it—or if he disliked it!

Lin Carter followed both Kuttner and Lovecraft in writing his own Dunsany pastiches, his Simrana tales. One of these, “The Gods ofNiom Parma”, is perhaps his best work. At any rate, let it be noted that the formula introduction of all the Simrana tales, “In Simrana they tell the tale of…”, derives neither from Lovecraft nor from Dunsany, but rather from Kuttner’s two tales of Bel Yarnak.

First publication: Weird Tales, January 1937. 

* * *


They tell it in Bel Yarnak, in a language not of Earth, that a malignant and terrible being once dwelt in that incredible abyss named the Gray Gulf of Yarnak. Not on earth, nor on any planet that spins about any star in the skies we know, is Bel Yarnak; but beyond Betelgeuse, beyond the Giant Stars, on a green and joyous world still in its lusty youth are the towers and silver minarets of this city. Nor are the dwellers in Bel Yarnak anthropoid nor in any way man-like; yet there are fires during the long warm nights in curious hearths, and wherever in this universe there are fires there will be tales told about them, and breathless listeners to bring contentment to the heart of the teller of tales. The Sindara rules benignantly over Bel Yarnak; yet in the old days fear and doom lay like a shroud over the land, and in the Gray Gulf of Yarnak a brooding horror dwelt loathsomely. And a strange enchantment chilled the skies and hid the triple moons behind a darkened pall.




For a being had come to glut its evil hunger in the land, and those who dwelt in Bel Yarnak called it the Eater of Souls. In nowise could this being be described, for none had seen it save under circumstances which precluded the possibility of return. Yet in the gulf it brooded, and when its hunger stirred it would send forth a soundless summons, so that in tavern and temple, by fireside and in the blackness of the night some would rise slowly, with a passionless look of death upon their features, and would depart from Bel Yarnak toward the Gray Gulf. Nor would they ever return. It was said that the thing in the gulf was half a demon and half a god, and that the souls of those whom it slew served it eternally, fulfilling strange missions in the icy wastes between the stars. This being had come from the dark sun, the hydromancers said, where it had been conceived by an unholy alliance between those timeless Ancients who filter strangely between the universes and a Black Shining One of unknown origin, the necromancers said other things, But they hated the hydromancers, who were powerful then, and their rune-casting was generally discredited. Yet the Sindara listened to both schools of mages, and pondered upon his throne of chalcedony, and presently determined to set forth voluntarily to the Great Gulf of Yarnak, which was reputed to be bottomless.

The necromancers gave the Sindara curious implements made of the bones of the dead, and the hydromancers gave him intricately twisted transparent tubes of crystal, which would be useful in battling the Eater of Souls. Thereafter the necromancers and the hydromancers squatted on their haunches in the city gate and howled dismally as the Sindara rode westward on his gorlak, that fleet but repugnantly shaped reptile. After a time the Sindara discarded both the weapons of the hydromancers and the necromancers, for he was a worshipper of Vorvadoss, as had been each Sindara in his time. None might worship Vorvadoss save the Sindara of Bel Yarnak, for such is the god’s command; and presently the Sindara dismounted from his gorlak and prayed fervently to Vorvadoss. For a time there was no response.

Then the sands were troubled, and a whirling and dancing of mist-motes blinded the Sindara. Out of the maelstrom the god spoke thinly, and his voice was like the tinkling of countless tiny crystal goblets.

“Thou goest to doom,” Vorvadoss said ominously. “But thy son sleeps in Bel Yarnak, and I shall have a worshipper when thou art vanished. Go therefore fearlessly, since god cannot conquer god, but only man who created him.”

* * *


Speaking thus cryptically Vorvadoss withdrew, and the Sindara, after pondering, continued his journey. In time he came to that incredible abyss from which men say the nearer moon was born, and at its edge he fell prone and lay sick and shuddering, peering down into mist-shrouded emptiness. For a cold wind blew up from the gulf, and it seemed to have no bottom. Looming far in the distance he could just discern the further brink.

Clambering up the rough stones came he whom the Sindara had set out to find; he came swiftly, making use of his multiple appendages to lift himself. He was white and hairy and appallingly hideous, but his misshapen head came only to the Sindara’s waist, although in girth his spidery limbs rendered a shocking illusion of hugeness. In his wake came the souls he had taken for his own; they were a plaintive whispering and stirring in the air, swooping and moaning and sighing for lost Nirvana. The Sindara drew his blade and struck at his enemy.

Of that battle sagas are still sung, for it raged along the brink for a timeless interval of eternity. In the end the Sindara was hacked and bleeding and spent, and his opponent was untouched and chuckling loathsomely. Then the demon prepared for his meal.

Into the Sindara’s mind came a whisper, the thin calling of Vorvadoss. He said: “There are many kinds of flesh in the universes, and other compounds which are not flesh. Thus doth the Eater of Souls feed.” And he told the Sindara of the incredible manner of that feeding, of the fusing of two beings, of the absorption of the lesser, and of the emergence therefrom of an augmented half-god, while the uncaged soul flew moaning in the train of those who served the being. Into the Sindara’s mind came knowledge and with it a grim resolve. He flung wide his arms and welcomed the ghastly embrace, for Vorvadoss had also spoken of the manner in which the doom might be lifted.

The thing sprang to meet him, and an intolerable agony ground frightfully within the Sindara’s bone and flesh; the citadel of his being rocked, and his soul cowered shrieking in its chamber. There on the edge of the Gray Gulf of Yarnak a monstrous fusion took place, a metamorphosis and a comingling that was blasphemous and horrible beyond all imagining. As a thing disappears in quicksand, so the being and the Sindara melted into each other’s body.

Yet even in that blinding agony a sharper pain came to the Sindara as he saw across the plain the beauty of this land over which he had ruled. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful as this green and joyous land of his, and a pain was in his heart, a sense of empty loss and an aching void which could not ever be filled. And he looked away to the black evil eyes of the Eater of Souls that were but inches away from his own, and he looked beyond the being to where cold emptiness lay gray and horrible. There were tears in his eyes and a gnawing ache in his heart for the silver minarets and towers of Bel Yarnak, that had lain naked and beautiful beneath the glowing light of the triple moons, for he should never see that place anymore.

He turned his head again, and for the last time, blinded with his tears and with his doom upon him. As he leaped forward he heard a despairing shriek, and then half-god and man were spinning dizzily downward, seeing the precipice rushing up past them. For Vorvadoss had said that thus, and only thus, could the spell be lifted.

And the cliff wall curved inward as it swept down, so presently it receded into the dim gray haze, and the Sindara fell in empty mist and into final unstirring darkness.




The Salem Horror

by Henry Kuttner


This story is the best known of Kuttnet’s Mythos pastiches, but for this honor it has paid the price of carrying with it a puzzling and ludicrous typographical error. In the Arkham House Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and all reprints based on that text we read that the old witch’s idol was a “worm-eating image.” Neat trick. Of course, Kuttner wrote “worm-eaten image. ”

Lovecraft had a lot to say about this one:

“The Salem Horror gave me much pleasure, & I certainly think it is a great deal better than much of the stuff which Wright continually prints. {Had Wright rejected a first draft of the tale? It sounds like HPL is commiserating.} My own criticism would be that the tale is a little vaguely motivated. Just what started the major phenomena at the particular time they did start? Surely Carson was not the first to occupy the old witch’s room—& yet one can hardly imagine a repetition of this sort of phenomena every time someone lights a fire in the fireplace. In stories where nameless entities are evoked from the abyss it is always well to attribute their summoning to some specific act or circumstance which has never occurred before (or has never occurred without a similar result), yet whose occurrence seems to come naturally & inevitably as a result of preceding events. I’ve largely forgotten my own “Witch House”, but I think I had my student-victim dabbling in mathematico-magical formulae of a rare kind, which eventually reached a dangerous parallel with those of the bygone witch—hence placed the two in rapport…. Another criticism I’d make is that the colour is laid on too thickly—strange things come too rapidly in succession, & with too great abruptness…. Another point—you need to give Salem a little more research to make the setting ring true. ” (March 12, 1936)

It is clear that Lovecraft recognized Kuttner1s tale as a rehash of his own “The Dreams in the Witch House”, but he didn’t seem to mind, any more than he ever acknowledged the dependence of Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm” on his own “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Though Lovecraft pointed out the anachronisms in Kuttner’s descriptions of Salem (Kuttner dutifully corrected them), he let another go without comment: in his Necronomicon passage Kuttner has Abdul Alhazred make a passing reference to the Great Khan of the Mongols—who lived several centuries after Abdul Alhazred! (In my Critical Commentary on the Necronomicon I resort to the expedient of excising the whole passage as a later interpolation into the text of Alhazred.)

First publication: Weird Tales, May 1937.

* * *


When Carson first noticed the sounds in his cellar, he ascribed them to the rats. Later he began to hear the tales which were whispered by the superstitious Polish mill workers in Derby Street regarding the first occupant of the ancient house, Abigail Prinn. There was none living today who could remember the diabolical old hag, but the morbid legends which thrive in the “witch district” of Salem like rank weeds on a neglected grave gave disturbing particulars of her activities, and were unpleasantly explicit regarding the detestable sacrifices she was known to have made to a worm-eaten, crescent-horned image of dubious origin. The oldsters still muttered of Abbie Prinn and her monstrous boasts that she was high priestess of a fearfully potent god which dwelt deep in the hills. Indeed, it was the old witch’s reckless boasting which had led to her abrupt and mysterious death in 1692, about the time of the famous hangings on Gallows Hill. No one liked to talk about it, but occasionally a toothless crone would mumble fearfully that the flames could not burn her, for her whole body had taken on the peculiar anesthesia of her witch-mark.

Abbie Prinn and her anomalous statue had long since vanished, but it was still difficult to find tenants for her decrepit, gabled house, with its overhanging second story and curious diamond-paned casement windows. The house’s evil notoriety had spread throughout Salem. Nothing had actually happened there of recent years which might give rise to the inexplicable tales, but those who rented the house had a habit of moving out hastily, generally with vague and unsatisfactory explanations connected with the rats.

And it was a rat which led Carson to the Witch Room. The squealing and muffled pattering within the rotting walls had disturbed Carson more than once during the nights of his first week in the house, which he had rented to obtain the solitude that would enable him to complete a novel for which his publishers had been asking — another light romance to add to Carson’s long string of popular successes. But it was not until sometime later that he began to entertain certain wildly fantastic surmises regarding the intelligence of the rat that scurried from under his feet in the dark hallway one evening.

The house had been wired for electricity, but the bulb in the hall was small and gave a dim light. The rat was a misshapen, black shadow as it darted a few feet away and paused, apparently watching him.

At another time Carson might have dismissed the animal with a threatening gesture and returned to his work. But the traffic on Derby Street had been unusually noisy, and he had found it difficult to concentrate upon his novel. His nerves, for no apparent reason, were taut; and somehow it seemed that the rat, watching just beyond his reach, was eyeing him with sardonic amusement.

Smiling at the conceit, he took a few steps toward the rat, and it rushed away to the cellar door, which he saw with surprise was ajar. He must have neglected to close it the last time he had been in the cellar, although he generally took care to keep the doors shut, for the ancient house was drafty. The rat waited in the doorway.

Unreasonably annoyed, Carson hurried forward, sending the rat scurrying down the stairway. He switched on the cellar light and observed the rat in a corner. It watched him keenly out of glittering little eyes.

As he descended the stairs he could not help feeling that he was acting like a fool. But his work had been tiring, and subconsciously he welcomed any interruption. He moved across the cellar to the rat, seeing with astonishment that the creature remained unmoving, staring at him. A strange feeling of uneasiness began to grow within him. The rat was acting abnormally, he felt; and the unwinking gaze of its cold shoe-button eyes was somehow disturbing.

Then he laughed to himself, for the rat had suddenly whisked aside and disappeared into a little hole in the cellar wall. Idly he scratched a cross with his toe in the dirt before the burrow, deciding that he would set a trap there in the morning.

The rat’s snout and ragged whiskers protruded cautiously. It moved forward and then hesitated, drew back. Then the animal began to act in a singular and unaccountable manner — almost as though it were dancing, Carson thought. It moved tentatively forward, retreated again. It would give a little dart forward and be brought up short, then leap back hastily, as though — the simile flashed into Carson’s mind — a snake were coiled before the burrow, alert to prevent the rat’s escape. But there was nothing there save the little cross Carson had scratched in the dust.

No doubt it was Carson himself who blocked the rat’s escape, for he was standing within a few feet of the burrow. He moved forward, and the animal hurriedly retreated out of sight.

His interest piqued, Carson found a stick and poked it exploringly into the hole. As he did so his eye, close to the wall, detected something strange about the stone slab just above the rat burrow. A quick glance around its edge confirmed his suspicion. The slab was apparently movable.

Carson examined it closely, noticed a depression on its edge which would afford a handhold. His fingers fitted easily into the groove, and he pulled tentatively. The stone moved a trifle and stopped. He pulled harder, and with a sprinkling of dry earth the slab swung away from the wall as though on hinges.

A black rectangle, shoulder-high, gaped in the wall. From its depths a musty, unpleasant stench of dead air welled out, and involuntarily Carson retreated a step. Suddenly he remembered the monstrous tales of Abbie Prinn and the hideous secrets she was supposed to have kept hidden in her house. Had he stumbled upon some hidden retreat of the long-dead witch?

Before entering the dark gap he took the precaution of obtaining a flashlight from upstairs. Then he cautiously bent his head and stepped into the narrow, evil-smelling passage, sending the flashlight’s beam probing out before him.

He was in a narrow tunnel, scarcely higher than his head, and walled and paved with stone slabs. It ran straight ahead for perhaps fifteen feet, and then broadened out into a roomy chamber. As Carson stepped into the underground room — no doubt a hidden retreat of Abbie Prinn’s, a hiding-place, he thought, which nevertheless could not save her on the day the fright-crazed mob had come raging along Derby Street — he caught his breath in a gasp of amazement. The room was fantastic, astonishing.

It was the floor which held Carson’s gaze. The dull gray of the circular wall gave place here to a mosaic of varicolored stone, in which blues and greens and purples predominated — indeed, there were none of the warmer colors. There must have been thousands of bits of colored stone making up that pattern, for none was larger than a walnut. And the mosaic seemed to follow some definite pattern, unfamiliar to Carson; there were curves of purple and violet mingled with angled lines of green and blue, intertwining in fantastic arabesques. There were circles, triangles, a pentagram, and other, less familiar, figures. Most of the lines and figures radiated from a definite point: the center of the chamber, where there was a circular disk of dead black stone perhaps two feet in diameter.

It was very silent. The sounds of the cars that occasionally went past overhead in Derby Street could not be heard. In a shallow alcove in the wall Carson caught a glimpse of markings on the walls, and he moved slowly in that direction, the beam of his light traveling up and down the walls of the niche.

The marks, whatever they were, had been daubed upon the stone long ago, for what was left of the cryptic symbols was indecipherable. Carson saw several partly effaced hieroglyphics which reminded him of Arabic, but he could not be sure. On the floor of the alcove was a corroded metal disk about eight feet in diameter, and Carson received the distinct impression that it was movable. But there seemed no way to lift it.

He became conscious that he was standing in the exact center of the chamber, in the circle of black stone where the odd design centered. Again he noticed the utter silence. On an impulse he clicked off the ray of his flashlight. Instantly he was in dead blackness.

At that moment a curious idea entered his mind. He pictured himself at the bottom of a pit, and from above a flood was descending, pouring down the shaft to engulf him. So strong was this impression that he actually fancied he could hear a muffled thundering, the roar of the cataract. Then, oddly shaken, he clicked on the light, glanced around swiftly. The drumming, of course, was the pounding of his blood, made audible in the complete silence — a familiar phenomenon. But, if the place was so still—

The thought leaped into his mind, as though suddenly thrust into his consciousness. This would be an ideal place to work. He could have the place wired for electricity, have a table and chair brought down, use an electric fan if necessary — although the musty odor he had first noticed seemed to have disappeared completely. He moved to the tunnel mouth, and as he stepped from the room he felt an inexplicable relaxation of his muscles, although he had not realized that they had been contracted. He ascribed it to nervousness, and went upstairs to brew black coffee and write to his landlord in Boston about his discovery.

* * *


The visitor stared curiously about the hallway after Carson had opened the door, nodding to himself as though with satisfaction. He was a lean, tall figure of a man, with thick steel-gray eyebrows overhanging keen gray eyes. His face, although strongly marked and gaunt, was unwrinkled.

“About the Witch Room, I suppose?” Carson said ungraciously. His landlord had talked, and for the last week he had been unwillingly entertaining antiquaries and occultists anxious to glimpse the secret chamber in which Abbie Prinn had mumbled her spells. Carson’s annoyance had grown, and he had considered moving to a quieter place; but his inherent stubbornness had made him stay on, determined to finish his novel in spite of interruptions. Now, eyeing his guest coldly, he said, “I’m sorry, but it’s not on exhibition anymore.”

The other looked startled, but almost immediately a gleam of comprehension came into his eyes. He extracted a card and offered it to Carson.

“Michael Leigh… occultist, eh?” Carson repeated. He drew a deep breath. The occultists, he had found, were the worst, with their dark hints of nameless things and their profound interest in the mosaic pattern on the floor of the Witch Room. “I’m sorry, Mr. Leigh, but — I’m really quite busy. You’ll excuse me.”

Ungraciously he turned back to the door.

“Just a moment,” Leigh said swiftly.

Before Carson could protest he had caught the writer by the shoulders and was peering closely into his eyes. Startled, Carson drew back, but not before he had seen an extraordinary expression of mingled apprehension and satisfaction appear on Leigh’s gaunt face. It was as though the occultist had seen something unpleasant — but not unexpected.

“What’s the idea?” Carson asked harshly. “I’m not accustomed—”

“I’m very sorry,” Leigh said. His voice was deep, pleasant. “I must apologize. I thought — well, again I apologize. I’m rather excited, I’m afraid. You see, I’ve come from San Francisco to see this Witch Room of yours. Would you really mind letting me see it? I should be glad to pay any sum—”

Carson made a deprecatory gesture.

“No,” he said, feeling a perverse liking for this man growing within him — his well-modulated, pleasant voice, his powerful face, his magnetic personality. “No, I merely want a little peace — you have no idea how I’ve been bothered,” he went on, vaguely surprised to find himself speaking apologetically. “It’s a frightful nuisance. I almost wish I’d never found the room.”

Leigh leaned forward anxiously. “May I see it? It means a great deal to me — I’m vitally interested in these things. I promise not to take up more than ten minutes of your time.”

Carson hesitated, then assented. As he led his guest into the cellar he found himself telling the circumstances of his discovery of the Witch Room. Leigh listened intently, occasionally interrupting with questions.

“The rat — did you see what became of it?” he asked.

Carson looked bemused. “Why, no. I suppose it hid in its burrow. Why?”

“One never knows,” Leigh said cryptically as they came into the Witch Room.

Carson switched on the light. He had had an electrical extension installed, and there were a few chairs and a table, but otherwise, the chamber was unchanged. Carson watched the occultist’s face, and with surprise saw it become grim, almost angry.

Leigh strode to the center of the room, staring at the chair that stood on the black circle of stone.

“You work here?” he asked slowly.

“Yes. It’s quiet — I found I couldn’t work upstairs. Too noisy. But this is ideal — somehow I find it very easy to write here. My mind feels” — he hesitated — “free; that is, disassociated with other things. It’s quite an unusual feeling.”

Leigh nodded as though Carson’s words had confirmed some idea in his own mind. He turned toward the alcove and the metal disk in the floor. Carson followed him. The occultist moved close to the wall, tracing out the faded symbols with a long forefinger. He muttered something under his breath — words that sounded like gibberish to Carson.

“Nyogtha… k’yarnak…”

He swung about, his face grim and pale. “I’ve seen enough,” he said softly. “Shall we go?” Surprised, Carson nodded and led the way back into the cellar.

Upstairs Leigh hesitated, as though finding it difficult to broach his subject. At length he asked, “Mr. Carson — would you mind telling me if you have had any peculiar dreams lately.”

Carson stared at him, mirth dancing in his eyes. “Dreams?” he repeated. “Oh — I see. Well, Mr. Leigh, I may as well tell you that you can’t frighten me. Your compatriots — the other occultists I’ve entertained — have already tried it.”

Leigh raised his thick eyebrows. “Yes? Did they ask you whether you’d dreamed?”

“Several did — yes.”

“And you told them?”

“No.” Then as Leigh leaned back in his chair, a puzzled expression on his face, Carson went on slowly, “Although, really, I’m not quite sure.”

“You mean?”

“I think — I have a vague impression — that I have dreamed lately. But I can’t be sure. I can’t remember anything of the dream, you see. And — oh, very probably your brother occultists put the idea into my mind!”

“Perhaps,” Leigh said non-committally, getting up. He hesitated. “Mr. Carson, I’m going to ask you a rather presumptuous question. Is it necessary for you to live in this house?”

Carson sighed resignedly. “When I was first asked that question I explained that I wanted a quiet place to work on a novel, and that any quiet place would do. But it isn’t easy to find ’em. Now that I have this Witch Room, and I’m turning out my work so easily, I see no reason why I should move and perhaps upset my program. I’ll vacate this house when I finish my novel, and then you occultists can come in and turn it into a museum or do whatever you want with it. I don’t care. But until the novel is finished I intend to stay here.”

Leigh rubbed his chin. “Indeed. I can understand your point of view. But — is there no other place in the house where you can work?” He watched Carson’s face for a moment, and then went on swiftly.

“I don’t expect you to believe me. You are a materialist. Most people are. But there are a few of us who know that above and beyond what men call science there is a greater science that is built on laws and principles which to the average man would be almost incomprehensible. If you have read Machen you will remember that he speaks of the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter. It is possible to bridge that gulf. The Witch Room is such a bridge! Do you know what a whispering-gallery is?”

“Eh?” Carson said, staring. “But there’s no—”

“An analogy — merely an analogy. A man may whisper a word in gallery — or a cave — and if you are standing in a certain spot a hundred feet away you will hear that whisper, although someone ten feet away will not. It’s a simple trick of acoustics — bringing the sound to a focal point. And this principle can be applied to other things besides sound. To any wave impulse — even to thought!”

Carson tried to interrupt, but Leigh kept on.

“That black stone in the center of your Witch Room is one of those focal points. The design on the floor — when you sit on the black circle there you are abnormally sensitive to certain vibrations — certain thought commands — dangerously sensitive! Why do you suppose your mind is so clear when you are working there? A deception, a false feeling of lucidity — for you are merely an instrument, a microphone, tuned to pick up certain malign vibrations the nature of which you could not comprehend!”

Carson’s face was a study in amazement and incredulity. “But — you don’t mean you actually believe—”

Leigh drew back, the intensity fading from his eyes, leaving them grim and cold. “Very well. But I have studied the history of your Abigail Prinn. She, too, understood the super-science of which I speak. She used it for evil purposes — the black art, as it is called. I have read that she cursed Salem in the old days — and a witch’s curse can be a frightful thing. Will you—” He got up, gnawing at his lip. “Will you, at least, allow me to call on you tomorrow?”

Almost involuntarily Carson nodded. “But I’m afraid you’ll be wasting your time. I don’t believe — I mean, I have no—” He stumbled, at a loss for words.

“I merely wish to assure myself that you — oh, another thing. If you dream tonight, will you try to remember the dream? If you attempt to recapture it immediately after waking, it is often possible to recall it.”

“All right. If I dream—”

That night Carson dreamed. He awoke just before dawn with his heart racing furiously and a curious feeling of uneasiness. Within the walls and from below he could hear the furtive scurryings of the rats. He got out of bed hastily, shivering in the cold grayness of early morning. A wan moon still shone faintly in a paling sky.

Then he remembered Leigh’s words. He had dreamed — there was no question of that. But the content of his dream — that was another matter. He absolutely could not recall it to his mind, much as he tried, although there was a very vague impression of running frantically in darkness.

He dressed quickly, and because the stillness of early morning in the old house got on his nerves, went out to buy a newspaper. It was too early for shops to be open, however, and in search of a news-boy he set off westward, turning at the first corner. And as he walked a curious and inexplicable feeling began to take possession of him: a feeling of — familiarity! He had walked here before, and there was a dim and disturbing familiarity about the shapes of the houses, the outline of the roofs. But — and this was the fantastic part of it — to his knowledge he had never been on this street before. He had spent little time walking about this region of Salem, for he was indolent by nature; yet there was this extraordinary feeling of remembrance, and it grew more vivid as he went on.

He reached a corner, turned unthinkingly to the left. The odd sensation increased. He walked on slowly, pondering.

No doubt he had traveled by this way before — and very probably he had done so in a brown study, so that he had not been conscious of his route. Undoubtedly that was the explanation. Yet as Carson turned into Charter Street he felt a nameless unease waking within him. Salem was rousing; with daylight impassive Polish workers began to hurry past him toward the mills. An occasional automobile went by.

Before him a crowd was gathered on the sidewalk. He hastened his steps, conscious of a feeling of impending calamity. With an extraordinary sense of shock he saw that he was passing the Charter Street Burying Ground, the ancient, evilly famous “Burying Point.” Hastily he pushed his way into the crowd.

Comments in a muffled undertone came to Carson’s ears, and a bulky blue-clad back loomed up before him. He peered over the policeman’s shoulder and caught his breath in a horrified gasp.

A man leaned against the iron railing that fenced the old graveyard. He wore a cheap, gaudy suit, and he gripped the rusty bars in a clutch that made the muscles stand out in ridges on the hairy backs of his hands. He was dead, and on his face, staring up at the sky at a crazy angle, was frozen an expression of abysmal and utterly shocking horror. His eyes, all whites, were bulging hideously; his mouth was a twisted, mirthless grin.

A man at Carson’s side turned a white face toward him. “Looks as if he was scared to death,” he said somewhat hoarsely. “I’d hate to have seen what he saw. Ugh — look at that face!”

Mechanically Carson backed away, feeling an icy breath of nameless things chill him. He rubbed his hand across his eyes, but still that contorted, dead face swam in his vision. He began to retrace his steps, shaken and trembling a little. Involuntarily his glance moved aside, rested on the tombs and monuments that dotted the old graveyard. No one had been buried there for over a century, and the lichen-stained tombstones, with their winged skulls, fat-cheeked cherubs, and funeral urns, seemed to breathe out an indefinable miasma of antiquity. What had frightened the man to death?

Carson drew a deep breath. True, the corpse had been a frightful spectacle, but he must not allow it to upset his nerves. He could not — his novel would suffer. Besides, he argued grimly to himself, the affair was obvious enough in its explanation. The dead man was apparently a Pole, one of the group of immigrants who dwell about Salem Harbor. Passing by the graveyard at night, a spot about which eldritch legends had clung for nearly three centuries, his drink-befuddled eyes must have given reality to the hazy phantoms of a superstitious mind. These Poles were notoriously unstable emotionally, prone to mob hysteria and wild imaginings. The great Immigrant Panic of 1853, in which three witch-houses had been burned to the ground, had grown from an old woman’s confused and hysterical statement that she had seen a mysterious white-clad foreigner “take off his face.” What else could be expected of such people, Carson thought?

Nevertheless he remained in a nervous state, and did not return home until nearly noon. When on his arrival he found Leigh, the occultist, waiting, he was glad to see the man, and invited him in with cordiality.

Leigh was very serious. “Did you hear about your friend Abigail Prinn?” he asked without preamble, and Carson stared, pausing in the act of siphoning charged water into a glass. After a long moment he pressed the lever, sent the liquid sizzling and foaming into the whiskey. He handed Leigh the drink and took one himself — neat — before answering the question.




“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Has — what’s she been up to?” he asked, with an air of forced levity.

“I’ve been checking up the records,” Leigh said, “and I find Abigail Prinn was buried on December 14th, 1690, in the Charter Street Burying Ground — with a stake through her heart. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Carson said tonelessly. “Well?”

“Well — her grave’s been opened and robbed, that’s all. The stake was found uprooted nearby, and there were footprints all around the grave. Shoe-prints. Did you dream last night, Carson?” Leigh snapped out the question, his gray eyes hard.

“I don’t know,” Carson said confusedly, rubbing his forehead. “I can’t remember. I was at the Charter Street graveyard this morning.”

“Oh. Then you must have heard something about the man who—”

“I saw him,” Carson interrupted, shuddering. “It upset me.”

He downed the whiskey at a gulp.

Leigh watched him. “Well,” he said presently, “are you still determined to stay in this house?”

Carson put down the glass and stood up.

“Why not?” he snapped. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t? Eh?”

“After what happened last night—”

“After what happened? A grave was robbed. A superstitious Pole saw the robbers and died of fright. Well?”

“You’re trying to convince yourself,” Leigh said calmly. “In your heart you know — you must know — the truth. You’ve become a tool in the hands of tremendous terrible forces, Carson. For three centuries Abbie Prinn has lain in her grave — undead — waiting for someone to fall into her trap — the Witch Room. Perhaps she foresaw the future when she built it, foresaw that someday someone would blunder into that hellish chamber and be caught by the trap of the mosaic pattern. It caught you, Carson — and enabled that undead horror to bridge the gulf between consciousness and matter, to get en rapport with you. Hypnotism is child’s play to a being with Abigail Prinn’s frightful powers. She could very easily force you to go to her grave and uproot the stake that held her captive, and then erase the memory of that act from your mind so that you could not remember it even as a dream!”

Carson was on his feet, his eyes burning with a strange light. “In God’s name, man, do you know what you’re saying?”

Leigh laughed harshly. “God’s name! The devil’s name, rather — the devil that menaces Salem at this moment; for Salem is in danger, terrible danger. The men and women and children of the town Abbie Prinn cursed when they bound her to the stake — and found they couldn’t burn her! I’ve been going through certain secret archives this morning, and I’ve come to ask you, for the last time, to leave this house.”

“Are you through?” Carson asked coldly. “Very well. I shall stay here. You’re either insane or drunk, but you can’t impress me with your poppycock.”

“Would you leave if I offered you a thousand dollars?” Leigh asked. “Or more, then — ten thousand? I have a considerable sum at my command.”

“No, damn it!” Carson snapped in a sudden blaze of anger. “All I want, is to be left alone to finish my novel. I can’t work anywhere else — I don’t want to, I won’t—”

“I expected this,” Leigh said, his voice suddenly quiet, and with a strange note of sympathy. “Man, you can’t get away! You’re caught in the trap, and it’s too late for you to extricate yourself so long as Abbie Prinn’s brain controls you through the Witch Room. And the worst part of it is that she can only manifest herself with your aid — she drains your life forces, Carson, feeds on you like a vampire.”

“You’re mad,” Carson said dully.

“I’m afraid. That iron disk in the Witch Room — I’m afraid of that, and what’s under it. Abbie Prinn served strange gods, Carson — and I read something on the wall of that alcove that gave me a hint. Have you ever heard of Nyogtha?”

Carson shook his head impatiently. Leigh fumbled in a pocket, drew out a scrap of paper. “I copied this from a book in the Kester Library,” he said, “a book called the Necronomicon, written by a man who delved so deeply into forbidden secrets that men called him mad. Read this.”

Carson’s brows drew together as he read the excerpt:

Men know him as the Dweller in Darkness, that brother of the Old Ones called Nyogtha, the Thing that should not be. He can be summoned to Earth’s surface through certain secret caverns and fissures, and sorcerers have seen him in Syria and below the black tower of Leng; from the Thang Grotto of Tartary he has come ravening to bring terror and destruction among the pavilions of the great Khan. Only by the looped cross, by the Vach-Viraj incantation, and by the Tikkoun elixir may he be driven back to the nighted caverns of hidden foulness where he dwelleth.

Leigh met Carson’s puzzled gaze calmly. “Do you understand now?”

“Incantations and elixirs!” Carson said, handing back the paper. “Fiddlesticks!”

“Far from it. That incantation and that elixir have been known to occultists and adepts for thousands of years. I’ve had occasion to use them myself in the past on certain — occasions. And if I’m right about this thing—” He turned to the door, his lips compressed in a bloodless line. “Such manifestations have been defeated before, but the difficulty lies in obtaining the elixir — it’s very hard to get. But I hope…. I’ll be back. Can you stay out of the Witch Room until then?”

“I’ll promise nothing,” Carson said. He had a dull headache, which had been steadily growing until it obtruded upon his consciousness, and he felt vaguely nauseated. “Good-bye.”

He saw Leigh to the door and waited on the steps, with an odd reluctance to return to the house. As he watched the tall occultist hurry down the street, a woman came out of the adjoining house. She caught sight of him, and her huge breasts heaved. She burst into a shrill, angry tirade.

Carson turned, staring at her with astonished eyes. His head throbbed painfully. The woman was approaching, shaking a fat fist threateningly.

“Why you scare my Sarah?” she cried, her swarthy face flushed. “Why you scare her wit’ your fool tricks, eh?” Carson moistened his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “Very sorry. I didn’t frighten your Sarah. I haven’t been home all day. What frightened her?”

“T’e brown t’ing — it ran in your house, Sarah say—”

The woman paused, and her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. She made a peculiar sign with her right hand — pointing her index and little fingers at Carson, while her thumb was crossed over the other fingers. “T’e old witch!”

She retreated hastily, muttering in Polish in a frightened voice.

Carson turned, went back into the house. He poured some whiskey into a tumbler, considered, and then set it aside untasted. He began to pace the floor, occasionally rubbing his forehead with fingers that felt dry and hot. Vague, confused thoughts raced through his mind. His head was throbbing and feverish.

At length he went down to the Witch Room. He remained there, although he did not work; for his headache was not so oppressive in the dead quiet of the underground chamber. After a time he slept.

How long he slumbered he did not know. He dreamed of Salem, and of a dimly glimpsed, gelatinous black thing that hurtled with frightful speed through the streets, a thing like an incredibly huge, jet-black amoeba that pursued and engulfed men and women who shrieked and fled vainly. He dreamed of a skull-face peering into his own, a withered and shrunken countenance in which only the eyes seemed alive, and they shone with a hellish and evil light.

He awoke at last, sat up with a start. He was very cold.

It was utterly silent. In the light of the electric bulb the green and purple mosaic seemed to writhe and contract toward him, an illusion which disappeared as his sleep-fogged vision cleared. He glanced at his wrist-watch. It was two o’clock. He had slept through the afternoon and the better part of the night.

He felt oddly weak, and a lassitude held him motionless in his chair. The strength seemed to have been drained from him. The piercing cold seemed to strike through to his brain, but his headache was gone. His mind was very clear — expectant, as though waiting for something to happen. A movement nearby caught his eye.

A slab of stone in the wall was moving. He heard a gentle grating sound, and slowly a black cavity widened from a narrow rectangle to a square. There was something crouching there in the shadow. Stark, blind horror struck through Carson as the thing moved and crept forward into the light.

It looked like a mummy. For an intolerable, age-long second the thought pounded frightfully at Carson’s brain: It looked like a mummy! It was a skeleton-thin, parchment-brown corpse, and it looked like a skeleton with the hide of some great lizard stretched over its bones. It stirred, it crept forward, and its long nails scratched audibly against the stone. It crawled out into the Witch Room, its passionless face pitilessly revealed in the white light, and its eyes were gleaming with charnel life. He could see the serrated ridge of its brown, shrunken back…

Carson sat motionless. Abysmal horror had robbed him of the power to move. He seemed to be caught in the fetters of dream-paralysis, in which the brain, an aloof spectator, is unable or unwilling to transmit the nerve-impulses to the muscles. He told himself frantically that he was dreaming, that he would presently awaken.

The withered horror arose. It stood upright, skeleton-thin, and moved to the alcove where the iron disk lay embedded in the floor. Standing with its back to Carson it paused, and a dry and sere whisper rustled out in the dead stillness. At the sound Carson would have screamed, but he could not. Still the dreadful whisper went on, in a language Carson knew was not of Earth, and as though in response an almost imperceptible quiver shook the iron disk.

It quivered and began to rise, very slowly, and as if in triumph the shriveled horror lifted its pipestem arms. The disk was nearly a foot thick, but presently as it continued to rise above the level of the floor an insidious odor began to penetrate the room. It was vaguely reptilian, musky and nauseating. The disk lifted inexorably, and a little finger of blackness crept out from beneath its edge. Abruptly Carson remembered his dream of a gelatinous black creature that hurtled through the Salem streets. He tried vainly to break the fetters of paralysis that held him motionless. The chamber was darkening, and a black vertigo was creeping up to engulf him. The room seemed to rock. Still the iron disk lifted; still the withered horror stood with its skeleton arms raised in blasphemous benediction; still the blackness oozed out in slow amoeboid movement.

There came a sound breaking through the sere whisper of the mummy, the quick patter of racing footsteps. Out of the corner of his eye Carson saw a man come racing into the Witch Room. It was the occultist, Leigh, and his eyes were blazing in a face of deathly pallor. He flung himself past Carson to the alcove where the black horror was surging into view.

The withered thing turned with dreadful slowness. Leigh carried some implement in his left hand, Carson saw, a crux ansata of gold and ivory. His right hand was clenched at his side. His voice rolled out, sonorous and commanding. There were little beads of perspiration on his white face.

“Ya na kadishtu nil gh’ri… stell’bsna kn’aa Nyogtha… k’yarnak phlegethor…”

The fantastic, unearthly syllables thundered out, echoing from the walls of the vault. Leigh advanced slowly, the crux ansata held high.

And from beneath the iron disk black horror came surging!

The disk was lifted, flung aside, and a great wave of iridescent blackness, neither liquid nor solid, a frightful gelatinous mass, came pouring straight for Leigh. Without pausing in his advance he made a quick gesture with his right hand, and a little glass tube hurtled at the black thing, was engulfed.

The formless horror paused. It hesitated, with a dreadful air of indecision, and then swiftly drew back. A choking stench of burning corruption began to pervade the air, and Carson saw great pieces of the black thing flake off, shriveling as though destroyed with corroding acid. It fled back in a liquescent rush, hideous black flesh dropping as it retreated.

A pseudopod of blackness elongated itself from the central mass and like a great tentacle clutched the corpse-like being, dragged it back to the pit and over the brink. Another tentacle seized the iron disk, pulled it effortlessly across the floor, and as the horror sank from sight, the disk fell into place with a thunderous crash.

The room swung in wide circles about Carson, and a frightful nausea clutched him. He made a tremendous effort to get to his feet, and then the light faded swiftly and was gone. Darkness took him.

* * *


Carson’s novel was never finished. He burned it, but continued to write, although none of his later work was ever published. His publishers shook their heads and wondered why such a brilliant writer of popular fiction had suddenly become infatuated with the weird and ghastly.

“It’s powerful stuff,” one man told Carson, as he handed back his novel, Black God of Madness. “It’s remarkable in its way, but it’s morbid and horrible. Nobody would read it. Carson, why don’t you write the type of novel you used to do, the kind that made you famous?”

It was then that Carson broke his vow never to speak of the Witch Room, and he poured out the entire story, hoping for understanding and belief. But as he finished, his heart sank as he saw the other’s face, sympathetic but skeptical.

“You dreamed it, didn’t you?” the man asked, and Carson laughed bitterly.

“Yes — I dreamed it.”

“It must have made a terribly vivid impression on your mind. Some dreams do. But you’ll forget about it in time,” he predicted, and Carson nodded.

And because he knew that he would only be arousing doubts of his sanity, he did not mention the thing that was burned indelibly on his brain, the horror he had seen in the Witch Room after wakening from his faint. Before he and Leigh had hurried, white-faced and trembling, from the chamber, Carson had cast a quick glance behind him. The shriveled and corroded patches that he had seen slough off from that being of insane blasphemy had unaccountably disappeared, although they had left black stains upon the stones. Abbie Prinn, perhaps, had returned to the hell she had served, and her inhuman god had withdrawn to hidden abysses beyond man’s comprehension, routed by powerful forces of elder magic which the occultist had commanded. But the witch had left a memento behind her, a hideous thing which Carson, in that last backward glance, had seen protruding from the edge of the iron disk, as though raised in ironic salute — a withered, claw-like hand!




The Black Kiss

by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner

		They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea,



		Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be.








    

— Chesterton, “Lepanto”






This story, the second in an abortive series featuring occult investigator Michael Leigh, is a collaboration between Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Bloch recalls that “The Black Kiss was basically his {Kuttner’s} concept”, as opposed to their other team efforts which had been “worked out mutually in advance or during the course of our consecutive drafts. “Kuttner, as in the case of all their collaborations, wrote the first draft, which his partner then completely rewrote (Bloch letter to Robert M. Price, January 25, 1994).

One wonders at the tangential role of Michael Leigh in the story. He remains offstage for most of the story, represented by proxy in the form of an inscrutable Oriental colleague. Perhaps it was to mask the fact that Leigh would have played an almost identical role here as in “The Salem Horror", saying almost precisely the same things in both stories, which after all appeared in rapid succession. Just as Bloch became “Tarleton Fiske” and Kuttner became “Keith Hammond” when either had two stories slated for the same issue of Strange Stories, perhaps Michael Leigh in effect assumed an alias as well!

First publication: Weird Tales, June 1937.

* * *


1. The Thing in the Waters

Graham Dean nervously crushed out his cigarette and met Doctor Hedwig’s puzzled eyes.

“I’ve never been troubled like this before,” he said. “These dreams are so oddly persistent. They’re not the usual haphazard nightmares. They seem—I know it sounds ridiculous—they seem planned. ”

“Dreams planned? Nonsense.” Doctor Hedwig looked scornful. “You, Mr. Dean, are an artist, and naturally of impressionable temperament. This house at San Pedro is new to you, and you say you’ve heard wild tales. The dreams are due to imagination and overwork.”

Dean glanced out of the window, a frown on his unnaturally pale face.

“I hope you’re right,” he said, softly. “But dreams shouldn’t make me look like this. Should they?”

A gesture indicated the great blue rings beneath the young artist’s eyes. His hands indicated the bloodless pallor of his gaunt cheeks.

“Overwork has done that, Mr. Dean. I know what has happened to you better than you do yourself.”

The white-haired physician picked up a sheet covered with his own scarcely decipherable notes and scrutinized it in review.

“You inherited this house at San Pedro a few months ago, eh? And you moved in alone to do some work.”

"Yes. The seacoast here has some marvelous scenes.” For a moment Dean’s face looked youthful once more as enthusiasm kindled its ashy fires. Then he continued, with a troubled frown. “But I haven’t been able to paint, lately—not seascapes, anyway, it’s very odd. My sketches don’t seem quite right anymore. There seems to be a quality in them that I don’t put there—”

“A quality, did you say?”

“Yes, a quality of malignness, if I can call it that. It’s indefinable. Something behind the picture takes all the beauty out. And I haven’t been overworking these last weeks, Doctor Hedwig.”

The doctor glanced again at the paper in his hand.

“Well, I disagree with you there. You might be unconscious of the effort you expend. These dreams of the sea that seem to worry you are meaningless, save as an indication of your nervous condition.”

“You’re wrong.” Dean rose, suddenly. His voice was shrill.

“That’s the dreadful part of it. The dreams are not meaningless. They seem cumulative; cumulative and planned. Each night they grow more vivid, and I see more of that green, shining place under the sea. I get closer and closer to those black shadows swimming there, those shadows that I know aren’t shadows but something worse. I see more each night. It’s like a sketch I’d block out, gradually adding more and more until—”

Hedwig watched his patient keenly. He suggested, “Until—”

But Dean’s tense face relaxed. He had caught himself just in time. “No, Doctor Hedwig. You must be right. It’s overwork and nervousness, as you say. If I believed what the Mexicans had told me about Morelia Godolfo—well, I’d be mad and a fool.”

“Who is this Morelia Godolfo? Some woman who has been filling you with foolish tales?”

Dean smiled. “No need to worry about Morelia. She was my great-great-grand-aunt. She used to live in the San Pedro house and started the legends, I think.”

Hedwig had been scribbling on a piece of paper. “Well, I see, young man! You heard these legends; your imagination ran riot; you dreamed. This prescription will fix you up.”

“Thanks.”

Dean took the paper, lifted his hat from the table, and started for the door. In the doorway he paused, smiling wryly.

“But you’re not quite correct in thinking the legends started me dreaming, Doctor. I began to dream them before I learned the history of the house.”

And with that he went out.

Driving back to San Pedro, Dean tried to understand what had happened to him. But always he came up against a blank wall of impossibility. Any logical explanation wandered off into a tangle of fantasy. The one thing he could not explain—which Doctor Hedwig had not been able to explain—was the dreams.

The dreams started soon after he came into his legacy: this ancient house north of San Pedro, which had so long stood deserted. The place was picturesquely old, and that attracted Dean from the first. It had been built by one of his ancestors when the Spaniards still ruled California. One of the Deans—the name was Dena, then—had gone to Spain and returned with a bride. Her name was Morelia Godolfo, and it was this long-vanished woman about whom all the subsequent legends centered.

Even yet there were wrinkled, toothless Mexicans in San Pedro who whispered incredible tales of Morelia Godolfo—she who had never grown old and who had a weirdly evil power over the sea. The Godolfos had been among the proudest families of Granada, but furtive legends spoke of their intercourse with the terrible Moorish sorcerers and necromancers. Morelia, according to these same hinted horrors, had learned uncanny secrets in the black towers of Moorish Spain, and when Dena had brought her as his bride across the sea she had already sealed a pact with dark Powers and had undergone a change.

So ran the tales, and they further told of Morelia’s life in the old San Pedro house. Her husband had lived for ten years or more after the marriage, but rumors said that he no longer possessed a soul.

It is certain that his death was very mysteriously hushed up by Morelia Godolfo, who went on living alone in the great house beside the sea.

The whispers of the peons were hereafter monstrously augmented. They had to do with the change in Morelia Godolfo, the sorcerous change which caused her to swim far out to sea on moonlit nights so that watchers saw her white body gleaming amidst the spray. Men bold enough to gaze from the cliffs might catch glimpses of her then, sporting with queer sea creatures that gamboled about her in the black waters, nuzzling her with shockingly deformed heads. These creatures were not seals, or any known form of submarine life, it was averred, although sometimes bursts of chuckling, gobbling laughter could be heard. It is said that Morelia Godolfo had swum out there one night, and that she never came back. But thereafter the laughter was louder from afar, and the sporting amidst the black rocks continued, so that the tales of the early peons had been nourished down to the present day.

Such were the legends known to Dean. The facts were sparse and inconclusive. The old house had fallen into decrepitude, and was only occasionally rented through the years. These rentals had been as short as they were infrequent. There was nothing definitely wrong with the house between White’s Point and Point Fermin, but those who had lived there said that the crashing of the surf sounded subtly different when heard through windows that overlooked the sea, and, too, they dreamed unpleasantly. Sometimes the occasional tenants had mentioned with peculiar horror the moonlit nights, when the sea became altogether too clearly visible. At any rate, occupants often vacated the house hastily.

Dean had moved in immediately after inheriting, because he had thought the place ideal for painting the scenes he loved. He had learned the legend and the facts behind it later, and by this time his dreams had started.

At first they had been conventional enough, though, oddly, all centered about the sea which he loved. But it was not the sea he loved that he knew in sleep.

The Gorgons lived in his dreams. Scylla writhed hideously across dark and surging waters, where harpies flew screaming. Weird creatures crawled sluggishly up from the black, inky depths where eyeless, bloated sea beasts dwelt. Gigantic and terrible leviathans leapt and plunged while monstrous serpents squirmed a strange obeisance to a mocking moon. Foul and hidden horrors of the sea’s depths engulfed him in sleep.

This was bad enough, but it was only a prelude. The dreams began to change. It was almost as though the first few formed a definite setting for the greater terrors to come. From the mythic images of old sea gods another vision emerged. It was inchoate at first, taking definite form and meaning very slowly over a period of several weeks. And it was this dream which Dean now feared.

It had occurred generally just before he awoke—a vision of green, translucent light, in which dark shadows swam slowly. Night after night the limpid emerald glow grew brighter, and the shadows twisted into a more visible horror. These were never clearly seen, although their amorphous heads held a strangely repellent recognizable quality for Dean.

Presently, in this dream of his, the shadow-creatures would move aside as though to permit the passage of another. Swimming into the green haze would come a coiling shape—whether similar to the rest or not Dean could not tell, for his dream always ended there. The approach of this last shape always caused him to awake in a nightmare paroxysm of terror.

He dreamt of being somewhere under the sea, amidst swimming shadows with deformed heads; and each night one particular shadow was coming closer and closer.

* * *


Each day, now, when he awoke with the cold sea-wind of early dawn blowing through the windows, he would lie in a lazy, languid mood till long past daybreak. When he rose these days he felt inexplicably tired, and he could not paint. This particular morning the sight of his haggard face in the mirror had forced him to visit a physician. But Doctor Hedwig had not been helpful.

Nevertheless Dean filled the prescription on the way home. A swallow of the bitter, brownish tonic strengthened him somewhat, but as he parked his car the feeling of depression settled down on him again. He walked up to the house still puzzled and strangely afraid.

Under the door was a telegram. Dean read it with a puzzled frown.






JUST LEARNED YOU ARE LIVING IN SAN PEDRO HOUSE STOP VITALLY IMPORTANT YOU VACATE IMMEDIATELY STOP SHOW THIS CABLE TO DOCTOR MAKOTO YAMADA 17 BUENA STREET SAN PEDRO STOP AM RETURNING VIA AIRPLANE STOP SEE YAMADA TODAY

    

MICHAEL LEIGH







Dean read the message again, and a flash of remembrance came to him. Michael Leigh was his uncle, but he had not seen the man for years. Leigh had been a puzzle to the family; he was an occultist, and spent most of his time delving in far corners of the earth. Occasionally he dropped from sight for long periods of time. The cable Dean held was sent from Calcutta, and he supposed that Leigh had recently emerged from some spot in the interior of India to learn of Dean’s inheritance.

Dean searched his mind. He recalled now that there had been some family quarrel about this very house years ago. The details were no longer clear, but he remembered that Leigh demanded the San Pedro house be razed. Leigh had given no sane reasons, and when the request was refused he had dropped out of sight for a time. And now came this inexplicable cablegram.

Dean was tired from his long drive, and the unsatisfactory interview with the doctor had irritated him more than he had realized. Nor was he in the mood to follow his uncle’s cabled request and undertake the long journey to Buena Street, which was miles away. The drowsiness which he felt, however, was normal healthy exhaustion, unlike the languor of recent weeks. The tonic he had taken was of some value after all.

He dropped into his favorite chair by the window that overlooked the sea, rousing himself to watch the flaming colors of the sunset. Presently the sun dropped below the horizon, and gray dusk crept in. Stars appeared, and far to the north he could see the dim lights of the gambling ships off Venice. The mountains shut off his view of San Pedro, but a diffused pale glow in that direction told him that the New Barbary was wakening into roaring, brawling life. Slowly the face of the Pacific brightened. A full moon was rising above the San Pedro hills.

For a long time Dean sat quietly by the window, his pipe forgotten in his hand, staring down at the slow swells of the ocean, which seemed to pulse with a mighty and alien life. Gradually drowsiness crept up and overwhelmed him. Just before he dropped into the abyss of sleep there flashed into his mind da Vinci’s saying: “The two most wonderful things in the world are a woman’s smile and the motion of mighty waters.”

He dreamed, and this time it was a different dream. At first only blackness, and a roaring and thundering as of angry seas, and oddly mingled with this was the hazy thought of a woman’s smile—and a woman’s lips—pouting lips, softly alluring—but strangely the lips were not red—no! They were very pale, bloodless, like the lips of a thing that had long rested beneath the sea—

The misty vision changed, and for a flashing instant Dean seemed to see the green and silent place of his earlier visions. The shadowy black shapes were moving more quickly behind the veil, but this picture was of but a second’s duration. It flashed out and vanished, and Dean was standing alone on a beach, a beach he recognized in his dream—the sandy cove beneath the house.

The salt breeze blew coldly across his face, and the sea glistened like silver in the moonlight. A faint splash told of a sea thing that broke the surface of the waters. To the north the sea washed against the rugged surface of the cliff, barred and speckled with black shadows. Dean felt a sudden, inexplicable impulse to move in that direction. He yielded.

As he clambered over the rocks he was suddenly conscious of a strange sensation, as though keen eyes were focused upon him—eyes that watched and warned! Vaguely in his mind rose up the gaunt face of his uncle, Michael Leigh, the deep-set eyes glowing. But swiftly this was gone, and he found himself before a deeper niche of blackness in the cliff face. Into it he knew he must go.

He squeezed himself between two jutting points of rock and found himself in utter, dismal darkness. Yet somehow he was conscious that he was in a cave, and he could hear water lapping nearby. All about him was a musty salt odor of sea decay, the fetid smell of useless ocean caves and holds of ancient ships. He stepped forward, and, as the floor shelved sharply downwards, stumbled and fell headlong into icy, shallow water. He felt, rather than saw, a flicker of swift movement, and then abruptly hot lips were pressed against his.

Human lips, Dean thought, at first.

He lay on his side in the chill water, his lips against those responsive ones. He could see nothing, for all was lost in the blackness of the cave. The unearthly lure of those invisible lips thrilled through him.

He responded to them, pressed them fiercely, gave them what they were avidly seeking. The unseen waters crawled against the rocks, whispering warning.

And in that kiss strangeness flooded him. He felt a shock and a tingling go through him, and then a thrill of sudden ecstasy, and swift on its heels came horror. Black loathsome foulness seemed to wash his brain, indescribable but fearfully real, making him shudder with nausea. It was as though unutterable evil were pouring into his body, his mind, his very soul, through the blasphemous kiss on his lips. He felt loathsome, contaminated. He fell back. He sprang to his feet.

And Dean saw, for the first time, the ghastly thing he had kissed, as the sinking moon sent a pale shaft of radiance creeping through the cave mouth. For something rose up before him, a serpentine and seal-like bulk that coiled and twisted and moved towards him, glistening with foul slime; and Dean screamed and turned to flee with nightmare fear tearing at his brain, hearing behind him a quiet splashing as though some bulky creature had slid back into the water—

2. A Visit from Doctor Yamada

He awoke. He was still in his chair before the window, and the moon was paling before the grayness of dawn. He was shaken with nausea, sick and shuddering with the shocking realism of his dream. His clothing was drenched with perspiration, and his heart hammered furiously. An immense lethargy seemed to have overwhelmed him, making it an intense effort to rise from the chair and stagger to a couch, on which he flung himself to doze fitfully for several hours.

A sharp pealing of the doorbell roused him. He still felt weak and dizzy, but the frightening lethargy had somewhat abated. When Dean opened the door, a Japanese man standing on the porch began a bobbing little bow, a gesture that was abruptly arrested as the sharp black eyes focused on Dean’s face. A little hiss of indrawn breath came from the visitor.

Dean said irritably, “Well? Do you want to see me?”

The other was still staring, his thin face sallow beneath a stiff thatch of gray hair. He was a small, slender man, with his face covered with a fine-spun web of wrinkles. After a pause he said, “I am Doctor Yamada.”

Dean frowned, puzzled. Abruptly he remembered his uncle’s cable of the day before. An odd, unreasonable irritation began to mount within him, and he said, more brusquely than he had intended, “This isn’t a professional call, I hope. I’ve already—”

“Your uncle—you are Mr. Dean?—cabled me. He was rather worried.” Doctor Yamada glanced around almost furtively.

Dean felt distaste stir within him, and his irritation increased.

“My uncle is rather eccentric, I’m afraid. There’s nothing for him to worry about. I’m sorry you had your trip for nothing.”

Doctor Yamada did not seem to take offense at Dean’s attitude. Rather, a strange expression of sympathy showed for a moment on his small face.

“Do you mind if I come in?” he asked, and moved forward confidently.

Short of barring his way, Dean had no means of stopping him, and ungraciously led his guest to the room where he had spent the night, motioning him to a chair while he busied himself with a coffeepot.

Yamada sat motionless, silently watching Dean. Then without preamble he said, “Your uncle is a great man, Mr. Dean.“

Dean made a noncommittal gesture. “I have seen him only once.” “He is one of the greatest occultists of this day. I, too, have studied psychic lore, but beside your uncle I am a novice.”

Dean said, "He is eccentric. Occultism, as you term it, has never interested me.”

The little Japanese watched him impassively. “You make a common error, Mr. Dean. You consider occultism a hobby for cranks. No”—he held up a slender hand—“your disbelief is written in your face. Well, it is understandable. It is an anachronism, an attitude handed down from the earliest times, when scientists were called alchemists and sorcerers burned for making pacts with the devil. But actually there are no sorcerers, no witches. Not in the sense that man understands these terms. There are men and women who have acquired mastery over certain sciences which are not wholly subject to mundane physical laws.”

There was a little smile of disbelief on Dean’s face. Yamada went on quietly. “You do not believe because you do not understand. There are not many who can comprehend, or who wish to comprehend, this greater science which is not bound by earthly laws. But here is a problem for you, Mr. Dean. ” A little spark of irony flickered in the black eyes. “Can you tell me how I know you have suffered from nightmares recently?”

Dean jerked around and stood staring. Then he smiled.

“As it happens, I know the answer, Doctor Yamada. You physicians have a way of hanging together—and I must have let something slip to Doctor Hedwig yesterday.” His tone was offensive, but Yamada merely shrugged slightly.

“Do you know your Homer?” he asked, apparently irrelevantly, and at Dean’s surprised nod went on, “And Proteus? You remember the Old Man of the Sea who possessed the power of changing his shape? I do not wish to strain your credulity, Mr. Dean, but for a long time students of the dark lore have known that behind this legend there exists a very terrible truth. All the tales of spirit possession, of reincarnation, even the comparatively innocuous experiments in thought transference, point to the truth. Why do you suppose folklore abounds with tales of men who have been able to change themselves into beasts—werewolves, hyenas, tigers, the seal-men of the Eskimos? Because these tales are founded on truth!

"I do not mean,” he went on, “that the actual physical metamorphosis of the body is possible, so far as we know. But it has long been known that the intelligence—the mind—of an adept can be transferred to the brain and body of a satisfactory subject. Animals’ brains are weak, lacking the power of resistance. But men are different, unless there are certain circumstances—”

As he hesitated, Dean proffered the Japanese a cup of coffee— coffee was generally brewing in the percolator these days—and Yamada accepted it with a formal little bow of acknowledgment. Dean drank his coffee in three hasty gulps, and poured more. Yamada, after a polite sip, put the cup aside and leaned forward earnestly.

“I must ask you to make your mind receptive, Mr. Dean. Don’t allow your conventional ideas of life to influence you in this matter. It is vitally to your interest that you listen carefully to me, and understand. Then—perhaps—”

He hesitated, and again threw that oddly furtive glance at the window.

“Life in the sea has followed different lines from life on land. Evolution has followed a different course. In the great deeps of the ocean, life utterly alien to ours has been discovered—luminous creatures which burst when exposed to the lighter pressure of the air—and in those tremendous depths forms of life completely inhuman have been developed, life forms that the uninitiated mind may think impossible. In Japan, an island country, we have known of these sea-dwellers for generations. Your English writer, Arthur Machen, has told a deep truth in his statement that man, afraid of these strange beings, has attributed to them beautiful or pleasantly grotesque forms which in reality they do not possess. Thus we have the nereids and oceanids—but nevertheless man could not fully disguise the true foulness of these creatures. Therefore there are legends of the Gorgons, of Scylla and the harpies—and, significantly, of the mermaids and their soullessness. No doubt you know the mermaid tale—how they long to steal the soul of a man, and draw it out by means of their kiss.”

Dean was at the window now, his back to the Japanese. As Yamada paused he said tonelessly, “Go on.”

“I have reason to believe,” Yamada went on very quietly, “that Morelia Godolfo, the woman from Alhambra, was not fully—human. She left no issue. These things never have children—they cannot.”

“What do you mean?” Dean had turned and was facing the Japanese, his face a ghastly white, the shadows beneath his eyes hideously livid. He repeated harshly, “What do you mean? You can’t frighten me with your tales—if that’s what you’re trying to do. You—my uncle wants me out of this house, for some reason of his own. You’re taking this means of getting me out—aren’t you? Eh?”

“You must leave this house,” Yamada said. “Your uncle is coming, but he may not be in time. Listen to me: These creatures—the sea-dwellers—envy man. Sunlight, and warm fires, and the fields of earth—things which the sea-dwellers cannot normally possess. These things—and love. You remember what I said about mind transference. This is the only way these things can attain that which they desire, and know the love of man or woman. Sometimes—not very often—one of these creatures succeeds in possessing itself of a human body. They watch always. When there is a wreck, they go there, like vultures to a feast. They can swim phenomenally fast. When a man is drowning, the defenses of his mind are down and sometimes the sea-dwellers can thus acquire a human body. There have been tales of men saved from wrecks who ever after were oddly changed.

“Morelia Godolfo was one of these creatures! The Godolfos knew much of the dark lore but used it for evil purposes—the so-called black magic. And it was, I think, through this that a sea-dweller gained power to usurp the brain and body of the woman. A transference took place. The mind of the sea-dweller took possession of Morelia Godolfo’s body and the intelligence of the original Morelia was forced into the terrible form of that creature of the abyss. In time the human body of the woman died and the usurping mind returned to its original shell. The intelligence of Morelia Godolfo was then ejected from its temporary prison and left homeless. That is true death.”

Dean shook his head slowly as though in denial but did not speak. And inexorably Yamada kept on.

“For years, generations, since then she has dwelt in the sea, waiting. Her power is strongest here, where she once lived. But, as I told you, only under unusual circumstances can this—transference take place. The tenants of this house might be troubled with dreams, but that would be all. The evil being had no power to steal their bodies. Your uncle knew that, or he would have insisted that the place be immediately destroyed. He did not foresee that you would ever live here.”

The little Japanese bent forward, and his eyes were twin points of black light.

“You do not need to tell me what you have undergone in the past month. I know. The sea-dweller has power over you. For one thing, there are bonds of blood, even though you are not directly descended from her. And your love for the ocean—your uncle spoke of that. You live here alone with your paintings and your imaginative fancies; you see no one else. You are an ideal victim, and it was easy for that sea horror to become en rapport with you. Even now you show the stigmata.”

* * *


Dean was silent, his face a pale shadow amidst the darker ones in the corners of the room. What was the man trying to tell him? What were these hints leading up to?

“Remember what I have said.” Doctor Yamada’s voice was fanatically earnest. “That creature wants you for your youth—your soul. She has lured you in sleep, with visions of Poseidonis, the twilight grottoes in the deep. She has sent you beguiling visions at first, to hide what she was doing. She has drained your life forces, weakened your resistance, waiting until she is strong enough to take possession of your brain.

“I have told you what she wants—what all these hybrid horrors raven for. She will reveal herself to you in time, and when her will is strong upon you in slumber, you will do her bidding. She will take you down into the deep, and show you the kraken- fouled gulfs where these things bide. You will go willingly, and that will be your doom. She may lure you to their feasts there— the feasts they hold upon the drowned things they find floating from wrecked ships. And you will live such madness in your sleep because she rules you. And then—then, when you have become weak enough, she will have her desire. The sea-thing will usurp your body and walk once more on earth. And you will go down into the darkness where once you dwelt in dreams, forever. Unless I am mistaken, you have already seen enough to know that I speak truth. I think that this terrible moment is not so far off, and I warn you that alone you cannot hope to resist the evil. Only with the aid of your uncle and me—”

Doctor Yamada stood up. He moved forward and confronted the dazed youth face to face. In a low voice he asked, “In your dreams— has the thing kissed you?"

For a heartbeat there was utter silence. Dean opened his mouth to speak, and then a curious little warning note seemed to sound in his brain. It rose, like the quiet roaring of a conch shell, and a vague nausea assailed him.

Almost without volition, he heard himself saying, “No.”

Dimly, as though from an incredibly far distance, he heard Yamada suck in his breath, as if surprised. Then the Japanese said, “That is good. Very good. Now listen: Your uncle will be here soon. He has chartered a special plane. Will you be my guest until he arrives?”

The room seemed to darken before Dean’s eyes. The form of the Japanese was receding, dwindling. Through the window the surf sound came crashing, and it rolled on in waves through Dean’s brain. In its thunder a thin, insistent whispering penetrated.

“Accept,” it murmured. “Accept!” And Dean heard his own voice accept Yamada’s invitation.

He seemed incapable of coherent thought. This last dream haunted him—and now Doctor Yamada’s disturbing story—he was ill—that was it!—very ill. He wanted very much to sleep, now. A flood of darkness seemed to wash up and engulf him. Gratefully he allowed it to sweep through his tired head. Nothing existed but the dark, and a restless lapping of unquiet waters.

Yet he seemed to know, in an odd way, that he was still—some outer part of him—conscious. He strangely realized that he and Doctor Yamada had left the house, were entering a car, and driving a long way. He was—with that strange, external other self—talking casually to the doctor; entering his house in San Pedro; drinking; eating. And all the while his soul, his real being, was buried in waves of blackness.

Finally a bed. From below, the surf seemed to blend into the blackness that engulfed his brain. It spoke to him now, as he rose stealthily and clambered out of the window. The fall jarred his outer self considerably, but he was on the ground outside without injury. He kept in the shadows as he crept away down to the beach—the black, hungry shadows that were like the darkness surging through his soul.

3. Three Dreadful Hours

With a shock, he was himself once more—completely. The cold water had done it; the water in which he found himself swimming. He was in the ocean, borne on waves as silver as the lightning that occasionally flashed overhead. He heard thunder, felt the sting of rain. Without wondering about the sudden transition, he swam on, as though fully aware of some unplanned destination. For the first time in over a month he felt fully alive, actually himself. There was a surge of wild elation in him that defied the facts; he no longer seemed to care about his recent illness, the weird warnings of his uncle and Doctor Yamada, and the unnatural darkness that had previously shadowed his mind. In fact, he no longer had to think—it was as though he were being directed in all his movements.

He was swimming parallel with the beach now, and with curious detachment he observed that the storm had subsided. A pale, fog-like glow hovered over the lashing waters, and it seemed to beckon.

The air was chill, as was the water, and the waves high, yet Dean experienced neither cold nor fatigue. And when he saw the things that waited for him on the rocky beach just ahead, he lost all perception of himself in a crescendo of mounting joy.

This was inexplicable, for they were the creatures of his last and wildest nightmares. Even now he did not see them plainly as they sported in the surf, but there were dim suggestions of past horror in their tenebrous outlines. The things were like seals: great, fish-like, bloated monsters with pulpy, shapeless heads. These heads rested on columnar necks that undulated with serpentine ease, and he observed, without any sensation other than curious familiarity, that the heads and bodies of the creatures were a sea-bleached white.

Soon he was swimming in among them—swimming with peculiar and disturbing ease. Inwardly he marveled, with a touch of his former feeling, that he was not now horrified by the sea-beasts in the least. Instead, it was almost with a feeling of kinship that he listened to their strange low gruntings and cackles—listened and understood.

He knew what they were saying, and he was not amazed. He was not frightened by what he heard, though the words would have sent abysmal horror through his soul in the previous dreams.

He knew where they were going and what they meant to do when the entire group swam out into the water once more, yet he did not fear. Instead, he felt a strange hunger at the thought of what was to come, a hunger that impelled him to take the lead as the things, with undulant swiftness, glided through the inky waters to the north. They swam with incredible speed, yet it was hours before a sea coast loomed up through the murk, lit by a blinding flare of light from offshore.

Twilight deepened to true darkness over the water, but the offshore light burned brightly. It seemed to come from a huge wreck in the waves just off the coast, a great hulk floating on the waters like a crumpled beast. There were boats gathered around it, and floating flares of light that revealed the shore.

As though by instinct, Dean, with the pack behind him, headed for the spot. Swiftly and silently they sped, their slimy heads blurred in the shadows to which they clung as they circled the boats and swam in towards the great crumpled shape. Now it was looming above him, and he could see arms flailing desperately as man after man sank below the surface. The colossal bulk from which they leaped was a wreck of twisted girders in which he could trace the warped outline of a vaguely familiar shape.

And now, with curious disinterest, he swam lazily about, avoiding the lights bobbing over the water as he watched the actions of his companions. They were hunting their prey. Leering muzzles gaped for the drowning men, and lean talons raked bodies from the darkness. Whenever a man was glimpsed in the shadows not yet invaded by rescue boats, one of the sea-things craftily snared his victim.

In a little while they turned and slowly swam away. But now many of the creatures clutched a grisly trophy at their squamous breasts. The pale white limbs of drowning men trailed in the water as they were dragged off into the darkness by their captors. To the accompaniment of low, carrion laughter the beasts swam away, back down the coast.

Dean swam with the rest. His mind was again a blur of confusion. He knew what the thing in the water was, and yet he could not name it. He had watched those hateful horrors snare doomed men and drag them off to the deep, yet he had not intervened. What was wrong? Even now, as he swam with frightening agility, he felt a call he could not fully understand—a call that his body was answering.

The hybrid things were gradually dispersing. With eerie splashings they disappeared below the surface of the gelid black waters, pulling with them the dreadfully limp bodies of the men, pulling them down to the blackness biding beneath.

They were hungry. Dean knew it without thinking. He swam on, along the coast, impelled by his curious urge. That was it—he was hungry.

And now he was going for food.

* * *


Hours of steady swimming southward. Then the familiar beach, and above it a lighted house which Dean recognized—his own house on the cliff. There were figures descending the slope now; two men with torches were coming down to the beach. He must not let them see him—why, he did not know, but they must not. He crawled along the beach, keeping close to the water’s edge. Even so, he seemed to move very swiftly.

The men with the torches were some distance behind him now. Ahead loomed another familiar outline—a cave. He had clambered over these rocks before, it seemed. He knew the pits of shadow that speckled the cliff rock, and knew the narrow passage of stone through which he now squeezed his prostrate body.

Was that someone shouting, far away?

Darkness, and a lapping pool. He crawled forward, felt chill waters creep over his body. Muffled by distance came an insistent shouting from outside the cave.

“Graham! Graham Dean!”

Then the smell of dank sea-foulness was in his nostrils—a familiar, pleasant smell. He knew where he was, now. It was the cave where in his dream he had kissed the sea-thing. It was the cave in which—

He remembered now. The black blur lifted from his brain, and he remembered all. His mind bridged the gap, and he once again recalled coming here earlier this very evening, before he had found himself in the water.

Morelia Godolfo had called him here; here her dark whispers had guided him at twilight, when he had come from the bed at Doctor Yamada’s house. It was the siren song of the sea-creature that had lured him in dreams.

He remembered how she had coiled about his feet when he entered, flung her sea-bleached body up until its inhuman head had loomed close to his own. And then the hot pulpy lips had pressed against his—the loathsome, slimy lips had kissed him again. Wet, dank, horribly avid kiss! His senses had drowned in its evil, for he knew that this second kiss meant doom.

“The sea-dweller will take your body,” Doctor Yamada had said —and the second kiss meant doom.

All this had happened hours ago!

Dean shifted around in the rocky chamber to avoid wetting himself in the pool. As he did so, he glanced down at his body for the first time that night—glanced down with an undulating neck at the shape he had worn for three hours in the sea. He saw the fish-like scales, the scabrous whiteness of the slimy skin; saw the veined gills. He stared into the waters of the pool then, so that the reflection of his face was visible in the dim moonlight that filtered through fissures in the rocks.

He saw all—

His head rested on the long, reptilian neck. It was an anthropoid head with flat contours that were monstrously inhuman. The eyes were white and protuberant; they bulged with the glassy stare of a drowning thing. There was no nose, and the center of the face was covered with a tangle of wormy blue feelers. The mouth was the worst of all. Dean saw pale white lips in a dead face—human lips. Lips that had kissed his own. And now—they were his own!

He was in the body of the evil sea-thing—the evil sea-thing that had once harbored the soul of Morelia Godolfo!

At that moment Dean would gladly have welcomed death, for the stark, blasphemous horror of his discovery was too much to bear. He knew about his dreams now, and the legends; he had learned the truth, and paid a hideous price. He recalled, vividly, how he had recovered consciousness in the water and swum out to meet those—others. He recalled the great black hulk from which drowning men had been taken in boats—the shattered wreck on the water. What was it Yamada had told him? “When there is a wreck they go there, like vultures to a feast.” And now, at last, he remembered what had eluded him that night—what that familiar shape on the waters had been. It was a crashed zeppelin. He had gone swimming into the wreckage with those things, and they had taken men—. Three hours—God! Dean wanted very much to die. He was in the sea body of Morelia Godolfo, and it was too evil for further life.

Morelia Godolfo! Where was she? And his own body, the shape of Graham Dean?

* * *


A rustling in the shadowy cavern behind him proclaimed the answer. Graham Dean saw himself in the moonlight—saw his body, line for line, hunching furtively past the pool in an attempt to creep away unobserved.

Dean’s flippered fins moved swiftly. His own body turned.

It was ghastly for Dean to see himself reflected where no mirror existed; ghastlier still to see that in his face there no longer were his eyes. The sly, mocking stare of the sea-creature peered out at him from behind their fleshy mask, and they were ancient, evil. The pseudo-human snarled at him and tried to dodge off into the darkness. Dean followed, on all fours.

He knew what he must do. That sea-thing—Morelia—she had taken his body during that last black kiss, just as he had been forced into hers, but she had not yet recovered enough to go out into the world. That was why he had found her still in the cave. Now, however, she would leave, and his uncle Michael would never know. The world would never know, either, what horror stalked its surface—until it was too late. Dean, his own tragic form hateful to him now, knew what he must do.

Purposefully he maneuvered the mocking body of himself into a rocky corner. There was a look of fright in those gelid eyes—

A sound caused Dean to turn, pivoting his reptilian neck. Through glazed fish-eyes he saw the faces of Michael Leigh and Doctor Yamada. Torches in hand, they were entering the cave.

Dean knew what they would do, and he no longer cared. He closed in on the human body that housed the soul of the sea-beast; closed in with the beast’s own flailing flippers; seized it in its own arms and menaced it with its own teeth near the creature’s white, human neck.

From behind him he heard shouts and cries at his very back, but Dean did not care. He had a duty to perform, an atonement. Through the corner of his eye, he saw the barrel of a revolver as it glinted in Yamada's hand.

Then came two bursts of stabbing flame and the oblivion Dean craved. But he died happy, for he had atoned for the black kiss.

Even as he sank into death, Graham Dean had bitten with animal fangs into his own throat, and his heart was filled with peace as, dying, he saw himself die—

His soul mingled in the third black kiss of Death.




The Jest of Droom-avista by Henry Kuttner


This story is finally little more than a conventional “you can’t win in a deal with the devil” story, but it has a few points of interest vis-a-vis the Kuttner Mythos and its development. For one, Droom-avista would seem to be the prototype of Zuchequon in the later “Bells of Honor.” The first is called the Dark Shining One, the second the Dark Silent One. The advent of each is signaled by a veil of eldritch shadow. I have already suggested that “Bells of Horror” owes a debt to Lovecrafis “The Haunter of the Dark.” Another clue to this conclusion is this epithet, “the Dark Shining One”, which combines both the notions of the Shining Trapezohedron and the Haunter of the Dark.

As for the name Droom-avista, here we see a bit of Zoroastrian influence. “Avista” is plainly derived from the title of the Zoroastrian scripture, the Avesta. In older works on Zoroastrianism this scripture was often called the Zend Avesta, because of the unique Zend language in which it is written. Kuttner has appropriated this term, too: it appears as the name of the sorcerer Zend in “Spawn of Dagon.”

First publication: Weird Tales, August 1937.

* * *


There is a tale they tell of voices that called eerily by night in the marble streets of long-fallen Bel Yarnak, saying: “Evil is come to the land; doom falls on the fair city where our children’s children walk. Woe, woe unto Bel Yarnak.” Then did the dwellers in the city gather affrightedly in huddled groups, casting furtive glances at the Black Minaret that spears up gigantically from the temple gardens; for, as all men know, when doom comes to Bel Yarnak, the Black Minaret will play its part in that dreadful Ragnarok.

Woe, woe unto Bel Yarnak! Fallen forever are the shining silver towers, lost the magic, soiled the glamor. For stealthily and by night, under the triple moons that hurtle swiftly across the velvet sky, doom crept out inexorably from the Black Minaret.

Mighty magicians were the priests of the Black Minaret. Mighty were they, alchemists and sorcerers, and always they sought the Stone of the Philosophers, that strange power which would enable them to transmute all things into the rarest of metals. And in a vault far below the temple gardens, toiling endlessly at glittering alembics and shining crucibles, lit by the violet glow of ocuru-lamps, stood Thorazor, mightiest of priests, wisest of all who dwelt in Bel Yarnak. Days and weeks and years he had toiled, while strange moons reeled down to the horizons, seeking the Elixir. Gold and silver paved the streets; blazing diamonds, moon-glowing opals, purple gems of strange fire, meteor-fallen, made of Bel Yarnak a splendid vision, shining by night to guide the weary traveler across the sandy wastes. But a rarer element Thorazor sought. Other worlds possessed it, for the intricate telescopes of the astronomers revealed its presence in the flaming suns that fill the chaotic sky, making night over Bel Yarnak a mirror reflecting the blazing scintillance of the city, a star-carpeted purple tapestry where the triple moons weave their arabesque patterns. So toiled Thorazor under the Black Minaret all of glistening jet onyx.

He failed, and again he failed, and at length he knew that only with the gods’ aid could he find the Elixir he sought. Not the little gods, nor the gods of good and evil, but Droom-avista, the Dweller Beyond, the Dark Shining One, Thorazor called up blasphemously from the abyss. For Thorazor’s brain was warped; he had toiled endlessly, and foiled as often; in his mind was but one thought. So he did that which is forbidden: He traced the Seven Circles and spoke the Name which wakens Droom-avista from his brooding sleep.

A shadow swept down, darkening over the Black Minaret. Yet Bel Yarnak was untroubled; glorious and beautiful the shining city glowed while thin voices called weirdly in the streets.

Woe, woe unto Bel Yarnak! For the shadow darkened and encompassed the Black Minaret, and midnight black closed ominously about the sorcerer Thorazor. All alone he stood in his chamber, no gleam of light relieving the awful darkness that heralded the coming of the Dark Shining One, and slowly, ponderously, there rose up before him a Shape. But Thorazor cried out and hid his eyes, for none may look upon the Dweller Beyond lest his soul be blasted forever.

Like the groaning tocsin of a Cyclopean bell came the voice of the Dweller, rumbling terribly under the Black Minaret. Yet only Thorazor heard it, for he alone had called up Droom-avista.




“Now my sleep is troubled,” the god cried. “Now my dreams are shattered and I must weave new visions. Many worlds, a mightier cosmos, have you ruined; yet there are other worlds and other dreams, and perchance I shall find amusement in this little planet. For is not one of my names the Jester?”

Shuddering and fearful, still hiding his eyes, Thorazor spoke.

“Great Droom-avista, I know your name; I have said it. By the doom even upon you, you must obey one command of him who calls you up.”

The darkness throbbed and pulsed. Ironically Droom-avista assented. “Command, then. O little fool, command your god! For always have men sought to enslave gods, and ever have they succeeded too well.”

Yet Thorazor heeded not the warning. One thought only had he: the Elixir, the mighty magic that would transmute all things into the rarest of elements, and to Droom-avista he spoke fearlessly. He said his desire.

"But is that all?” the god said slowly. “Now this is but a small thing for which to disturb my slumber. So shall I grant your desire—for am I not named the Jester? Do thus and thus.” And Droom-avista spoke of that which would transmute all things into the rarest of metals on Bel Yarnak.

Then the god withdrew, and the shadow lifted. Again Droom- avista sank into his dreaming sleep, weaving intricate cosmogonies; and speedily he forgot Thorazor. But the sorcerer stood in his chamber, trembling with exultation, for at his feet lay a jewel. This had the god left behind.

* * *


Flaming, blazing, streaming with weird fire the gem illuminated the dark chamber, driving the shadows back into the distant corners. Yet Thorazor had not eyes for its beauty; this was the Philosopher’s Stone, this the Elixir! A glory was in the wizard’s eyes as he prepared a brew as Droom-avista had commanded.

Then the mixture seethed and bubbled in the golden crucible, and over it Thorazor held the shining jewel. The culmination of a lifetime’s hopes was reached as he dropped the gem into the frothing brew.

For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then, slowly at first, but with increasing swiftness, the golden crucible changed in color, slowly darkening. Thorazor cried out, blessing Droom-avista, for the crucible was no longer golden. It had been transmuted, by the power of the jewel, into the rarest of metals.

The gem, as though lighter than the bubbling mixture, lay lightly on the liquid surface. But the metamorphosis was not yet complete. The darkness crept down the pedestal that supported the crucible; it spread out like a fungoid stain across the onyx floor. It reached the feet of Thorazor, and the sorcerer stood frozen, glaring down at the frightful transmutation that was changing his body from flesh and blood into solid metal. And in a flash of blinding realization Thorazor knew Droom-avista’s jest, and knew that by the power of the Elixir all things are changed to the rarest of elements.

He shrieked once, and then his throat was no longer flesh. And slowly, slowly, the stain spread across the floor and up the stone walls of the chamber. The shining onyx dulled and lost its sheen. And the hungry stain crept out through the Black Minaret, out upon Bel Yarnak, while the thin voices cried sadly in the marble streets.

Woe, woe unto Bel Yarnak! Fallen is the glory, dulled and tarnished the gold and silver splendor, cold and lifeless the beauty of the magic citadel. For outward and ever outward crept the stain, and in its path all was changed. The people of Bel Yarnak no longer move light-heartedly about their houses; lifeless images throng the streets and palaces. Immovable and silent sits the Sindara on a tarnished throne; dark and grim looms the city under the hurtling moons. It is Dis; it is the damned city, and sad voices in the silent metropolis mourn for lost glory.

Fallen is Bel Yarnak! Changed by the magic of Thorazor and by Droom-avista’s jest, changed to the rarest of all elements in the planet of gold and silver and shining gems.

No longer Bel Yarnak—it is Dis, the City of Iron!




Spawn of Dagon by Henry Kuttner

		Under all graves they murmur,



		They murmur and rebel,



		Down to the buried kingdoms creep,



		And like a lost rain roar and weep



		O’er the red heavens of hell.








    

— Chesterton.






Will Murray has characterized Henry Kuttner as the quintessential pulp writer: He could write stories in any genre, fast, and on demand. When Robert E. Howard plunged into the River Styx, Kuttner sought to carry on in the tradition of Conan the Cimmerian and penned a small but valuable canon of the adventures of Prince Raynor and the hero of the present tale, Elak of Atlantis. Gary Lovisi (of Gryphon Books, P.O. Box 209, Brooklyn NY 11228) had collected the two series in a pair of small press books. You may also find them, if you look hard enough, in several old paperback anthologies: “Spawn of Dagon” itself in Leo Margulies (ed.), The Ghoul Keepers, Pyramid, 1961; Lin Carter (ed.), The Magic of Atlantis, Lancer, 1970; and Sean Richards (ed), The Barbarian Swordsmen, Star, 1981; “Dragon Moon” in L. Sprague de Camp (ed.), The Fantastic Swordsmen, Pyramid, 1967; Hans Stefan Santesson (ed.), The Mighty Barbarians, Lancer, 1969; “Thunder in the Dawn” in De Camp (ed.), Warlocks and Warriors, Berkley, 1970; “Beyond the Phoenix” in Peter Haining (ed.), Weird Tales, Vol. 1, Sphere, 1978; “Cursed Be the City” in Lin Carter (ed.), The Young Magicians, Ballantine, 1969; “The Citadel of Darkness” in De Camp (ed.), Swords and Sorcery, Pyramid, 1963- Carter always maintained that Kuttner beat Howard at his own game in these tales. Certainly “Spawn of Dagon” has at least a little in common with Howard’s “Rogues in the House” (and, come to think of it, so does Carter’s own “Thieves of Zangabal”!). You may be the judge as to which is the better.

“Dagon”, of course, is no Lovecraftian coinage. HPL borrowed it from the Philistine deity of the Bible. There is evidence that Dagon was pictured as a semi-ichthyic merman, and Brian Lumley reinforces this possibility by pointing out the association of Dagon with Oannes the fish god. So it might be that Kuttner is here making his own independent use of the same deity. But it is hard to miss a Lovecraftian coloring to the idea of Dagon as a fish god with an ichthyic race of servitors seeking to sink all the surface continents in order to regain their primordial hegemony.

It is worth a moment’s pause to exegete an in-joke in the story. Elak happens to overhear the musings of the sorcerer Zend: “I now summon…a new soul to serve me. When her soul is freed, I shall send it to Antares. There is a planet there where I have heard much sorcery exists. Mayhap I can learn a few more secrets. ” Surely the reference here is to Edmond Hamilton’s “Kaldar, World of Antares” (The Magic Carpet, April 1933, reprinted in Don Wollheim’s Ace anthology Swordsmen in the Sky J. Hamilton himself recalled that when Kuttner was in high school he had written a fan letter to Weird Tales “that I was his favorite author” (in Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story, FAX Collector’s Editions, 1977, p. 53)

First publication: Weird Tales, July 1938.

* * *


Two streams of blood trickled slowly across the rough boards of the floor. One of them emerged from a gaping wound in the throat of a prostrate, armor-clad body; the other dripped from a chink in the battered cuirass, and the swaying light of a hanging lamp cast grotesque shadows over the corpse and the two men who crouched on their hams watching it. They were both very drunk. One of them, a tall, extremely slender man whose bronzed body seemed boneless, so supple was it, murmured:

“I win, Lycon. The blood wavers strangely, but the stream I spilt will reach this crack first.” He indicated a space between two planks with the point of his rapier.

Lycon’s child-like eyes widened in astonishment. He was short, thick-set, with a remarkably simian face set atop his broad shoulders. He swayed slightly as he gasped, “By Ishtar! The blood runs up-hill!”

Elak, the slender man, chuckled. “After all the mead you swilled the ocean might run up-hill. Well, the wager’s won; I get the loot.” He got up and stepped over to the dead man. Swiftly he searched him, and suddenly muttered an explosive curse. “The swine’s as bare as a Bacchic vestal! He has no purse.”

Lycon smiled broadly and looked more than ever like an undersized hairless ape. “The gods watch over me,” he said in satisfaction.

“Of all the millions in Atlantis you had to pick a fight with a pauper,” Elak groaned: “Now we’ll have to flee San-Mu, as your quarrels have forced us to flee Poseidonia and Kornak. And the San-Mu mead is the best in the land. If you had to cause trouble, why not choose a fat usurer? We’d have been paid for our trouble, then, at least.”

“The gods watch over me,” Lycon reiterated, leaning forward and then rocking back, chuckling to himself. He leaned too far and fell on his nose, where he remained without moving. Something dropped from the bosom of his tunic and fell with a metallic sound to the oaken floor. Lycon snored.

Elak, smiling unpleasantly, appropriated the purse and investigated its contents. “Your fingers are swifter than mine,” he told the recumbent Lycon, “but I can hold more mead than you. Next time don’t try to cheat one who has more brains in his big toe than you have in all your misshapen body. Scavenging little ape! Get up; the innkeeper is returning with soldiers.”

He thrust the purse into the wallet at his belt and kicked Lycon heartily, but the small thief failed to awaken. Cursing with a will, Elak hoisted the body of the other to his shoulders and staggered toward the back of the tavern. The distant sound of shouting from the street outside grew louder, and Elak thought he could hear the querulous complaints of the innkeeper.

“There will be a reckoning, Lycon!” he promised bitterly. “Ishtar, yes! You’ll learn—”

He pushed through a golden drapery and hurried along a corridor — kicked open an oaken door and came out in the alley behind the tavern. Above, cold stars glittered frostily, and an icy wind blew on Elak’s sweating face, sobering him somewhat.

Lycon stirred and writhed in his arms. “More grog!” he muttered. “Oh gods! Is there no more grog?” A maudlin tear fell hotly on Elak’s neck, and the latter for a moment entertained the not unpleasant idea of dropping Lycon and leaving him for the irate guards. The soldiers of San-Mu were not renowned for their soft-heartedness, and tales of what they sometimes did to their captives were unpleasantly explicit.

However, he ran along the alley instead, blundered into a brawny form that sprang out of the darkness abruptly, and saw a snarling, bearded face indistinct in the vague starlight. He dropped Lycon and whipped out his rapier. Already the soldier was plunging forward, his great sword rushing down.

Then it happened. Elak saw the guard’s mouth open in a square of amazement, saw horror spring into the cold eyes. The man’s face was a mask of abysmal fear. He flung himself back desperately — the sword-tip just missed Elak’s face.

The soldier raced away into the shadows.

* * *


With a snake-like movement Elak turned, rapier ready. He caught a blur of swift motion. The man facing him had lifted quick hands to his face, and dropped them as suddenly. But there was no menace in the gesture. Nevertheless Elak felt a chill of inexplicable uneasiness crawl down his back as he faced his rescuer. The soldiers of San-Mu were courageous, if lacking in human kindness. What had frightened the attacking guard?

He eyed the other. He saw a medium-sized man, clad in voluminous gray garments that were almost invisible in the gloom — saw a white face with regular, statuesque features. A black hollow sprang into existence within the white mask as a soft voice whispered, “You’d escape from the guards? No need, for your rapier — I’m a friend.”

“Who the — but there’s no time for talk. Thanks, and good-bye.” Elak stooped and hoisted Lycon to his shoulders again. The little man was blinking and murmuring soft appeals for more mead. And the hasty thunder of mailed feet grew louder, while torchlight swiftly approaching cast gleams of light about the trio.

“In here,” the gray-clad man whispered. “You’ll be safe.” Now Elak saw that in the stone wall beside him a black rectangle gaped. He sprang through the portal without hesitation. The other followed, and instantly they were in utter blackness as an unseen door swung creakingly on rusty hinges.

Elak felt a soft hand touch his own. Or was it a hand? For a second he had the incredible feeling that the thing whose flesh he had touched did not belong to any human body — it was too soft, too cold! His skin crawled at the feel of the thing. It was withdrawn, and a fold of gray cloth swung against his palm. He gripped it.

“Follow!”

Silently, gripping the guide’s garment, bearing Lycon on his shoulders, Elak moved forward. How the other could find his way through the blackness Elak did not know, unless he knew the way by heart. Yet the passage — if passage it was — turned and twisted endlessly as it went down. Presently Elak had the feeling that he was moving through a larger space, a cave, perhaps. His footsteps sounded differently, somehow. And through the darkness vague whisperings came to him.

Whispers in no language he knew. The murmurous sibilants rustled out strangely, making Elak’s brows contract and his free hand go involuntarily to the hilt of his rapier. He snarled, “Who’s here?”

The invisible guide cried out in the mysterious tongue. Instantly the whisperings stopped.

“You are among friends,” a voice said softly from the blackness. “We are almost at our destination. A few more steps—”

A few more steps, and light blazed up. They stood in a small rectangular chamber hollowed out of the rock. The nitrous walls gleamed dankly in the glow of an oil lamp, and a little stream ran across the rock floor of the cave and lost itself, amid chuckles of goblin laughter, in a small hole at the base of the wall. Two doors were visible. The gray-clad man was closing one of them.

A crude table and a few chairs were all the furnishings of the room. Elak strained his ears. He heard something — something that should not be heard in inland San-Mu. He could not be mistaken. The sound of waves lapping softly in the distance … and occasionally a roaring crash, as of breakers smashing on a rocky shore.

He dumped Lycon unceremoniously in one of the chairs. The little man fell forward on the table, pillowing his head in his arms. Sadly he muttered, “Is there no mead in Atlantis? I die, Elak. My belly is an arid desert across which the armies of Eblis march.”

He sobbed unhappily for a moment and fell asleep.

* * *


Elak ostentatiously unsheathed his rapier and laid it on the table. His slender fingers closed on the hilt. “An explanation,” he said, “is due. Where are we?”

“I am Gesti,” said the gray-clad one. His face seemed chalk-white in the light of the oil lamp. His eyes, deeply sunken, were covered with a curious glaze. “I saved you from the guards, eh? You’ll not deny that?”

“You have my thanks,” Elak said. “Well?”

“I need the aid of a brave man. And I’ll pay well. If you’re interested, good. If not, I’ll see you leave San-Mu safely.”

Elak considered. “It’s true we’ve little money.” He thought of the purse in his wallet and grinned wryly. “Not enough to last us long, at any rate. Perhaps we’re interested. Although—” He hesitated.

“Well?”

“I could bear to know how you got rid of the soldier so quicldy, back in the alley behind the tavern.”

“I do not think that matters,” Gesti whispered in his sibilant voice. “The guards are superstitious. And it’s easy to play on their weakness. Let that suffice!” The cold glazed eyes met Elak’s squarely, and a little warning note seemed to clang in his brain.

There was danger here. Yet danger had seldom given him pause. He said, “What will you pay?”

“A thousand golden pieces.”

“Fifty thousand cups of mead,” Lycon murmured sleepily. “Accept it, Elak. I’ll await you here.”

There was little affection in the glance Elak cast at his companion. “You’ll get none of it,” he promised. “Not a gold piece!”

He turned to Gesti. “What’s to be done for this reward?”

Gesti’s immobile face watched him cryptically. “Kill Zend.”

Elak said, “Kill — Zend? Zend? The Wizard of Atlantis?”

“Are you afraid?” Gesti asked tonelessly.

“I am,” Lycon said without lifting his head from his arms. “However, if Elak is not, he may slay Zend and I’ll wait here.”

Ignoring him, Elak said, “I’ve heard strange things of Zend. His powers are not human. Indeed, he’s not been seen in the streets of San-Mu for ten years. Men say he’s immortal.”

“Men — are fools.” And in Gesti’s voice there was a contempt that made Elak stare at him sharply. It was as though Gesti was commenting on some race alien to him. The gray-clad man went on hurriedly, as though sensing the trend of Elak’s thoughts. “We have driven a passage under Zend’s palace. We can break through at any time; that we shall do tonight. Two tasks I give you: kill Zend; shatter the red sphere.”

Elak said, “You’re cryptic. What red sphere?”

“It lies in the topmost minaret of his palace. His magic comes from it. There is rich loot in the palace, Elak — if that’s your name. So the little man called you.”

“Elak or dunce or robber of drunken men,” Lycon said, absently feeling the bosom of his tunic. “All alike. Call him by any of those names and you’ll be right. Where is my gold, Elak?”

But without waiting for an answer he slumped down in his chair, his eyes closing and his mouth dropping open as he snored. Presently he fell off the chair and rolled under the table, where he slumbered.

“What the devil can I do with him?” Elak asked. “I can’t take him with me. He’d”

“Leave him here,” Gesti said.

Elak’s cold eyes probed the other. “He’ll be safe?”

“Quite safe. None in San-Mu but our band knows of this underground way.”

“What band is that? “ Elak asked.

Gesti said nothing for a time. Then his soft voice whispered, “Need you know? A political group banded together to overthrow the king of San-Mu, and Zend, from whom he gets his power. Have you more — questions?”

“No.”

“Then follow.”

Gesti led Elak to one of the oaken doors; it swung open, and they moved forward up a winding passage. In the dark Elak stumbled over a step. He felt the cloth of Gesti’s garment touch his hand, and gripped it. In the blackness they ascended a staircase cut out of the rock.

Halfway up, Gesti paused. “I can go no further,” he whispered. “The way is straight. At the end of the stairway there is a trap-door of stone. Open it. You’ll be in Zend’s place. Here is a weapon for you.” He thrust a tube of cold metal into Elak’s hand. “Simply squeeze its sides, pointing the smaller end at Zend. You understand?”

Elak nodded, and, although Gesti could scarcely have seen the movement in the darkness, he whispered, “Good. Dagon guard you!”

He turned away; Elak heard the soft rush of his descent dying in the distance. He began to mount the stairs, wonderingly. Dagon — was Gesti a worshipper of the forbidden evil god of ocean? Poseidon, a benignant sea-god, was adored in marble temples all over the land, but the dark worship of Dagon had been banned for generations. There were tales of another race whose god Dagon was — a race that had not sprung from human or even earthly loins…

* * *


Gripping the odd weapon, Elak felt his way upward. At length his head banged painfully against stone, and, cursing softly, he felt about in the darkness. It was the trap-door of which Gesti had spoken. Two bolts slid back in well-oiled grooves. And the door lifted easily as Elak thrust his shoulders against it.

He clambered up in semi-darkness, finding himself in a small bare room through which light filtered from a narrow window-slit high in the wall. A mouse, squeaking fearfully, fled as he scrambled to his feet. Apparently the room was little used. Elak moved stealthily to the door.

It swung, open a little under his cautious hand. A corridor stretched before him, dimly lit by cold blue radiance that came from tiny gems set in the ceiling at intervals. Elak followed the upward slant of the passage; the red sphere Gesti had mentioned was in the topmost minaret. Up, then.

“Ishtar!” Elak breathed. “What wizardry’s this?”

In a niche in the wall Elak saw the head. The shock of it turned him cold with amazement. A bodiless head, set upright on a golden pedestal within a little alcove — its cheeks sunken, hair lank and disheveled — but eyes bright with incredible life! Those eyes watched him!

“Ishtar!” Elak breathed. “What wizardry’s this?”

He soon found out. The pallid lips of the horror writhed and twisted, and from them came a high skirling cry of warning.

“Zend! Zend! A stranger walks your—”

Elak’s rapier flew. There was scarcely any blood. He dragged the blade from the eyesocket, whispering prayers to all the gods and goddesses he could remember. The lean jaw dropped, and a blackened and swollen tongue lolled from between the teeth. A red, shrunken, eyelid dropped over the eye Elak had not pierced.

There was no sound save for Elak’s hastened breathing. He eyed the monstrous thing in the alcove, and then, confident that it was no longer a menace, lengthened his steps up the passage. Had Zend heard the warning of his sentinel? If so, danger lurked all about him.

A silver curtain slashed with a black pattern hung across the corridor. Elak parted it, and, watching, he froze in every muscle.

A dwarf, no more than four feet tall, with a disproportionately large head and a gray, wrinkled skin, was trotting briskly toward him. From the tales he had heard Elak imagined the dwarf to be Zend. Behind the wizard strode a half-naked giant, who carried over his shoulder the limp form of a girl. Elak spun about, realizing that he had delayed too long. Zend was parting the silver curtain as Elak raced back down the corridor.

At his side a black rectangle loomed — a passage he had overlooked, apparently, when he had passed it before. He sprang into its shielding darkness. When Zend passed he would strike down the wizard and take his chances with the giant. Remembering the smooth hard muscles that had rippled under the dead-white skin of the man, Elak was not so sure that his chances would be worth much. He realized now that the giant had seemed familiar.

Then he knew. Two days ago he had seen a man — a condemned criminal — beheaded in the temple of Poseidon. There could be no mistake. The giant was the same man, brought back to life by Zend’s evil necromancy!

“Ishtar!” Elak whispered, sweating. “I’d be better off in the hands of the guards.” How could he slay a man who was already dead?

Elak hesitated, his rapier half drawn. There was no use borrowing trouble. He would keep safely out of sight until Zend was separated from his ghastly servitor — and then it would be an easy matter to put six inches of steel through the wizard’s body. Elak was never one for taking unnecessary risks, as he had a wholesome regard for his hide. He heard a shuffling of feet and drew back within the side passage to let Zend pass. But the wizard turned suddenly and began to mount the steeply sloping corridor where Elak lurked. In Zend’s hand was a softly glowing gem that illuminated the passage, though not brightly.

Elak fled. The passage was steep and narrow, and it ended at last before a blank wall. Behind him a steady padding of feet grew louder in the distance. He felt around desperately in the dark. If there was a hidden spring in the walls, he failed to find it.

A grin lighted his face as he realized how narrow the passage was. If he could do it—

* * *


He placed his palms flat against the wall, and with his bare feet found an easy purchase on the opposite one. Face down, swiftly, with his muscles cracking under the strain, he walked up the wall until he was safely above the head of even the giant. There he stopped, sweating, and glanced down.

Only an enormously strong man could have done it, and if Elak had weighed a little more it would have been impossible. His shoulders and thighs ached as he strained to hold his position without moving. The trio were approaching. If they should glance up, Elak was ready to drop and use his blade, or the strange weapon Gesti had given him. But apparently they did not notice him, hidden as he was in the shadows of the high ceiling.

He caught a glimpse of the girl the giant carried. A luscious wench! But, of course, Zend would undoubtedly choose only the most attractive maidens for his necromancy and sorcery.

“If that dead-alive monster weren’t here,” he ruminated, “I’d be tempted to fall on Zend’s head. No doubt the girl would be grateful.”

She was, at the moment, unconscious. Long black lashes lay on cream-pale cheeks, and dark ringlets swayed as the giant lurched on. Zend’s hand fumbled out, touched the wall. The smooth surface of stone lifted and the gray dwarf pattered into the dimness beyond. The giant followed, and the door dropped again.

With a low curse of relief Elak swung noiselessly to the floor and rubbed his hands on his leather tunic. They were bleeding, and only the hardness of his soles had saved his feet from a similar fate. After a brief wait Elak fumbled in the darkness and found the concealed spring.

The door lifted, with a whispering rush of sound.

Elak found himself in a short corridor that ended in another black-slashed silver curtain. He moved forward, noticing with relief that the door remained open behind him.

Beyond the silver curtain was a room — huge, high-domed, with great open windows through which the chill night wind blew strongly. The room blazed with the coruscating brilliance of the glowing gems, which were set in walls and ceiling in bizarre, arabesque patterns. Through one window Elak saw the yellow globe of the moon, which was just rising. Three archways, curtained, broke the smooth expanse of the farther wall. The chamber itself, richly furnished with rugs and silks and ornaments, was empty of occupants. Elak noiselessly covered the distance to the archways and peered through the curtain of the first.

Blazing white light blinded him. He had a flashing, indistinct vision of tremendous forces, leashed, cyclopean, straining mightily to burst the bonds that held them. Yet actually he saw nothing — merely an empty room. But empty he knew that it was not! Power unimaginable surged from beyond the archway, shuddering through every atom of Elak’s body. Glittering steel walls reflected his startled face.

And on the floor, in the very center of the room, he saw a small mud-colored stone. That was all. Yet about the stone surged a tide of power that made Elak drop the curtain and back away, his eyes wide with fear. Very quickly he turned to the next curtain — peered apprehensively beyond it.

Here was a small room, cluttered with alembics, retorts, and other of Zend’s magical paraphernalia. The pallid giant stood silently in a corner. On a low table was stretched the girl, still unconscious. Above her hovered the gray dwarf, a crystal vial in one hand. He tilted it; a drop fell.

Elak heard Zend’s harsh voice.

“A new servant … a new soul to serve me. When her soul is freed, I shall send it to Antares. There is a planet there where I’ve heard much sorcery exists. Mayhap I can learn a few more secrets…”

Elak turned to the last alcove. He lifted the curtain, saw a steep stairway. From it rose-red light blazed down. He remembered Gesri’s words: “Shatter the red sphere! His magic comes from it.”

Good! He’d break the sphere first, and then, with no magic to protect him, Zend would be easy prey. With a lithe bound Elak began to mount the stairs. Behind him came a guttural cry.

“Eblis, Ishtar, and Poseidon!” Elak said hastily. “Protect me now!” He was at the top of the staircase, in a high-domed room through which moonlight crept from narrow windows. It was the room of the sphere.

Glowing, shining with lambent rose-red radiance, the great sphere lay in a silver cradle, metallic tubes and wires trailing from it to vanish into the walls. Half as tall as Elak’s body it was, its brilliance soft but hypnotically intense — and he stood for a moment motionless, staring.

* * *


Behind him feet clattered on the stair. He turned, saw the pallid giant lumbering up. A livid scar circled the dead-white neck. He had been right, then. This was the criminal he had seen executed — brought back to life by Zend’s necromancy. In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a dagger’s blow or a strangler’s hands.

Without a sound the giant sprang for Elak, who dodged under the great clutching paws and sent his rapier’s point deep within the dead-white breast. It bent dangerously; he whipped it out just in time to save it from snapping, and it sang shrilly as it vibrated. Elak’s opponent seemed unhurt. Yet the rapier had pierced his heart. He bled not at all.

The battle was not a long one, and it ended at a window. The two men went reeling and swaying about the room, ripping wires and tubes from their places in the fury of their struggle. Abruptly the red light of the globe dimmed, went out. Simultaneously Elak felt the giant’s cold arms go about his waist.

Before they could tighten, he dropped. The moon peered in at a narrow window just beside him, and he flung himself desperately against the giant’s legs, wrenching with all his strength. The undead creature toppled.

He came down as a tree falls, without striving to break the force of the impact. His hands went out clutchingly for Elak’s throat. But Elak was shoving frantically at the white, cold, muscular body, forcing it out the narrow window. It overbalanced, toppled — and fell.

The giant made no outcry. After a moment a heavy thud was audible. Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. “For,” he thought, “a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar’s hand saved me, one never knows.” Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so.

A loud shriek from below made him go quickly down the stairway, rapier ready. Zend was running toward him, his gray face a mask of fear. The dwarf hesitated at sight of him, spun about as a low rumble of voices came from near by. At the foot of the stairway Elak waited.

From the passage by which Elak had entered the great room a horde of nightmare beings spewed. In their van came Gesti, gray garments flapping, white face immobile as ever. Behind him sheer horror squirmed and leaped and tumbled. With a shock of loathing Elak remembered the whispering voices he had heard in the underground cavern — and knew, now, what manner of creatures had spoken thus.

A race that had not sprung from human or even earthly loins.…

Their faces were hideous staring masks, fish-like in contour, with parrot-like beaks and great staring eyes covered with a filmy glaze. Their bodies were amorphous things, half solid and half gelatinous ooze, like the iridescent slime of jellyfish; writhing tentacles sprouted irregularly from the ghastly bodies of the things. They were the offspring of no sane universe, and they came in a blasphemous hissing rush across the room. The rapier stabbed out vainly and clattered to the stones as Elak went down. He struggled futilely for a moment, hearing the harsh, agonized shrieks of the wizard. Cold tentacles were all about him, blinding him in their constricting coils. Then suddenly the weight that held him helpless was gone. His legs and arms, he discovered, were tightly bound with cords. He fought vainly to escape; then lay quietly.

Beside him, he saw, the wizard lay tightly trussed. The nightmare beings were moving in an orderly rush toward the room in which Elak had sensed the surges of tremendous power, where lay the little brown stone. They vanished beyond the curtain, and beside Elak and the wizard there remained only Gesti. He stood looking down at the two, his white face immobile.

“What treachery is this?” Elak asked with no great hopefulness. “Set me free and give me my gold.”

But Gesti merely said, “You won’t need it. You will die very soon.”

“Eh? Why—”

“Fresh human blood is needed. That’s why we didn’t kill you or Zend. We need your blood. We’ll be ready soon.”

An outbrust of sibilant whispers came from beyond the silver drape. Elak said unsteadily, “What manner of demons are those?”

The wizard gasped, “You ask him? Did you not know—”

Gesti lifted gloved hands and removed his face. Elak bit his lips to choke back a scream. Now he knew why Gesti’s face had seemed so immobile. It was a mask.

Behind it were the parrot-like beak and fish-like eyes Elak now knew all too well. The gray robes sloughed off; the gloves dropped from the limber tips of tentacles. From the horrible beak came the sibilant whisper of the monster:

“Now you know whom you served.”

The thing that had called itself Gesti turned and progressed — that was the only way to describe its method of moving — to the curtain behind which its fellows had vanished. It joined them. Zend was staring at Elak. “You did not know? You served them, and yet did not know?”

“By Ishtar, no!” Elak swore. “D’you think I’d have let those — those — what are they? What are they going to do?”

“Roll over here,” Zend commanded. “Maybe I can loosen your bonds.”

Elak obeyed, and the wizard’s fingers worked deftly.

“I doubt — no human hands tied these knots. But—”

“What are they?” Elak asked again. “Tell me, before I go mad thinking hell has loosed its legions on Atlantis.”

“They are the children of Dagon,” Zend said. “Their dwelling-place is in the great deeps of the ocean. Have you never heard of the unearthly ones who worship Dagon?”

“Yes. But I never believed—”

“Oh, there’s truth in the tale. Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. Hold still. These cursed knots—”

“I don’t understand all of that,” Elak said, wincing as the wizard’s nail dug into his wrist. “But go on.”

“These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas… . They will achieve their desire now, Hear.”

“Not if I can get free,” Elak said. “How do the knots hold?”

“They hold,” the wizard said discouragedly. “But one strand is loose. My fingers are raw. The — the red globe is broken?”

“No,” Elak said. “Some cords were torn loose as I fought with your slave, and the light went out of it. Why?”

“The gods be thanked!” Zend said fervently. “If I can repair the damage and light the globe again, the children of Dagon will die. That’s the purpose of it. The rays it emits destroy their bodies, which are otherwise invulnerable, or almost so. If I hadn’t had the globe, they’d have invaded my palace and killed me long ago.”

“They have a tunnel under the cellars,” Elak said.

“I see. But they dared not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. Curse these knots! If they accomplish their purpose—”

“What’s that?” Elak asked — but he had already guessed the answer.

“To sink Atlantis! This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn’t pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room” — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — “in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon’s breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis.”

Hot blood dripped on Elak’s hands as the wizard tore at the cords.

“Aye … other lands. There were races that dwelt on Earth before man came. My powers have shown me a sunlit island that once reared far to the south, an island where dwelt a race of beings tall as trees, whose flesh was hard as stone, and whose shape was so strange you could scarcely comprehend it. The waters rose and covered that island, and its people died. I have seen a gigantic mountain that speared up from a waste of tossing waters, in Earth’s youth, and in the towers and minarets that crowned its summit dwelt beings like sphinxes, with the heads of beasts and gods and whose broad wings could not save them when the cataclysm came. For ruin came to the city of the sphinxes, and it sank beneath the ocean — destroyed by the children of Dagon. And there was—”

“Hold!” Elak’s breathless whisper halted the wizard’s voice. “Hold! I see rescue, Zend.”

“Eh?” The wizard screwed his head around until he too saw the short, ape-featured man who was running silently across the room, knife in hand. It was Lycon, whom Elak had left slumbering in the underground den of Gesti.

The knife flashed and Elak and Zend were free. Elak said swiftly, “Up the stairs, wizard. Repair your magic globe, since you say its light will kill these horrors. We’ll hold the stairway.”

* * *


Without a word the gray dwarf sped silently up the steps and was gone. Elak turned to Lycon.

“How the devil—”

Lycon blinked wide blue eyes. “I scarcely know, Elak. Only when you were carrying me out of the tavern and the soldier screamed and ran away I saw something that made me so drunk I couldn’t remember what it was. I remembered only a few minutes ago, back downstairs somewhere. A face that looked like a gargoyle’s, with a terrible great beak and eyes like Midgard Serpent’s. And I remembered I’d seen Gesti put a mask over the awful face just before you turned there in the alley. So I knew Gesti was probably a demon.”

“And so you came here,” Elak commented softly. “Well, it’s a good thing for me you did. I — what’s the matter?” Lycon’s blue eyes were bulging.

“Is this your demon?” the little man asked, pointing.

Elak turned, and smiled grimly. Facing him, her face puzzled and frightened, was the girl on whom Zend had been experimenting — the maiden whose soul he had been about to unleash to serve him when Elak had arrived. Her eyes were open now, velvet-soft and dark, and her white body gleamed against the silver-black drape.

Apparently she had awakened, and had arisen from her hard couch.

Elak’s hand went up in a warning gesture, commanding silence, but it was too late. The girl said,

“Who are you? Zend kidnapped me — are you come to set me free? Where—”

With a bound Elak reached her, dragged her back, thrust her up the stairway. His rapier flashed in his hand. Over his shoulder he cast a wolfish smile.

“If we live, you’ll escape Zend and his magic,” he told the girl, hearing an outbrust of sibilant cries and the rushing murmur of the attacking horde. Yet he did not turn. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Coryllis.”

“’Ware, Elak!” Lycon shouted.

Elak turned to see the little man’s sword flash out, shearing a questing tentacle in two. The severed end dropped, writhing and coiling in hideous knots. The frightful devil-masks of monsters glared into Elak’s eyes. The children of Dagon came sweeping in a resistless rush, cold eyes glazed and glaring, tentacles questing, iridescent bodies shifting and pulsing like jelly — and Elak and Lycon and the girl, Coryllis, were caught by their fearful wave and forced back, up the staircase.

Snarling inarticulate curses, Lycon swung his sword, but it was caught and dragged from his hand by a muscular tentacle. Elak tried to shield Coryllis with his own body; he felt himself going down, smothering beneath the oppressive weight of cold, hideous bodies that writhed and twisted with dreadful life. He struck out desperately — and felt a hard, cold surface melting like snow beneath his hands.

The weight that held him down was dissipating — the things were retreating, flowing back, racing and flopping and tumbling down the stairs, shrieking an insane shrill cry. They blackened and melted into shapeless puddles of slime that trickled like a little gray stream down the stairway… .

Elak realized what had happened. A rose-red light was glowing in the air all about him. The wizard had repaired his magic globe, and the power of its rays was destroying the nightmare menace that had crept up from the deeps.

In a heartbeat it was over. There was no trace of the horde that had attacked them. Gray puddles of ooze — no more. Elak realized that he was cursing softly, and abruptly changed it to a prayer. With great earnestness he thanked Ishtar for his deliverance.

* * *


Lycon recovered his sword, and handed Elak his rapier. “What now?” he asked.

“We’re off! We’re taking Coryllis with us — there’s no need to linger here. True, we helped the wizard — but we fought him first. He may remember that. There’s no need to test his gratefulness, and we’d be fools to do it.”

He picked up Coryllis, who had quietly fainted, and quickly followed Lycon down the steps. They hurried across the great room and into the depths of the corridor beyond.

And five minutes later they were sprawled at full length under a tree in one of San-Mu’s numerous parks. Elak had snatched a silken robe from a balcony as he passed beneath, and Coryllis had draped it about her slim body. The stars glittered frostily overhead, unconcerned with the fate of Atlantis — stars that would be shining thousands of years hence when Atlantis was not even a memory.

No thought of this came to Elak now. He wiped his rapier with a tuft of grass, while Lycon, who had already cleaned his blade, stood up and, shading his eyes with his palm, peered across the park. He muttered something under his breath and set off at a steady lope. Elak stared after him.

“Where’s he going? There’s a — by Ishtar! He’s going in a grog shop. But he has no money. How—”

A shocked thought came to him, and he felt hastily in his wallet. Then he cursed. “The drunken little ape! When he slashed my bonds in the wizard’s palace, he stole the purse! I’ll—”

Elak sprang to his feet and took a stride forward. Soft arms gripped his leg. He looked down. “Eh?”

“Let him go,” Coryllis said, smiling. “He’s earned his mead.”

“Yes — but what about me? I—”

“Let him go,” Coryllis murmured….

And, ever after that, Lycon was to wonder why Elak never upbraided him about the stolen purse.




The Invaders

by Henry Kuttner


Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos” proved to be quite influential. Lovecraft mentions the uncanny canines in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, and later the Hounds were taken out fora walk by both Brian Lumley and Roger Zelazny. The device of the drug that enables the user to swim backward in the time stream also proved influential. One finds it in this story by Kuttner as well. We will find something similar again in “Hydra.”

Kuttner also has a good bit of fun with his friend Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm in this story. He notes that “the book’s kept in a vault in the Huntington Library… but I managed to get photostatic copies of the pages I needed… Scarcely anyone in California knows that such a book exists in the Huntington Library.” Of course, there is no De Vermis Mysteriis there or any place else, but Kuttner’s fiction did prove to be strangely prophetic. As it happens, the Huntington Library did acquire a treasure trove of ancient esoteric manuscripts—a complete set of photograph copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls—and few knew of their presence. Though a good three-fourths of the Scroll texts had been published by the 1960’s and ’70’s, the official authorities in Jerusalem kept the remainder under wraps. All scholarly requests for access and plans to publish these texts were quashed by the authorities.

To break this scholarly monopoly, the Huntington Library announced in 1991 that any interested scholar might have access to their set of copies. Since then we have witnessed a firestorm of controversy over the Scrolls, their content, date, authorship, and possible repercussions for the early history of Christianity. Kuttner was more than half right in depicting a secret manuscript kept under wraps at the Huntington Library, as well as the furor that resulted when photocopies were made available!

First publication: Strange Stories, February 1939

* * *


“Oh—it’s you,” said Hayward. "You got my wire?”

The light from the doorway of the cottage outlined his tall, lean figure, making his shadow a long, black blotch on the narrow bar of radiance that shone across the sand to where green-black rollers were surging.

A sea bird gave a shrill, eerie cry from the darkness, and I saw Hayward’s silhouette give a curious little jerk.

“Come in,” he said, quickly, stepping back.

Mason and I followed him into the cottage.

Michael Hayward was a writer—a unique one. Very few writers could create the strange atmosphere of eldritch horror that Hayward put into his fantastic tales of mystery. He had imitators—all great writers have—but none attained the stark and dreadful illusion of reality with which he invested his oftentimes shocking fantasies. He went far beyond the bounds of human experience and familiar superstition, delving into uncanny fields of unearthliness. Blackwood’s vampiric elementals, M. R. James’ loathsome liches—even the black horror of de Maupassant’s “Horla” and Bierce’s “Damned Thing”—paled by comparison.

It wasn’t the abnormal beings Hayward wrote about so much as the masterly impression of reality he managed to create in the reader’s mind—the ghastly idea that he wasn’t writing fiction, but was simply transcribing on paper the stark, hellish truth. It was no wonder that the jaded public avidly welcomed each new story he wrote.

Bill Mason had telephoned me that afternoon at the Journal, where I worked, and had read me an urgent telegram from Hayward asking -in fact, begging- us to come at once to his isolated cottage on the beach north of Santa Barbara. Now, beholding him, I wondered at the urgency.

He didn’t seem ill, although his thin face was more gaunt than usual, and his eyes unnaturally bright. There was a nervous tension in his manner, and I got the odd impression that he was intently listening, alert for some sound from outside the cottage. As he took our coats and motioned us to chairs, Mason gave me a worried glance.

Something was wrong. Mason sensed it, I sensed it. Hayward filled his pipe and lit it, the smoke wreathing about his stiff black hair. There were bluish shadows in his temples.

“What’s up, old man?” I hazarded. “We couldn’t make head nor tail of your wire.”

He flushed. “I guess I was a little flurried when I wrote it. You see, Gene—oh, what’s the use—something is wrong, very wrong. At first I thought it might be my nerves, but—it isn’t.”

From outside the cottage came the shrill cry of a gull, and Hayward turned his face to the window. His eyes were staring, and I saw him repress a shudder. Then he seemed to pull himself together. He faced us, his lips compressed.

“Tell me, Gene—and you, Bill—did you notice anything— odd—on your way up?”

“Why, no,” I said.

“Nothing? Are you sure? It might have seemed unimportant— any sounds, I mean.”

“There were the seagulls,” Mason said, frowning. “You remember, I mentioned them to you, Gene.”

Hayward caught him up sharply. “Seagulls?”

“Yes,” I said. “That is, birds of some kind—they didn’t sound quite like seagulls. We couldn’t see them, but they kept following the car, calling to each other. We could hear them. But aside from the birds—”

I hesitated, astonished at the look on Hayward’s face—an expression almost of despair. He said, “No—that’s it, Gene. But they weren’t birds. They’re something—you won’t believe,” he whispered, and there was fright in his eyes. “Not till you see them—and then it’ll be too late.”

“Mike,” I said. “You’ve been overworking. You’ve—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I’m not losing my grip. Those weird stories of mine—they haven’t driven me mad, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m as sane as you are. The truth is,” he said very slowly, choosing his words with care, “I am being attacked."

I groaned inwardly. Delusions of persecution—a symptom of insanity. Was Hayward’s mind really crumbling? Why, I wondered, were his eyes so unnaturally bright, and his thin face so flushed? And why did he keep shooting quick, furtive glances at the window?

I turned to the window. I started to say something and stopped.

I was looking at a vine. That is, it resembled a thick, fleshy vine more than anything else, but I had never seen any plant quite similar to the rope-like thing that lay along the window ledge. I opened the window to get a better look at it.

It was as thick as my forearm, and very pale—yellowish ivory. It possessed a curious glossy texture that made it seem semi-transparent, and it ended in a raw-looking stump that was overgrown with stiff, hair-like cilia. The tip somehow made me think of an elephant’s trunk, although there was no real similarity. The other end dangled from the window ledge and disappeared in the darkness toward the front of the house. And, somehow, I didn’t like the look of the thing.

“What is it?” Mason asked behind me.

I picked up the—the—whatever it was. Then I got a severe shock, for it began to slip through my hand! It was being pulled away from me, and as I stared the end slipped through my fingers and whipped into the darkness. I craned out the window.

“There’s somebody outside!” I flung over my shoulder. “I saw—”

I felt a hand seize me, shove me aside. “Shut that window,” Hayward gasped. He slammed it down, locked it. And I heard a gasping inarticulate cry from Mason.

He was standing in the open doorway, glaring out. His face was changing, becoming transfigured with amazement and loathing.

From outside the portal came a shrill, mewing cry—and a blast of great winds. Sand swirled in through the doorway. I saw Mason stagger back, his arm flung up before his eyes.

Hayward leaped for the door, slammed it. I helped the now shuddering Mason to a chair. It was terrible to see this usually imperturbable man in the grip of what could only be called panic. He dropped into the seat, glaring up at me with distended eyes. I gave him my flask; his fingers were white as they gripped it. He took a hasty gulp. His breathing was rapid and uneven.

Hayward came up beside me, stood looking down at Mason, pity in his face.

“What the devil’s the matter?” I cried. But Mason ignored me, had eyes only for Hayward.

“G-God in heaven,” he whispered. “Have I—gone mad, Hayward?"

Hayward shook his head slowly. “I’ve seen them, too.”

“Bill,” I said sharply. “What’s out there? What did you see?”

He only shook his head violently, trying to repress the violent paroxysms of trembling that were shaking him.

I swung about, went to the door, opened it. I don’t know what I expected to see—some animal, perhaps—a mountain lion or even a huge snake of some kind. But there was nothing there—just the empty white beach.

It was true there was a disk-shaped area of disturbed sand nearby, but I could make nothing of that. I heard Hayward shouting at me to close the door.

I shut it. “There’s nothing there,” I said.

“It—must have gone,” Mason managed to get out. “Give me another drink, will you?”

I handed him my flask. Hayward was fumbling in his desk. “Look here,” he said after a moment, coming back with a scrap of yellow paper. He thrust it at Mason, and Bill gasped out something incoherent. “That’s it,” he said, getting his voice under control. “That’s the—the thing I saw!”

I peered over his shoulder, scrutinizing the paper. It bore a sketch in pencil, of something that looked as if it had emerged from a naturalist’s nightmare. At first glance I got the impression of a globe, oddly flattened at the top and bottom, and covered with what I thought at first was a sparse growth of very long and thick hairs. Then I saw that they were appendages, slender tentacles. On the rugose upper surface of the thing was a great faceted eye, and below this a puckered orifice that corresponded, perhaps, to a mouth. Sketched hastily by Hayward, who was not an artist, it was nevertheless powerfully evocative of the hideous.

“That’s the thing,” Mason said. “Put it away! It was all—shining, though. And it made that—that sound.”

“Where did it go?” Hayward asked.

“I—don’t know. It didn’t roll away—or go into the ocean. I’m sure of that. All I heard was that blast of wind, and sand blew in my eyes. Then—well, it was gone.”

* * *


I shivered.

“It’s cold,” Hayward said, watching me. “It always gets cold when they come.” Silently he began to kindle a fire in the stone fireplace.

“But such things can’t exist!” Mason cried out in sudden protest. Then in tones of despair: “But I saw it, I saw it!”

“Get hold of yourself, Bill,” I snapped.

“I don’t give a damn what you think, Gene,” he cried. “I saw something out there that—why, I’ve always laughed at such things—legends, dreams—but, God! when one sees it—oh, I’m not trying to fool you, Gene. You’ll probably see the thing yourself before long.” He finished with a curious note of horror in his voice.

I knew he wasn’t lying. Still—“Are you sure it wasn’t a—a mirage?” I asked. “The spray, perhaps—an optical illusion?”

Hayward broke in. “No, Gene.” He faced us, grim lines bracketing his mouth. "It’s no illusion. It’s the stark, hideous truth. Even now I sometimes try to make myself believe I’m dreaming some fantastic, incredible nightmare from which I'll eventually awaken. But no. I—I couldn’t stand it any longer— alone. The things have been here for two days now. There are several of them—five or six, perhaps more. That’s why I sent you the wire.”

“Five or six of what?” I demanded, but Mason interrupted me quickly.

“Can’t we get out? My car is down the road a bit."

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” Hayward cried. “I’m afraid to. I’ve my car too. As a matter of fact, I did start for Santa Barbara last night. I thought I might get away under cover of dark. But the noises—those sounds they make—got louder and louder, and I had the feeling, somehow, that they were getting ready to drop on me. I flagged a man and paid him to send you the wire.”

“But what are they?” Mason burst out. “Have you no idea? Such things don’t just appear. Some hybrid form of life from the sea, perhaps—some unknown form of life—”

Hayward nodded. “Exactly. An unknown form of life. But one totally alien, foreign to mankind. Not from the sea, Bill, not from the sea. From another dimension—another plane of existence.”

This was too much for me. “Oh, come, Hayward,” I said. “You can’t really mean—why, it’s against all logic.”

“You didn’t see it,” Mason said, glaring at me. “If you’d seen that frightful, obscene thing, as I did—”

“Look here,” cut in Hayward abruptly. “I—I shouldn’t have brought you into this. Seeing what it’s done to Bill has made me realize—you’re still free to go, you know. Perhaps it would be better—”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to run from a cry in the night, an odd-looking vine, an optical illusion. Besides, I knew what an effort it had cost Hayward to get out those words of renunciation. But before I could speak, a strange, shrill cry came from outside the house. Hayward glanced quickly at the window. He had pulled the shade down.

His face was grave. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “You mustn’t leave the house tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps—”

He turned to his desk, picked up a small pillbox. Mutely he extended his hand, on which he had dropped a few round, blackish pellets.

I picked one up, sniffed at it curiously. I felt an odd tickling sensation in my nostrils, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, thought of a childhood incident long buried in the past—nothing important, merely a clandestine visit to an apple orchard with two youthful chums. We had filled two gunny sacks—

Why should I remember this now? I had entirely forgotten that boyhood adventure—at least, I hadn’t thought of it in years.

Hayward took the pellet from me rather hastily, watching my face. “That was the beginning,” he said after a pause. “It’s a drug. Yes,” he went on at our startled expressions. “I’ve been taking it. Oh, it’s not hashish or opium—I wish it were! It’s far worse—I got the formula from Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. ”

“What?” I was startled. “Where did you—”

Hayward coughed. “As a matter of fact, Gene, I had to resort to a little bribery. The book’s kept in a vault in the Huntington Library, you know, but I—I managed to get photostatic copies of the pages I needed.”

“What’s it all about, this book?” Mason asked, impatiently.

“Mysteries of the Worm,” I told him. “I’ve seen it mentioned in dispatches at the paper. It’s one of the tabooed references—we’ve got orders to delete it from any story in which it appears.”

“Such things are kept hushed up,” Hayward said. “Scarcely anyone in California knows that such a book exists in the Huntington Library. Books like that aren’t for general knowledge. You see, the man who wrote it was supposed to be an old Flemish sorcerer, who had learned forbidden lore and evil magic—and who wrote the book while he was in prison awaiting trial for witchcraft. The volume’s been suppressed by the authorities in every country in which it’s been issued. In it I found the formula for this drug.”

He rattled the pellets in his hand. “It’s—I may as well tell you—it’s the source of my weird stories. It has a powerfully stimulating effect on the imagination.”

“What are its effects?” I asked.

“It’s a time drug,” Hayward said, and watched us.

We stared back at him.

“I don’t mean that the drug will enable the user to move in tjme—no. Not physically, at any rate. But by taking this drug I have been able to remember certain things that I have never experienced in this life.

“The drug enables one to recall his ancestral memories,” he went on swiftly, earnestly. “What’s so strange about that? I am able to remember past lives, previous reincarnations. You’ve heard of transmigration of souls—over one-half the population of the world believes in it. It’s the doctrine that the soul leaves the body at death to enter another—like the hermit crab, moving from one shell to another.”

“Impossible,” I said. But I was remembering my strange flash of memory while I was examining one of the pellets.

“And why?” Hayward demanded. “Surely the soul, the living essence, has a memory. And if that hidden, submerged memory can be dragged from the subconscious into the conscious—the old mystics had strange powers and stranger knowledge, Gene. Don’t forget that I’ve taken the drug.”

“What was it like?” Mason wanted to know.

“It was—well, like a flood of memory being poured into my mind—like a moving picture being unfolded—I can’t make it clearer than that.

“It brought me to Italy, the first time. It was during the Borgia reign. I can remember it vividly—plots and counterplots, and finally a flight to France, where I—or rather this ancestor of mine—died in a tavern brawl. It was very vivid, very real.

“I’ve kept taking the drug ever since, although it isn’t habit- forming. After I wake up from my dream-state—it takes from two to four hours, generally—my mind feels clear, free, unleashed. That’s when I do my writing.

“You have no idea how far back these ancestral memories go. Generations, ages, inconceivable eons! Back to Genghis Khan, back to Egypt and Babylon—and further than that, back to the fabulous sunken lands of Mu and Atlantis. It was in those first primal memories, in a land which exists today only as a memory and a myth, that I first encountered those things—the horror you saw tonight. They existed on Earth then, uncounted millennia ago. And I—”

Again the skirling, shrill cry shrieked out. This time it sounded as if it came from directly above the cottage. I felt a sudden pang of cold, as though the temperature had taken an abrupt drop. There was a heavy, ominous hush in which the crashing of the surf sounded like the thunder of great drums.

Sweat was standing out in beads on Hayward’s forehead.

“I’ve called them to Earth,” he muttered dully, his shoulders drooping. “The Mysteries of the Worm gave a list of precautions to be taken before using the drug—the Pnakotic pentagon, the cabalistical signs of protection—things you wouldn’t understand. The book gave terrible warnings of what might happen if those precautions weren’t taken—specifically mentioned those things—‘the dwellers in the Hidden World’, it called them.

“But I—I neglected finally to safeguard myself. I didn’t foresee— I thought I might get a stronger effect from the drug if I didn’t take the directed precautions, improve my stories. I unbarred the gateway, and called them to Earth again.”

He stared into space, his eyes blank and unseeing. “I have committed terrible sin by my neglect,” he muttered, it seemed to himself.

Mason was suddenly on his feet, his whole body shaking. “I can’t stay here! It’ll drive us all mad. It’s only an hour’s drive to Santa Barbara—I can’t stand this waiting, waiting, with that thing outside gloating over us!”

Was Mason, too, losing his nerve? His mind? In the face of this unseen menace, whatever it was?

Sea birds, a mirage of spray—men, perhaps—were responsible for Mason’s fear—I tried to tell myself that.

But deep in my heart I knew that no ordinary fear could have driven my two companions to the verge of craven hysteria. And I knew that I felt a strange reluctance to go out into that brooding, silent darkness on the beach.

“No,” Hayward said. “We can’t—that’d be walking right into the thing. We’ll be all right in here—”

But there was no reassurance in his voice.

“I can’t stay here doing nothing!” Mason shouted. “I tell you, we’ll all go crazy. Whatever that thing is—I’ve got my gun. And I’ll stake bullets against it any time. I’m not staying here!”

He was beside himself. A short time ago the thought of venturing outside the cottage had seemed horrible to him; now he welcomed it as an escape from nerve-racking inaction. He pulled a vicious, flat automatic from his pocket, strode to the door.

Hayward was on his feet, stark horror in his eyes. “For the love of God, don’t open that door!” he shouted.

But Mason flung open the door, ignoring him. A gust of icy wind blew in upon us. Outside fog was creeping in, sending greasy tendrils coiling like tentacles toward the doorway.

“Shut the door!” Hayward screamed as he lunged across the room. I made a hasty move forward as Mason sprang out into the darkness. I collided with Hayward, went reeling. I heard the gritty crunch of Mason’s footsteps on the sand—and something else.

A shrill, mewing cry. Somehow—fierce, exultant. And it was answered from the distance by other cries, as though dozens of sea birds were wheeling high above us, unseen in the fog.

I heard another strange little sound—I couldn’t classify it. It sounded vaguely like a shout that had been clipped off abruptly. There was a rushing howl of winds and I saw Hayward clinging to the door, staring out as though stupefied.

In a moment I saw why. Mason had vanished—utterly and completely, as though he had been borne off by a bird of prey. There was the empty beach, the low dunes to the left—but not a sign of Bill Mason.

I was dazed. He couldn’t have sprinted from sight during the brief time my eyes had been turned away. Nor could he have hidden beneath the house, for it was boarded down to the sand.

Hayward turned a white, lined face to me. “They’ve got him,” he whispered. “He wouldn’t listen to me. Their first victim—God knows what will happen now.”

Nevertheless we searched. It was in vain. Bill Mason had vanished. We went as far as his car, but he wasn’t there.

If the keys of the car had been in the dashboard, I might have urged Hayward to get into the car with me, to race from that haunted beach. I was growing afraid, but I dared not admit my fear even to myself.

We went back to the cottage slowly.

“It’s only a few hours ‘til dawn,” I said after we had sat and stared at each other for a while. “Mason—we can find him then.”

"We’ll never find him,” Hayward said dully. “He’s in some hellish world we can’t even imagine. He may even be in another dimension.”

I shook my head stubbornly. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe. There must be some logical explanation, and I dared not lower my defenses of skepticism and disbelief.

After a time we heard a shrill mewing from outside. It came again, and then several sharp cries at once. I lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, got up and paced the room nervously.

“That damned drug,” I heard Hayward muttering. “It’s opened the gateway—I have committed sin—”

I paused, my attention caught by a word, a sentence, on a sheet of paper in Hayward’s typewriter. I ripped it from the platen.

“Material for a story,” Hayward said bitterly, glancing up at the sound. “I wrote that two nights ago, when I first got the memory of the things. I’ve told you how those damnable pills work. I got the—the memory in the afternoon, and sat down to hammer out a story from it that night. I was—interrupted.”

I didn’t answer. I was reading, fascinated, that half-page of type. And as I read, an eerie spell of horror seemed to settle down over me, like a chill shroud of dank fog. For in that eldritch legend Hayward had written, there were certain disturbing hints of things that made my mind shudder away from their frightfulness, even while I recognized them.

The manuscript read:

I dwelt in an archaic world. A world that had been long forgotten when Atlantis and Cimmeria flourished, a world so incredibly ancient that none of its records have ever come down through the ages.

The first human race dwelt in primal Mu, worshiping strange, forgotten gods—mountain-tall Cthulhu of the Watery Abyss, the Serpent Yig, Iod the Shining Hunter, Vorvadoss of the Gray Gulf of Yarnak.

And in those days there came to Earth certain beings form another dimension of space, inhuman, monstrous creatures which desired to wipe out all life from the planet. These beings planned to leave their own dying world to colonize Earth, building their titanic cities on this younger, more fruitful planet.

With their coming a tremendous conflict sprang into being, in which the gods friendly to mankind were arrayed against the hostile invaders.

Foremost in that cyclopean battle, mightiest of Earth’s gods, was the Flaming One, Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak, and I, high priest of his cult, kindled

There the manuscript ended.

Hayward had been watching me. “That was my—dream, Gene, when I last took the time-drug. It wasn’t quite as clear as most of them—there are always blind spots, odd gaps where my memory somehow doesn’t work. But the drug showed me what had happened in that prehistoric lifetime of mine, so many incarnations ago. We won—or rather our gods won. The invaders—those things—”

He broke off as a mewing cry sounded, very near, and then resumed in an unsteady voice. “They were driven back into their own world, their own dimension—and the gateway was closed, so they could not return. It’s remained closed through all these eons.

“It would still be closed,” he went on bitterly. “If I hadn’t opened it with my experiments, or had taken the precautions the Mysteries of the Worm gave. Now they've got Mason—and that’s all they need. I know that, somehow. A sacrifice to open the gate between this world and their own frightful dimension, so that their hordes can come pouring upon Earth—

“That’s how they got in before. By a human sacrifice—”

“Listen!” I held up my hand urgently. The mewing cries had died, but there was another sound—a faint high-pitched moaning coming from outside the cottage. Hayward didn’t move.

“It may be Mason,” I jerked out as I went to the door. Momentarily I hesitated, and then swung it open, stepped out on the sand. The moaning grew louder. Hayward slowly came up by my side. His eyes were sharper than mine, for as he peered into the fog banks he gave a startled exclamation.

“Good God!” He flung out his arm, pointing. “Look at that!"

Then I, too, saw it, and I stood there glaring at the thing, unable to move.

There on that Pacific beach, with the yellow light from the open door pouring out into the fog, something was dragging itself painfully over the sand toward us—something distorted, misshapen, uttering little whimpering cries as it pulled itself along. It came into the beam of light and we saw it distinctly.

Beside me, Hayward was swaying back and forth, making hoarse sounds as though he were trying to scream and couldn’t. I stumbled back, flinging up my arm to shield my horrified eyes, croaking, “Keep away! For God’s sake, stay back—you—you—you’re not Bill Mason—damn you, stay back!”

But the thing kept on crawling toward us. The black, sightless hollows where its eyes had been were grim shadows in the dim light. It had been flayed alive, and its hands left red marks on the sand as it crept. A patch of bare white skull shone like a frightful tonsure on the crimsoned head.

Nor was that all—but I cannot bring myself to describe the dreadful and loathsomely abnormal changes that had taken place in the body of the thing that had been Bill Mason. And even as it crawled it was—changing!

A dreadful metamorphosis was overtaking it. It seemed to be losing its outline, to sprawl down until it wriggled rather than crawled along the sand. Then I knew! In the space of seconds it was reversing the entire evolutionary upsurge of the human species! It squirmed there like a snake, losing its resemblance to anything human as I watched, sick and shuddering. It melted and shrank and shriveled until there was nothing left but a loathsome foul ichor that was spreading in a black puddle of odious black slime. I heard myself gasping hysterical, unintelligible prayers. And suddenly a piercing shock of cold went through me. High in the fog I heard a mewing, shrill call.

Hayward clutched at my arm, his eyes blazing. “It's come,” he whispered. “It’s the sacrifice—they’re breaking through!”

I swung about, leaped for the open door of the cottage. The icy, unnatural chill was numbing my body, slowing my movements. “Come on,” I shouted to Hayward. “You fool, don’t stay out there! There has been one sacrifice already! Must there be others?”

He flung himself into the house and I slammed and locked the door.

Shrill, unearthly cries were coming from all directions now, as though the things were calling and answering one another. I thought I sensed a new note in the cries—a note of expectation, of triumph.

The window shade rolled up with a rattle and a snap, and the fog began to move past the pane, coiling and twisting fantastically. At a sudden gust the window shook in its casing. Hayward said under his breath, “Atmospheric disturbances—oh, my God! Poor Mason—watch the door, Gene!” His voice was strangled.

For a moment I saw nothing. Then the door bulged inward as though frightful pressure had been applied from without. A panel cracked with a rending sound, and I caught my breath. Then—it was gone.

The metal doorknob had a white rime of frost on it. “This— this isn’t real,” I said madly, although I was shuddering in the icy cold.

“Real enough. They’re breaking through—”

Then Hayward said something so strange that it brought me around sharply, staring at him. Gazing vacantly at me, like a man in a hypnagogic state, he muttered in a queer gutteral voice, “The fires burn on Nergu-K’nyan and the Watchers scan the night skies for the Enemies—ny’ghan tharanak grit—”

“Hayward!” I seized his shoulders, shook him. Life came back into his eyes.

“Blind spot,” he muttered. “I remembered something—now it’s gone—”

He flinched as a new outburst of the mewing cries came from above the house.

But a strange, an incredible surmise, had burst upon my brain. There was a way out, a key of deliverance from evil—Hayward had it and did not know it!

“Think,” I said breathlessly. “Think hard! What was it—that memory?”

“Does that matter now? This—” He saw the expression on my face, its meaning flashed across to him and he answered, not quickly, not slowly, but dreamily: “I seemed to be on a mountain peak, standing before the altar of Vorvadoss, with a great fire flaming up into the darkness. Around me there were priests in white robes—Watchers—”

“Hayward,” I cried. “Vorvadoss—look here!” I snatched up the half-page of the manuscript, read from it hastily. "The gods friendly to man were arrayed against the invaders—”

“I see what you mean!” Hayward cried. “We triumphed—then. But now—”

“Hayward!” I persisted desperately. “Your flash of memory just now! You were standing on a mountain while the Watchers scanned the night skies for the Enemies, you said. The Enemies must have been those creatures. Suppose the Watchers saw them?"

Suddenly the house shook under an impact that was not the work of the screaming wind. God! Would my efforts bear fruit too late? I heard an outburst of the shrill cries, and the door creaked and splintered. It was dreadfully cold. We were flung against the wall, and I staggered, almost losing my balance.

Again the house rocked under another battering-ram impact. My teeth were chattering, and I could hardly speak. A black dizziness was creeping up to overwhelm me, and my hands and feet had lost all feeling. Out of a whirling sea of darkness I saw Hayward’s white face.

“It’s a chance,” I gasped, fighting back the blackness. “Wouldn’t there—have been some way of summoning the gods, the friendly gods—if the Watchers saw the Enemies? You—you were high priest—in that former life. You’d know— how—to summon—”

The door crashed, broke. I heard wood being torn ruthlessly apart, but I dared not turn.

“Yes!” Hayward cried. “I remember—there was a word!”

I saw his frightened gaze shift past me to the horror that I knew was ripping at the broken door. I fumbled for his shoulders, managed to turn him away. “You must! Think, man—”

Abruptly a light flared in his eyes. He was reacting at last.

He flung up his arms and began a weird, sonorous chant. Strangely archaic-sounding words flowed from his tongue fluently, easily. But now I had no eyes for him—I was glaring at the horror that was squeezing itself through the splintered gap it had torn in the wall.

It was the thing Hayward had sketched, revealed in all its loathsome reality!

My dizziness, my half-fainting state, saved me from seeing the thing too clearly. As it was, a scream of utter horror ripped from my throat as I saw, through a spinning whirlpool of darkness, a squamous, glowing ball covered with squirming, snake-like tentacles—translucent ivory flesh, leprous and hideous—a great faceted eye that held the cold stare of the Midgard serpent. I seemed to be dropping, spinning, falling helplessly down toward a welter of writhing, glossy tentacles—and dimly I could hear Hayward still chanting.

“la! Rhyn tharanak… Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak! The Troubler of the Sands! Thou Who waiteth in the Outer Dark, Kindler of the Flame… n’gha shuggy’haa…”

He pronounced a Word. A Word of Power, which my stunned ears could scarcely hear. Yet hear it I did. And I felt that beyond the borders of human consciousness and understanding, that Word was flashing and thundering, through the intergalactic spaces to the farthest abyss. And in primeval night and chaos Something heard, and rose up, and obeyed the summons.

For, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, blackness fell on the room, hiding from my sight the monstrous glowing thing that was plunging toward us. I heard a dreadful skirling cry—and then there was utter silence, in which I could not even hear the recurrent crashing of the surf. The abysmal cold sent sharp flashes of pain through me.

Then, out of the darkness, there rose up before us a Face. I saw it through a haze of silvery mist that clung about it like a veil. It was utterly inhuman, for the half-seen features were arranged in a pattern different to mankind, seeming to follow the strange pattern of some unfamiliar and alien geometry. Yet it did not frighten, it calmed.

Through the silver mist I made out strange hollows, fantastic curves and planes. Only the eyes were clear, unmistakable—black as the empty wastes between the stars, cold in their unearthly wisdom.

There were tiny dancing flames flickering in those eyes, and there were little flames, too, playing over the strange, inhuman countenance. And although not a shadow of emotion passed over those brooding, passionless eyes, I felt a wave of reassurance. Suddenly all fear left me. Beside me, unseen in the darkness, I heard Hayward whisper, “Vorvadoss! The Kindler of the Flame!”

Swiftly the darkness receded, the face faded to a shadowy dimness. I was looking, not at the familiar walls of the cottage, but at another world. I had gone down with Hayward into the profundities of the past.

I seemed to be standing in a vast amphitheater of jet, and around me, towering to a sky sprinkled with an infinite multitude of cold stars, I could see a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and fortresses, of great masses of stone and metal, arching bridges and cyclopean ramparts. And with racking horror I saw teeming loathsomely in that nightmare city the spawn of that alien dimension.

Hundreds, thousands—surging multitudes of them, hanging motionless in the dark, clear air, resting quiescent on the tiers of the amphitheater, surging across the great cleared spaces. I caught glimpses of glittering eyes, cold and unwinking; pulpy, glowing masses of semi-transparent flesh; monstrous reptilian appendages that swam before my eyes as the things moved loathsomely. I felt contaminated, defiled. I think I shrieked, and my hands flew up to shut out that intolerable vision of lost Abaddon—the dimension of the Invaders.

And abruptly that other-world vision snapped out and vanished.

I saw the godlike, alien Face fleetingly, felt the cool glance of those strange, omniscient eyes. Then it was gone, and the room seemed to rock and sway in the grip of cosmic forces. As I staggered and almost fell I saw again around me the walls of the cottage.

The unbearable chill was no longer in the air; there was no sound but the pounding of the surf. The wind still sent the fog twisting past the window, but the brooding, oppressive feeling of age-old evil had utterly vanished. I sent an apprehensive glance at the shattered door, but there was no trace of the horror that had burst into the cottage.

Hayward was leaning limply against the wall, breathing in great gasps. We looked at each other dumbly. Then, moved by a common impulse, we went, half staggering, to the splintered gap where the door had been, out onto the sand.

The fog was fading, vanishing, torn into tatters by a cool, fresh wind. A starlit patch of night sky glittered above the cottage.

“Driven back,” Hayward whispered. “As they were once before— back to their own dimension, and the gateway locked. But not before a life was taken by them—the life of our friend—may Heaven forgive me for that—”

Suddenly he turned, went stumbling back into the cottage, great dry sobs racking him.

And my cheeks, too, were wet.

He came out. I stood at his side as he threw the time-pellets into the sea. Never again would he go back to the past. He would live henceforth in the present, and a little in the future—as was more fitting, decenter, for human beings to do—




The Frog

by Henry Kuttner


Kuttner had been at work on this tale long before it finally appeared. Fully three years earlier Lovecraft wrote him,

Your mention of “The Frog” interests me greatly, for it looks like one of my favorite sort of tales. If {Weird Tales editor Farnsworth} Wright rejects it, I trust you’ll let me see the MS’.—for I don’t want to miss the kind of item this appears to be! The atmosphere of dream-pursuit is surely ideal for anything of this nature. (May 18, 1936)

Wright must have spumed it, as HPL apparently anticipated, and it was three years before it would appear in the pages o/Weird Tales’ rival counterpart. Perhaps Wright thought it a bit too similar to “The Salem Horror”; if so, he was right.

Note that here Kuttner introduces his own eerie locale, Monk’s Hollow, a name evocative of isolated nocturnal rites practiced by renegade diabolist monks such as we associate with Lovecraft’s Exham Priory and with the brotherhood in Bloch’s “The Feast in the Abbey.”

First publication: Strange Stories, February 1939.

* * *


Norman Hartley knew little about the black legends which clustered about Monk’s Hollow, and cared less. Hidden in a secluded valley in the eastern hills, the ancient town had lain dreaming for generations, and a quaint and unpleasantly morbid folklore had sprung up from the tales the oldsters whispered about the days when witches had worked detestable sorceries in the festering North Swamp, a region which even yet was shunned by the villagers.

Monstrous things had dwelt in that stagnant morass long ago, they said, and the Indians had had good cause to name it the Forbidden Place. The witches had passed, and their terrible books had been burnt, their curious implements destroyed.

But the dark lore had come down furtively through the generations, and there were still some who could remember the night when, summoned by agonized shrieks, men had broken into halfwitted old Betsy Codman’s cottage and found her still-quivering body dangling in a Witch’s Cradle.

Norman Hartley, however, saw in Monk’s Hollow only a quiet, lonely little village where he might find the privacy which had been impossible in New York. Convivial friends were continually bursting into his studio, and instead of working on his canvases Hartley would find himself visiting the night clubs.

His work had suffered. In the ancient, gambreled house he had rented, two miles from the village, he felt that he could recapture the inspiration that had made his paintings famous.

* * *


But the Witch Stone bothered him.

It was a roughly chiseled block of gray stone, perhaps three feet high and two feet square, which stood in the flower garden behind the house. Hartley’s sense of artistic values was outraged every time he looked out of his window at the stone.

Dobson, the caretaker, had tried to train the flowers so as to shield it from sight; he had planted creepers about it, but the ground was apparently sterile. There was a little clearing of bare brown soil about the Witch Stone where nothing grew—not even weeds.

Dobson said it was because of Persis Winthorp, but Dobson was superstitious and a fool.

Whether Persis Winthorp actually lay buried beneath the stone or not, the fact remained that the block was an eyesore. One’s gaze passed casually over the gay colors of the garden, drawn irresistibly by the little barren clearing where the stone stood. Hartley, to whom beauty was almost a religion, found himself becoming irritated whenever his eyes rested on the Witch Stone. Finally he told Dobson to move it. The old caretaker, his seamed brown face puckered with apprehension, scraped his wooden leg across the floor and demurred.

“It don’t do no harm,” he said, giving Hartley a sideways glance out of watery blue eyes. “Besides, it’s a sort of landmark.”

“Look here,” Hartley said, unreasonably annoyed. “If I’m renting this house I’ve a right to move the stone out of the way if I don’t like it. And I don’t—it’s like a great ugly splotch of green in a sunset. It throws the garden out of symmetry. One would think you were afraid to touch it.” Hartley’s thin, studious face was flushed.

Hartley snorted, but the caretaker went on seriously. “I mind he told me once old Persis cursed Monk’s Hollow when they were ducking her in the pond. And they couldn’t drown her, either—not with the father she had, that came out of the North Swamp one night to—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Hartley said disgustedly. “So if the stone is moved she’ll pop up, eh?”

Dobson caught his breath. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Mr. Hartley. Persis Winthorp was a witch—everybody knows that. There used to be awful things going on in this house when she lived here.”

Hartley turned away. They were standing in the garden and he moved aside to examine the stone.

There were curious marks upon it, seemingly chiseled by inexpert hands. The rough figures had a vague resemblance to Arabic, but Hartley could make nothing of them. He heard Dobson stump up beside him.

“He said—my granddad—that when they were ducking her they had to get the women folks away. She came up out of the water all green and slimy, with her great mouth croaking out spells to nobody knows what heathen gods—”

Hartley looked up quickly at the sound of a motor. A truck was chugging into view around the bend of the road. He glanced at the Witch Stone, and then, making up his mind, hastily sprinted for the road. Behind him he heard Dobson muttering some obscure reference to Persis Winthorp’s mysterious father.

The truck was loaded with gravel. He flagged it, and as it ground to a halt swung himself on the running board.

“I wonder if you’d do a little job for me,” he said to the two men in the truck. “I want to get a good-sized rock out of my garden, and it’s a bit too heavy for me to handle. It’ll only take a minute.” He pulled out his wallet.

The driver, an unshaved, bull-necked Irishman, turned inquiringly to his companion, exchanged glances with him, and then grinned at Hartley. “Sure, buddy. Glad to oblige.”

“Good,” Hartley said, and, half to himself: “We can dump it under a bush, out of sight.”

* * *


Later, Hartley stood by his window, frowning. The moon was rising beyond the ridge, but the garden was still in shadow. Somehow he had the impression that something had moved in that dim black sea of gloom. Crickets were shrilling monotonously, and he felt unreasonably nervous. From below came a recurrent tap and shuffle as Dobson puttered about the kitchen.

Dobson would have to do something about that barren spot in the garden. It was even more noticeable now that the stone had been removed, and even in the gloom Hartley fancied he could see a deeper shadow where the Witch Stone had stood.

What was the old legend? Dobson had hysterically poured it out as the truck drivers were lifting the stone, pleading with them to replace it, begging Hartley to relent. It was full of monstrous hints of the obscure traffic Persis Winthorp had had with the abnormal beings that dwelt in the North Swamp, and in particular her dealings with the batrachoid creature who had sired her—a demon whom the Indians had worshiped ages ago, Dobson said.

The villagers could not kill her, but there were spells which could nullify her evil magic, and there were words of power that could keep her fettered in her grave—words such as those which were chiseled upon the Witch Stone, the caretaker protested, fear contorting his face into a brown, wrinkled mask.

In Monk’s Hollow they said—and his voice sank to a tremulous whisper—that in the grave, Persis had grown more like her unknown father. And now that Hartley was moving the Witch Stone—

Hartley lit a cigarette, frowning down into the enigmatic gloom of the garden. Either Dobson was mentally unbalanced, or there was some logical reason for his interest in that particular spot in the garden. Perhaps—

The thought flashed into Hartley’s mind, and he chuckled suddenly. Of course! He should have known! Dobson must be something of a miser—indeed, Hartley had already encountered more than one instance of his penury—and his hoard must have been buried beneath the Witch Stone.

What more logical place to hide it—the grave of the ill-famed old witch, shunned by the superstitious country folk?

Well, it served the old fellow right, Hartley thought unkindly. Trying to frighten his employer with a cock-and-bull story about a witch-woman who was supposed still to be alive—

With a sharp exclamation Hartley bent forward, peered out of the window. There was something moving in the garden—a blacker shadow in the gloom. He could not make out its form, but it seemed to be moving very slowly in the direction of the house.

Suddenly he realized that the sound of Dobson’s movements below had ceased. The wooden leg was no longer thumping on the kitchen floor. With the realization Hartley grinned, halfminded to throw up the window and shout at the caretaker. Good Lord! Did the fellow think Hartley was trying to steal his few pennies?

Hartley told himself that Dobson was old, crotchety, but nevertheless Hartley felt a little surge of irritation mount within him.

The black shadow was coming closer to the house. Hartley strained his eyes, but could make out no more than a dim, oddly squat outline. For a moment he wondered whether Dobson, for some insane reason, was crawling on his hands and knees.

The shadow scuttled swiftly for the house, was hidden from Hartley by the windowsill. He shrugged, crushed out his cigarette, and turned back to the book he had been reading.

Subconsciously he must have been waiting for some sound, for when the knock came he started, almost dropping the book. Someone had lifted and let fall the knocker on the front door.

* * *


He waited. The sound was not repeated, but after a time he heard a furtive shuffling below, together with the tap-tapping of Dobson’s wooden leg.

The book lay forgotten in his lap. To his straining ears came a preliminary scratching, then the tinkle of breaking glass. There was a faint rustling sound.

Hartley got up quickly. Had Dobson inadvertently locked himself out—and had he, after knocking at the door, broken a window to crawl back into the house? Somehow Hartley could not picture the rheumatic, crippled Dobson forcing himself through a window. Also, he had heard Dobson’s footsteps inside the house just now.

Had the black shadow in the garden really been Dobson? Could it have been some prowler seeking entry? The two truck drivers had eyed his fat wallet greedily when he had paid them—

Then, blasting up from below, came a scream, knife-edged with terror, shrilling out harshly through the house. Hartley swore, leaped for the door. As he opened it he heard a hurried rush of footsteps—Dobson’s, for the tapping of the wooden leg was plainly audible.

But mingling with that sound was a puzzling scratching noise, as though of a dog’s claws scraping across the floor. Hartley heard the back door open; the footsteps and the scraping ceased.

He took the stairway in three leaps.

As he burst into the kitchen the screaming began again, was cut off abruptly. There was a faint gurgling proceeding from beyond the open doorway that led into the garden. Hartley hesitated, snatched up a heavy carving knife that lay on the table, and stepped quietly into the night.

The moon had risen higher, and in its wan light the garden looked ghostly, unearthly, save where the light from the doorway streamed out in a narrow path of yellow illumination. The night air was cool on his face. From his left, in the direction of the barren clearing where the Witch Stone had stood, came a faint rustling.

Hartley stepped quietly aside, vague apprehension mounting within him. Remembrance of Dobson’s warning came flooding back, the caretaker’s ominous insistence that the old witch had never died, that she lay waiting in her grave for someone to move the stone that held her fettered.

“Dobson,” he called softly, and again: “Dobson!”

Something was moving toward him, very quietly, very stealthily.

The moonlight revealed a lumpy patch of shadow dragging itself forward. It was too bulky for a human being; besides, men do not emit harsh whistling sounds as they breathe, and their backs are not fat and green and slimy—

Good God! What was this thing—this nightmare spawn of ancient horror that came leaping at Hartley out of the night? What blasphemous creature had been buried beneath the Witch Stone— and what dark forces had Hartley unknowingly unleashed?

They said that in the grave she had grown more like her unknown father.

Hartley reeled back against the house, mad horror battling with the rational beliefs of a lifetime. Such things could not exist—but it did exist! It was coming at him in great leaps, a misshapen shadow that glistened faintly in the moonlight. And dreadful menace was in its swift approach.

Already he had delayed too long. The thing was almost upon him as he turned to flee. His legs buckled, and for a frightful instant he thought that they would not support him, that he would sink helpless to the ground beneath the creature’s onslaught. He staggered a few steps, heard the slobbering breathing almost on his neck, then gathered his strength and sprinted along the wall of the house.

The thing came after him. He doubled around the corner of the building and made for the road. As he gained on it he chanced a swift look over his shoulder, and cold horror trailed icy fingers over his heart. It was still pursuing him.

Monk’s Hollow! At the thought he turned and fled along the road toward the town, still clutching the carving knife. He had forgotten it, but now, glancing down, he tightened his grip on the weapon and sprinted a bit faster. If he could only reach the village—

* * *


It was two miles away—two endless miles of empty road, lonely and unfrequented, with little chance of an automobile passing. Few drivers chose this road; it was rutted and in disrepair; the new state highway was more direct.

But the highway lay beyond a ridge, and Hartley knew that he would stand no chance on rocky or uneven ground. Even on the road he had to watch carefully for the black shadows that betokened gaps and ruts in the surface. Behind him something came leaping, and there was a sound of rasping, heavy breathing.

The night was cold, but sweat burst out on Hartley’s face in great beads. His shirt was sodden. His lounging robe impeded his running, and he slipped out of it. Behind him came a harsh, thick cry. There was a little scuffle, and then the rhythmic thuds were resumed.

“When they were ducking her they had to get the women folks away—she came up out of the water all green and slimy—”

Hartley gritted his teeth, fought back an impulse to shriek his terror. Behind him came the steady thud-thud, and the stentorous breathing. The thing was gaining!

If he could only reach the village! He increased his pace, straining until the blood pounded in his temples. His efforts were useless. The thing behind him matched his pace; the thudding grew louder. Once he fancied he felt the creature’s foul, hot breath on his neck. His chest was a raw flame; a knife edge of agony burned his lungs; his breath whooped in and out.

He caught his foot in a rut and almost went headlong. With a wrenching effort he recovered his balance and fled on.

But the sounds of pursuit had grown loud—dreadfully loud. He wondered whether he might elude his pursuer by a quick dash into the thickets that lined the road—black blotches in the moonlight. No—the creature was too close. Hartley’s mouth was gaping as he fought for breath.

Then he saw the light. Yellow squares that were windows in an oblong patch of blackness—but far, far distant. No—in the darkness he had misjudged—the house not fifty feet away. It loomed up suddenly before him.

He shrieked from a raw and throbbing throat as he raced for the porch.

But before he reached it he felt a heavy weight upon his back, bearing him to the ground; great talons were ripping at his shirt, raking his flesh with needle-sharp claws. His eyes and mouth were clogged with dirt, but he realized that he was still gripping the carving knife.

Somehow he managed to reverse it, stabbed up blindly over his shoulder. The slobbering, harsh breathing gave place to a frightful croaking yell, and then the knife was torn from his grasp. He struggled frantically to squirm free, but the great weight pinned him down inexorably.

A confused shouting came to his ears. He heard the crunching of quick footsteps, and the roar of a gun. Abruptly the weight was gone from his back; he heard something go thudding off into the darkness as he rolled over, scraping at the earth that encrusted his face. Out of smarting eyes he saw a man’s pale face staring at him, a man who wore dusty overalls and held an old-fashioned musket in trembling hands.

Hartley discovered that he was sobbing.

The other man stared off into the shadows, looked back at Hartley with wide eyes. “Wh-what was it?” he asked shakily. “In God’s name—what was it?”

*****

Anam Pickering, whose tiny farm lay on the outskirts of Monk’s Hollow, awoke with a start. He sat up in bed, fumbling on the bedside table for his glasses, his wrinkled face creased in puzzled lines. What had awakened him? Some unusual noise—It came again—a furtive scratching beneath the window. The farmer, taken by surprise, started violently, and the glasses dropped to the carpet.

“Who’s there?” he called sharply. There was no answer, but the scratching sound was repeated. There was another noise, too, a sound of thick, gasping breathing. Suddenly frightened, Anam cried, “Martha! Is that you, Martha?”

A bed creaked in the adjoining room. “Anam?” A thin voice called. “What’s wrong?”

Anam got out of bed quickly and dropped to his knees beside the bed, fumbling for his spectacles. A sudden shattering of glass made him catch his breath sharply.

He looked up, but his dim eyes made out only a hazy rectangle— the window—against which a vague black bulk loomed. An insidious odor came to his nostrils, his rheumatic limbs sending protesting twinges through him.

He heard a pattering of feet, and his sister’s voice. “Anam? What—,” the voice broke off, and there was a pause, frightful in its implication. Then above the scrambling and wheezing of the intruder the woman’s scream skirled out, shrill and insane with utter terror.

A little moan of bewilderment came from Anam as he hesitated, peering around blindly. He made a tentative step and caromed into the bed, fell across it. He sensed rather than saw something, huge and black and shapeless, leap entirely over him and there was a heavy thud that shook the flimsy little farmhouse.

Martha had stopped screaming. She was making hoarse little rasping sounds deep in her throat, as though she were trying to cry out and couldn’t. “Martha!” Anam shrieked. “Martha! For God’s sake—”

There was a scurry of swift movement, and a low, oddly muzzled cry from the woman. Thereafter the only sound within the room was the thick, gulping breathing, and presently, as Anam lay half fainting across the bed, another sound, monstrous in the mad thoughts it called to the man’s mind—a faint rending and tearing, as of flesh being ribboned by sharp talons.

* * *


Whimpering, Anam got to his feet. As he moved slowly across the room he repeated Martha’s name under his breath, and his head swung from side to side as his dimmed vision tried to pierce the cryptic gloom. The tearing sound stopped abruptly.

Anam walked on. The harsh fabric of the carpet scratched his bare feet, and he was shivering violently. Still whispering Martha’s name, he sensed a black bulk looming up before him—

He touched something cold, slimy, with a sickening feel of loathsome fatness. He heard a frightful guttural snarl of bestial ferocity, something moved swiftly in the darkness—and death took Anam Pickering.

* * *


Thus horror came to Monk’s Hollow. Like a foul breath of corruption from the generations of decadence in which the witch-town had brooded, a miasmic exhalation from the grave of Persis Winthorp lay like an ominous pall over the town.

When Hartley, accompanied by a dozen villagers, returned to his house in the morning, he found the flower garden trampled and ruined. The barren spot in the center of the garden had given place to a deep pit, in which, as though in ghastly mockery, lay a shocking conglomeration, the mutilated and partially devoured cadaver of old Dobson, recognizable only by the splintered remnant of the wooden leg.

The remains lay embedded in a foul-smelling pool of thick, greenish slime, and, although no one cared to approach that dreadful pit closely, the marks of gnawing on what was left of the peg leg were all too evident.

Hartley had recovered somewhat from his experience of the preceding night. Hours of nightmarish conjecture had led him through incredible labyrinths of fantasy to one inescapable conclusion, the stubborn belief that there was some logical, natural explanation of the horror.

To this view he clung, in spite of what he had seen the night before creeping toward him in the moonlit garden. The villagers could not know that Hartley dared not accept the monstrous theories which they had advanced during the trip to the witch- house, nor that Hartley held to his skepticism as the last bulwark of his sanity.

“I dare not believe,” the artist told himself desperately. "Such things are impossible.”

“An animal of some sort,” he insisted, in answer to a comment by Byram Liggett, the stocky, bronze-faced farmer who had rescued him. “I’m sure of that. Some carnivorous animal—”

Liggett shook his head dubiously, his gun—for all the men had come fully armed—held in readiness as his eyes furtively searched the surrounding vegetation. “No, sir,” he said firmly. “Don’t forget, I saw it. That thing wasn’t like nothin’ God ever created. It was —her—come up out of her grave.”

Involuntarily the group shrank back from the charnel pit.

“All right, a—a hybrid, then,” Hartley argued. “A sport—a freak. The product of a union between two different kinds of animals. That’s possible. It’s simply a dangerous wild animal of unusual type—it must be!”

Liggett looked at him oddly, and was about to speak when there came an interruption in the person of a youth who ran panting up, white-faced and gasping.

A premonition of disaster came to Hartley. “What’s happened?” he snapped, and the boy tried to control his hurried breathing until he could speak coherently.

“Ol’ Anam—an’ Miss Pickering,” he gasped out at last. “Suthin’s killed ’em! All—all tore to pieces they was—I saw 'em—”

At the memory a shudder shook the boy, and he began to cry from sheer terror.

The men looked at one another with blanched faces, and a little murmur began, grew louder. Liggett raised his arms, quieted them. There were little beads of moisture on his brown face.

“We got to get back to town,” he said tensely. “An’ in a hurry, too. Our women-folks an’ kids—”

As a thought came to him, he turned again to the boy. “Jem,” he asked sharply. “Did you notice—were there any tracks at Anam’s place?”

The boy choked back his sobs. “There—yes there was. Great big things, like frog tracks, only big as my head. They—”

The harsh, urgent voice of Liggett interrupted. “Back to town, everybody. Quick! Git your women an’ younsters indoors, an’ keep 'em there.”

At his words the group broke and scattered, moving hastily away until Liggett and Hartley were left. Hartley was very pale as he stared at the farmer.

“Surely this—this is unnecessary,” he said. “A few men—with guns—”

“You damn fool!” Liggett snapped, his voice rough with restrained anger. “Movin’ the Witch Stone—you shouldn’t been ‘lowed to rent the place anyway. Oh, you city folks are smart, I guess, with your talk o’ freaks an’—an’ sports—but what do you know ‘bout what used to happen in Monk’s Hollow hundreds o' years ago?

“I’ve heard ‘bout those times, when devils like Persis Winthorp had their conjures an’ pagan books here, an’ I’ve heard tell o’ the awful things that used to live in the North Swamp. You’ve done enough harm. You better come with me—you can’t stay here. Nobody’s safe till we do something ‘bout—that!"

Hartley made no answer, but silently followed Liggett back to the road.

On their way they passed men hurrying townward, bent oldsters hobbling along, casting frightened glances about them, women with wide-eyed children whom they kept close about their skirts. A few automobiles drove slowly past, and a number of old-fashioned buggies. The telephones had been busy. Occasionally Hartley caught furtive whispers, and as they drew nearer to town the number of fugitives increased, and the whispers grew and swelled into low, terror-laden mutterings, drumming into Hartley’s ears like the doom-laden pounding of a great drum.

“The Frog! The Frog!"

Night came. Monk’s Hollow lay sleeping in the moonlight. A number of grim, armed men patrolled the streets. Garage doors were left open, in instant readiness to rush aid in answer to a telephoned appeal for help. There must be no more tragedies like that of last night.

At two in the morning Liggett had been jerked from an uneasy sleep by the frantic ringing of the telephone. It was the proprietor of a gasoline station on the highway several miles beyond the town. Something had attacked him, he shrieked into the instrument. He had locked himself within the station, but its glass walls would offer little protection against the thing that was even then creeping closer.

But help arrived too late. The station was an inferno of flame that fed on the underground gasoline reservoirs, and the men had only a glimpse of a great misshapen thing that bounded from the holocaust to escape apparently unscathed amid the hail of hasty bullets that greeted its appearance.

But the proprietor of the station had, at least, died a clean death; he had been cremated, for some of his bones, unmarked by gnawing fangs, were later found among the ruins.

And that night Hartley had found monstrous tracks beneath the window of his room in Liggett’s house. When he showed them to Liggett, the farmer had stared at him with a curious light in his eyes, but had said little.

* * *


The next attack came the following night. Hartley had fled from his bedroom and slammed the door just in time to escape the thing that clawed and slobbered and bellowed at the thin panel. But before Hartley and the aroused Liggett could return with their guns it had taken fright and escaped through the shattered window.

Its tracks led into a patch of thick underbrush nearby, but to enter that tangled wilderness of shadow at night would have been sheer suicide. Liggett had spent half an hour at the telephone, arranging for the villagers to meet at his house at dawn to begin the pursuit. Then, since they could not sleep, the two men returned to Hartley’s bedroom and talked until nearly dawn.

“It’s marked you down,” Liggett said. “It’s after you, like I thought. I figgered—.” He hesitated, scratching the stubble on his chin. “I figgered that maybe we could trap it—”

Hartley caught his meaning. “Using me for bait? No!”

“What else can we do? We’ve tried to track it, but it hides in the North Swamp by day. It’s the only way, unless you want it to kill more people. You can’t keep kids indoors all the time, Hartley.”

“The National Guard—,” Hartley began, but Liggett interrupted him.

“How can they git it there in the swamp? If the thing could be got by ord’nary means we’d have done it. We’ll track it, come dawn, but it won’t do any good. Don’t you see, man, every minute counts? Even while we’re talking here the thing may be butcherin’ somebody. Don’t forgit—.” He broke off, eyeing Hartley.

"I know. You think I started it. But—God! I’ve told myself over and over that the thing’s a freak, some hellish outcome of an unnatural mating. But—”

“But you know that’s not so,” Liggett said quietly. “You know what it is.”

“No.” Hartley shook his head dully. “It can’t—”

He stopped, staring at Liggett’s face. The farmer was glaring past Hartley’s shoulder, incredulous horror in his eyes. He cried out a startled warning, sent Hartley spinning with a sudden push. The artist had a glimpse of a shining hideous countenance protruding through the window; a dreadful mask that was neither batrachoid nor human, but partook monstrously of the attributes of both. A great slit-like mouth worked loosely, and yellow, glazed eyes glared into Hartley’s; there was a choking stench of foul corruption, and the thing was in the room. Liggett’s gun blasted.

The creature seemed to twist in midair, and the farmer went down beneath the onslaught. An agonized shriek welled out, broke off abruptly. The monster, crouching over Liggett’s body, lifted a muzzle wet with fresh blood and made a gobbling sound, dreadfully reminiscent of a chuckle, deep in its throat. Sick and shaking, Hartley felt the doorknob beneath his fingers, and he flung the door open as the creature leaped.

He slammed it just in time, but a panel splintered under a terrific impact. Hartley fled along the hall as the door crashed.

Outside the house he hesitated momentarily, glancing around in an agony of indecision. In the cold grayness that precedes the dawn he saw the nearest house perhaps two hundred feet away, but as he started to race toward it the thing came bounding into view, intercepting him. It had apparently crept out through the window by which it had entered.

Hartley suddenly remembered his automatic and clawed it out, fired point blank at the creature as it came at him. There was a croaking snarl of rage, and the loose slit-mouth worked hideously; a little stream of foul black ichor began to trickle slowly from a wound on the wattled, pouchy throat of the thing.

But it did not halt, and Hartley, realizing that a creature of such monstrous size must possess tremendous vitality, turned to flee. It was between him and the village, and as though realizing its advantage the thing kept at Hartley's heels, giving him no chance to double back. The thought flashed unbidden into Hartley’s mind: The monster was herding him!

He heard a window creak up, heard a shout. Then he was running for his life back along the road over which he had fled on the first night of the horror.

At the thought, and at sight of a small lane—a rutted cart path—joining the road at right angles, he twisted aside and raced along it. His only hope lay in somehow getting back to the village. Behind him came the gasping and slobbering, the rhythmic pounding that betokened the grim pursuit.

He chanced a snap shot over his shoulder, but the hazy light of the false dawn was deceptive, and he missed. He dared waste no more bullets.

The thing was herding him! Twice he saw paths that led back to the village, and each time the pursuing monster blocked his escape, circling with great leaps to his right until the paths had been passed. And presently the fields grew wilder, and the vegetation took on a lush, unhealthy greenness. He might have attempted to scale a tree, but there was none near enough to the road, and the pursuer was too close. With a dreadful shock of realization Hartley saw that the North Swamp lay before him—the ill-omened morass about which all the ghastly legends had centered.

The ridge to the east was silhouetted against pale grayness. From far away Hartley heard a sound that sent a thrill of hope through him. The sound of an automobile motor—no, two of them! He remembered his neighbor’s shout as he had fled from Liggett’s house. The man must have gone for help, roused the village. But the snarling breathing was dreadfully close.

Once the monster paused, and Hartley glanced over his shoulder to see it clawing in hideous rage at its wounded throat. The bullet must have handicapped it in the pursuit, else Hartley would long before have fallen beneath ripping talons. He brought up his gun, but the thing, as though realizing his purpose, sprang forward, and Hartley had to sprint in order to escape the great leaps. The sound of motors grew louder in the dawn stillness.

The path wound through the swamp. It was overgrown with weeds, rutted and pitted deeply, and at times the encroaching ooze had crept up until only a narrow ribbon of dry land was left. On all sides the lush greenness of the morass spread, with occasional open spaces of repellently black water. Over all lay a curious stillness, an utter lack of motion. No wind ruffled the tops of the grass fronds, no ripples spread over the waters. The sounds of the pursuit, the roaring of the motors, seemed an incongruous invasion of this land of deathly stillness.

The end came suddenly, without warning. Green slime covered the road for a distance of a dozen yards; Hartley, splashing through the icy, ankle-deep water, felt his foot go down into a hole, and fell heavily, wrenching his ankle. Even as he fell he rolled aside desperately, felt a wind brush him as the monster’s impetus carried it beyond him.

Hartley’s arms, outthrust, were abruptly embedded in something soft and clinging, something that sucked and pulled them down inexorably. With a rasping cry he wrenched them free from the quicksand, fell back to the firmer ground of the road. He heard the sound of a shot, and, flat on his back in the ooze, saw a monstrous mask of horror incarnate looming above him. The sound of motors had increased to a roar, and a shout of encouragement came to his ears.

The monster hesitated, drew back, and Hartley, remembering his gun, jerked it from his belt. He fired point blank at the creature, and coincidentally with the report of his own gun came a volley from the cars. Lead whined above him, and he felt a stinging pain in his shoulder.

* * *


Suddenly it seemed as though the monster were a huge bladder, punctured in a dozen places, pouring out black and nauseous ichor. With a hoarse gasping cry it flopped aside, made a crippled, one-sided leap, and came down in the bog beside the road. Then, swiftly, it began to sink.

The quicksand took it. Its huge hindquarters, black and glistening, corded with muscle, disappeared almost immediately, and then the distended, leprously white belly. Hartley, sick and fainting, felt hands lifting him to his feet, heard questioning voices that seemed to come from a great distance.

But he had eyes only for the abysmal horror that was being engulfed a dozen yards from him, the webbed and spurred flail-like talons that were desperately beating the slime, the misshapen, hideous head that rolled from side to side in agony. From the gaping mouth of the thing came a ghastly outpouring of croaking shrieks, a monstrous bellowing that suddenly grew horribly familiar, articulate, thick and guttural: a frenzied outcry of blasphemy such as might come from the rotting tongue of a long-dead corpse.

All the men fell back, white with loathing, and Hartley dropped to his knees, retching and moaning in an agony of horror, as the thing, its mouth half choked with the hungry quicksand, bellowed:

“Awrrgh—ugh—ye—blast ye! Blast ye all! May the curse o’ Persis Winthorp rot yer flesh an’ send ye down to—”

The frightful outburst of sound gave place to a terrible gargling shriek that was abruptly choked off. There was a brief commotion in the ooze; a great bubble formed and burst—and age-old stillness brooded once more over the North Swamp.




Hydra

by Henry Kuttner


You will already be well aware of the in-joke origin of Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and its sequel, Lovecraft's “The Haunter of the Dark", and its sequel, Bloch’s “The Shadow from the Steeple. ” In the first HPL comes on stage as an erudite occultist who gets messily devoured by the avatar of Tsathoggua. In the second Bloch becomes Robert Blake and meets pretty much the same fate at the lobes of an avatar of Nyarlathotep. In the third, as Bloch himself revealed years later, Edmund Fiske is a mask for Bloch's friend and colleague Fritz Leiber. (Some have imagined Bloch himself in the role, misled by the red herring that Bloch sometimes used the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske). In “Hydra” we see the young Henry Kuttner joining the game. The character Robert Ludwig is surely Robert Bloch, the alter ego of Ludvig Prinn, while Paul Edmond must stand for Edmond Hamilton. Even though the character’s last name probably does derive from that source, a letter from Lovecraft to Bloch (December 3, 1936) reveals that the Paul Edmond character is supposed to be Kuttner himself, while Kenneth Scott is Lovecraft. All this leads us to speculate as to the origin of Kuttner’s own pseudonym: Is not Keith Hammond gematria for his early favorite and later friend Edmond Hamilton? I think so.

Note the reference to an occult volume called The Sixtystone. This is a tip of the hat to Arthur Machen and his great tale “The Novel of the Black Seal", where the eponymous “seal” is a peculiarly engraved polyhedron called Ixixar, or the Sixtystone. Kuttner had of course referred to Machen already in “The Salem Horror” and, implicitly, in "The Invaders", where the terminal devolution of Bill Mason recalls that of the expiring Helen Vaughan in Machen's “The Great God Pan. ”

Kuttner lifts the invocation “Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon” from Lovecraft, making it a summons to the goddess Cybele (whom HPL mentioned in “The Rats in the Walls”), though he had used the chant itself in “The Horror at Red Hook” and there made it the liturgy to Lilith. Originally it was neither, the words forming part of the ancient rites of Hecate instead.

Finally, the Mythos encyclopedist may pause and puzzle over the dropped name “Pharol.” Which ancient deity was this? You will find him featured prominently in some of the space adventures of Northwest Smith by Kuttner’s wife C. L. Moore, especially “Dust of the Gods” (see the collection Northwest Smith, Ace Books, 1981. Four additional Northwest Smith tales not included in that volume occur in Karl Wagner (ed.), Echoes of Valor II, TOR Books, 1989).

First publication: Weird Tales, April 1939.

* * *


Two men died; possibly three. So much is known. The tabloids ran flaming headlines telling of the mysterious mutilation and death of Kenneth Scott, noted Baltimore author and occultists, and later, they capitalized similarly on the disappearance of Robert Ludwig, whose correspondence with Scott was well known in literary circles. The equally strange and even more ghastly death of Paul Edmond, while separated from the scene of the Scott horror by the width of a continent, was clearly connected with it. This was shown by the presence of a certain much-discussed object which was found clutched in Edmond’s rigid hands — and which the credulous claim caused his death. While this solution is improbable, it is nevertheless true that Paul Edmond bled to death because his carotid artery was severed, and it is also true that thre are features about the case difficult to explain in the light of present-day science.




The tabloids made a great deal of Edmond’s diary, and even conventional papers find it difficult to handle that unusual document in a fashion that would not lay them open to the charge of yellow journalism. The Hollywood Citizen-News solved the problem for its contemporaries by quoting the least fantastic portions of the diary, and hinting plainly that Edmond had been a fiction writer, and that the man’s notes had never been intended as a truthful summary of events. The privately printed pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul, which played so important a part in the diary, seems to be of purely fictional origin. None of the local booksellers has heard of it, and Mr. Russell Hodgkins, Calofornia’s most noted bibliophile, declares that the title and the volume must have originated in the mind of the ill-fated Paul Edmond.

Yet, according to Edmond’s diary and certain other papers and letters discovered in his desk, it was this pamphlet which caused Ludwig and Edmond to undertake the disastrous experiment. Ludwig had decided to visit his California correspondent, making a leisurely voyage from New York by way of the Panama Canal. The Carnatic docked on August 15th, and Ludwig spent several hours wandering through San Pedro. It was there, in a musty “swap shop,” that he bought the pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul. When the young man arrived at Edmond’s Hollywood apartment he had the booklet with him.

Both Ludwig and Edmond were deeply interested in the occult. They had dabbled in witchcraft and demonology, as a result of their acquaintance with Scott, who possessed one of the best occult libraries in America.

Scott was a strange man. Slender, sharp-eyed, and taciturn, he spent most of his time in an old brownstone house in Baltimore. His knowledge of esoteric matters was little short of phenomenal; he had read the Chhaya Ritual, and in his letters to Ludwig and Edmond had hinted at the real meanings behind the veiled hints and warnings in that half-legendary manuscript. In his great library were such names as Sinistrari, Zancherius, and the ill-famed Gougenot des Mousseau; and in his library safe he had, it was rumored, an immense scrapbook filled with excerpts copied from such fantastic sources as the Book of Karnak, the monstrous Sixtystone, and the blasphemous Elder Key, of which only two copies are reputed to exist on earth.

It was little wonder, therefore, that the two students were anxious to tear aside the veil and view the astounding mysteries of which Scott hinted so cautiously. In his diary Edmond confessed that his own curiosity was the direct cause of the tragedy.

Yet it was Ludwig who bought the booklet and pored over it with Edmond in the latter’s apartment. Certainly Edmond described the pamphlet plainly enough, and it is strange, therefore, that no bibliophile could identify it. According to the diary, it was quite small, about four by five inches, bound in coarse brown paper, and yellowed and crumbling with age. The printing — in Eighteenth Century type with the long s — was crudely done, and there was neither a date-line nor a publisher’s imprint. There were eight pages; seven of them filled with what Edmond called the usual banal sophisms of mysticism, and on the last page were the specific directions for what would nowadays be known as “projecting one’s astral.”

The general process was familiar to both students. Their researches had informed them that the soul — or in modern occult language, “astral body” — is supposed to be an ethereal double or ghost, capable of projection to a distance. But the specific directions — finding these was unusual. Nor did they seem difficult to follow. Edmond has purposely been vague about these preparations, but one gathers that the two students visited several chemists before obtaining the ingredients needed. Where they secured the cannabis indica later discovered on the scene of the tragedy is a mystery, but not, of course, one impossible of solution.

On August 15th, Ludwig, apparently without Edmond’s knowledge, wrote to Scott by air-mail, describing the pamphlet and its contents, and asking for advice.

On the night of August 18th, approximately half an hour after Kenneth Scott received Ludwig’s letter, the two young occultists undertook their disastrous experiment.

* * *


Later, Edmond blamed himself. In the diary he mentions Ludwig’s uneasiness, as though the latter sensed some hidden danger. Ludwig suggested postponing the trial for a few days, but Edmond laughed at his fears. It ended with the two placing the required ingredients in a brazier and kindling the mixture.

There were other preparations, too, but Edmond is quite vague. He makes one or two furtive references to “the seven lamps” and “the infra color,” but nothing can be made of these terms. The two had decided to attempt projection of their astral bodies across the continent; they would attempt communication with Kenneth Scott. One can detect a tinge of youthful vanity in this.

Cannabis indica formed one of the ingredients of the mixture in the brazier; that has been ascertained by analysis. It was the presence of this Indian drug which led so many to believe that the later entries in Edmond’s diary were evolved from nothing more tangible than the fantasies of an opium or hashish dream, directed along the curious channels they took merely because of the students’ preoccupation with thos things at the time. Edmond dreamed he saw Scott’s house in Baltimore. But it must be remembered that he had been staring at a photograph of that house which he had placed on the table before him; and he was consciously willing to go there. Nothing is more logical therefore, than that Edmond simply dreamed what he wanted to dream.

But Ludwig had the identical vision, or, at least, so he stated afterward — unless Edmond, in that entry, lied. It is the opinion of Professor Perry L. Lewis, a recognized expert on dream-phenomena, that Edmond, during his hashish vision, spoke of his illusions aloud, with no conscious intention of so doing, nor any later memory of it — and that Ludwig, as in a hypnotic trance, simply saw the phantasms Edmond’s words conjured up in his mind.

Edmond states in his diary that after watching the burning contents of the brazier for some minutes, he fell into a state of somnolent trance, in which he saw his surroundings clearly, but with certain curious alterations which can only be attributed to the action of the drug. The marijuana smoker may see a tiny hall bedroom metamorphose itself into a huge vaulted chamber; similarly, Edmond stated that the room in which he sat seemed to enlarge. Oddly, however, the growth was of a strangely abnormal type; the geometry of the room gradually became all wrong. Edmond stresses this point without attempting to explain it. Just when the shifting became noticeable he does not mention, but presently he found himself in the midst of a chamber which, although recognizable his own, had changed until it centered at a certain point.

The notes are almost incoherent here. Edmond obviously found it difficult to describe what he saw in his vision. All the lines and curves of the room, he insists with odd emphasis, seemed to point at one specific spot, the brazier where the mixture of drugs and chemicals was smoldering.

Very faintly a persistent ringing came to his ears, but this dwindled and at last died away altogether. At the time Edmond thought the sound due to the effects of the drug. It was not until later that he learned of Scott’s frantic efforts to reach him by means of long-distance telephone. The shrill ringing grew fainter and faded into silence.

Edmond was of an experimental turn of mind. He tried to shift his gaze to specific objects he remembered, a vase, a lamp, a table. But the room seemed to possess an indescribable viscid fluidity, so that he found his stare inevitably slipping along warped lines and curves until he was again watching the brazier. And it was then that he became conscious of something unusual taking place at that spot.

The mixture no longer smoldered. Instead, a strange crystal formation was building itself up within the brazier. This object Edmond found impossible to describe; he could only say that it seemed a continuation of the warped lines of the room, carrying them beyond the point where they centered. Apparently unconscious of the insanity of such a concept, he goes on to say that his eyes began to ache as he watched the crystalline object, but he could not turn away his gaze.

The crystal drew him. He felt an abrupt and agonizing suction; there was a high-pitched thrumming in the air, and suddenly he was drifting with increasing velocity toward the thing in the brazier. It sucked him in — such is Edmond’s inexplicable phrase; he felt a moment of incredible cold, and then a new vision rose up before him.

* * *


Gray fog, and instability. Edmond stressed this curious feeling of flux, which he declared existed within himself. He felt, he says oddly, like a cloud of smoke, wavering and drifting aimlessly. But when he glanced down he saw his own body, fully clothed and apparently quite substantial.

Now a dreadful feeling of uneasiness began to oppress his mind. The fog thickened and whirled; the nightmare, causeless fear familiar to the opium-taker clutched him in its grip. Something, he felt, was approaching, something utterly horrible and frightful in its potent menace. Then, quite suddenly, the fog was gone.

Far beneath him he saw what at first he took to be the sea. He was hanging unsupported in empty air, and a surging grayness shimmered and crawled from horizon to horizon. The fluctuating leaden surface was dotted and speckled with round dark blobs; these were innumerable. Without conscious volition he felt himself drawn down vertically, and as he approached the mysterious grayness he saw it more clearly.

He could not determine its nature. It seemed merely a sea of gray slime, protoplasmic and featureless. But the dark blobs became recognizable as heads.

“Down toward the ghastly

horde Edmond was drawn.”

Into Edmond’s mind flashed the memory of a narrative he had once read, written in the Twelfth Century by the monk Alberico, and purporting to be the record of a descent into Hell. Like Dante, Alberico had seen the torments of the damned; the blasphemers (he wrote in his stilted, pedantic Latin) had been immersed to their necks in a lake of molten metal. Edmond remembered Alberico’s description now. Then he saw that the heads were not those of beings partly submerged in the gray slime; instead, they were homogenous with the graynesss. They grew from it!

Edmond’s fear had left him. With oddly detached curiosity he scanned the fantastic surface below. There were human heads bobbing and nodding from the gray sea, uncountable thousands of them, but by far the greater number of the heads were not human. Some of these latter bore traces of the anthropoid, but others were scarcely recognizable as living objects.

For the heads lived. Their eyes stared with awful agony; their lips writhed in soundless laments; tears coursed down the sunken cheeks of many. Even the horribly inhuman heads — bird-like, reptilian, monstrous things of living stone and metal and vegetable matter — showed traces of the unceasing torment that gnawed at them. Down toward the ghastly horde Edmond was drawn.

Again blackness enveloped him. It was transitory, but as he emerged from momentary unconsciousness he felt (he says) curiously changed. Something had happened to him during that fateful period of darkness. There seemed to be a cloudy vagueness shadowing his mind, so that he viewed his surroundings darkly and through a kind of haze. In this new vision he seemed to be high in the air above a silent, moonlit city, and rapidly moving downward.

There was a full moon, and by its light he recognized the old brownstone house toward which he was descending. It was Kenneth Scott’s home, made familiar to him by the photograph. A vague thrill of triumph warmed him; the experiment, then, had succeeded.

The house loomed up before him. He was hovering outside an open, unlighted window. Peering in, he recognized the slender form of Kenneth Scott seated at a desk. The occultist’s lips were tightly compressed, and a worried scowl darkened his face. A great book with yellowed parchment pages was open before the man, who was studying it carefully. Occasionally his worried eyes would turn to the telephone on the desk beside him. Edmond made an attempt to call to Scott, and the latter looked up, staring through the window.

Instantly a shocking change transformed Scott’s face. The man seemed to become quite insane with fear. He sprang up from the desk, overturning his chair, and simultaneously Edmond felt an impelling urge dragging him forward.

What happened after that is confused and hazy. Edmond’s notes are fragmentary at this point, and it is only possible to gather that Edmond was in the room and pursuing the frantic Scott in a fashion that was inexplicable and abnormal. He was flowing — and Scott was caught and engulfed — and here Edmond’s notes break off utterly, as though he had been overcome by remembrance of the episode.

Merciful blackness swallowed Edmond then, but there was one more flashing vision before the dream faded and was gone. Again he seemed to be outside Scott’s window, swiftly retreating into the night, and through the open square of yellow radiance was visible part of Scott’s desk and the crumpled body of the man himself lying on the carpet beyond it. At least Edmond assumed that it was Scott’s body, for either the man was lying with his head doubled at an impossible angle out of sight beneath his torso, or else he was headless.

That ended the dream. Edmond awoke to find the room in darkness, and Ludwig stirring sleepily near by. Both students were distracted and overwrought. They argued excitedly for some time, with occasional semi-hysterical outbursts, and Ludwig revealed that his vision had been identical with Edmond’s. It is a pity that neither of them took the trouble to analyze the situation and look for a logical explanation, but both, of course, were mystics, and thoroughly credulous.

The telephone rang. An impatient operator asked if Edmond would receive a call from Baltimore. She had, she said, been ringing the apartment for some time without getting a reply. Edmond cut her off abruptly and requested that the connection be put through. But this could not be done. The operator at Baltimore exchange reported that her party did not answer, and, after a futile exchange of questions, Edmond hung up. It was then Ludwig confessed to writing Scott, bemoaning the reticence that had made him refrain from telling the Baltimore occultist the purpose of the experiment — the destination to which the astrals were directed.

Nor were their fears calmed by the discovery of the object in the brazier. Apparently part of the vision at least had been founded on truth; the unknown chemicals had crystallized into a thing that appeared to be all planes and angles. It was formed of some brittle substance resembling frosted glass, was roughly pyramidal, and measured about six inches from apex to base. Ludwig wanted to smash it at once, but Edmond prevented him.

Their arguments were brought to an end by the arrival of a telegram from Scott. It read:

ATTEMPT NO EXPERIMENTS WITH PAMPHLET YOU MENTION STOP TREMENDOUSLY DANGEROUS AND MAY MEAN MY DEATH STOP AM WRITING YOU TODAY BY AIR MAIL FULL DETAILS STOP ADVISE YOU BURN PAMPHLET

KENNETH SCOTT

There were two more communications which resulted in Paul Edmond’s temporary stay at a Hollywood hospital. The first was an item which appeared in time for the morning edition of the Los Angeles Times of August 20th. It stated briefly that Kenneth Scott, well-known author and occultist, residing in Baltimore, Maryland, had been mysteriously murdered. There were no clues to indicate the identity of the assailant, and the body had not been discovered until the afternoon of the 19th. The fact that the victim’s head had been severed from his body and was inexplicably missing made identification at first doubtful, but Scott’s physician confirmed the logical supposition. A quantity of grayish slime smeared on the carpet added another element of mystery to the case. Scott’s head, the coroner declared, had been cleanly severed from his body by a sharp blade. Police stated that an arrest would be made shortly.

Needless to say, that arrest was never made. The tabloids seized the juicy morsel and made much of it, and an enterprising reporter unearthed the fact that Scott had sent an air-mail letter from the Baltimore Central post office shortly before the time at which his death had been fixed. It was this communication which was the direct cause of Edmond’s nervous collapse and his retirement to a hospital.

The letter was found in Edmond’s apartment, but it sheds little light on the case. Scott was a visionary, and his letter bears an almost suspicious resemblance to his fictional work.

“Both of you know (ran part of the long letter) “how much truth there is often to be found behind old legends and folk-lore. The Cyclops is no longer a myth, as any doctor familira with monstrous births can tell you. And you know how my theories regarding the Elixir Vitæ have been confirmed by the discovery of heavy water. Well, the myth of the Hydra is based on such a truth.

“There are innumerable tales of multi-headed monsters, all springing from the actual entity of whose real existence a very few have known through the ages. This creature did not originate on earth, but in the gulfs Outside. It was, after a fashion, a vampiric entity, living not on the blood of its victims but on their heads — their brains. This may sound strange to you, but you know by this time that there are beings Outside whose needs and flesh are not as ours. Through the eons this entity has ravened in the abyss beyond our dimension, sending out its call to claim victims where it could. For this entity, by absorbing the heads and brains of intelligent creatures both of this world and of other planets, emerges with its powers and vitality greatly augmented.

“You both know that through the ages there have been certain people willing to worship the Great Ones — even the evil Aliens who have come down to us in folk-lore as demons. Every god and every entity has had its worshippers, from black Pharol to the least of the Aliens whose powers are more than human. And these cults intermingle in a very curious way, so that we find traces of a forgotten worship cropping up in far later times. When the Romans worshipped the Magna Mater in Italy’s dark forests, for instance, why do you suppose they incorporated into their ritual the mystic adoration, ‘Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon’? The implication is clear.

“I have gone into considerable detail, but it has been necessary to prepare you for my explanation of the origin of that pamphlet Robert found in San Pedro. I knew of this booklet, which was printed in Salem in 1783, but I had thought that there were no longer any copies in existence. That pamphlet is a trap, and a most damnable one, created by the worshippers of the Hydra to lure victims into the maw of their god!

“It purports to be merely an innocent experiment with the astral self. However, the real purpose is to open a gateway and prepare a sacrifice for the Hydra. When the booklets were first distributed, through secret underground channels, there was an epidemic of deaths in New England. Dozens of men and women were found headless, with no trace of any human murderer. Yet the real killers were the ones who performed the experiment according to the directions given in the booklet, and unknowingly let the Hydra use their vital forces to materialize on this planet.

“Baldly speaking, what happens is this: the subject, following the instructions, inhales the fumes of the drug which tears apart the veil between our world and Outside. He concentrates upon the person whom he wishes his astral to visit, and that person is doomed. For the experimenter is drawn Outside, into another dimension of space, and through a certain psychic and chemical process is temporarily made one with the Hydra. What it amounts to is this: the Hydra, using the experimenter’s astral as a host, comes to earth and takes its prey — which is the person upon whom the subject has been concentrating. There is no real danger to the experimenter himself, save, perhaps, for a possible severe nervous shock. But the other — the victim — is taken by the Hydra for its own. He is doomed to eternal torment, except in certain unusual cases where he can maintain a psychic link with an earthly mind. But I need not speak of that.

“I am greatly worried. I have put through a long-distance call to Edmond’s apartment, and no doubt you will hear from me tonight long before this letter can arrive. If you are rash enough to undertake the experiment before I can communicate with you, I shall be in grave danger, for you may attempt projection of your astral to Baltimore, to me. After I have posted this letter, and while I am waiting for my telephone call to be put through, I shall do my utmost to find a protective formula, although I do not think one exists.

”Kenneth Scott.”

It was this letter which sent Edmond to the hospital for a few days to recover from his nervous condition. Ludwig was apparently of stronger stuff; he stayed, at Edmond’s request, in the latter’s apartment, and indulged in some experimenting of his own.

Just what happened in Edmond’s apartment during the next few days will never be fully known. Ludwig visited his host daily at the hospital, and told him of his experiments, and Edmond noted what he could remember on slips of paper which he subsequently inserted between pages of his diary. One is inclined to believe that the anomalous mixture of drugs in the brazier continued to exert its influence on the minds of the two students, for certainly Ludwig’s experiments, as recorded by Edmond, seem like a continuation of the original hashish dream.

Ludwig had burned the pamphlet, as might be expected. And then, on the night following Edmond’s removal to the hospital, the other youth maintained, he had heard Scott speaking to him.

Edmond did not scoff, for he was vastly credulous. He listened intently while Ludwig declared that the occultist was still alive, although existing in another dimension of space. The Hydra had captured Scott, but the occultist had the power to communicate with Ludwig. It is necessary to keep constantly in mind the fact that neither of these two youths was quite normal after the mental agitation he had undergone.

So Ludwig added more and more every day to his tale, and Edmond listened. They spoke furtively, in whispers, and Edmond kept careful watch over his notes so that they would not fall into skeptical hands. The whole crux of the matter, Ludwig said, was the strange crystalline object which had formed in the brazier. It was this which kept open the path to Outside. One could pass through it if one wished, despite the fact that it was not as large as a man’s head, because the crystal created a “warp in space” — a term Edmond mentions several times, but entirely neglects to explain. The Hydra, however, could not return to earth unless the original conditions were duplicated.

Ludwig said he had heard Scott’s voice whispering thinly from the crystalline thing of insane planes and angles, and the occultist was in horrible agony and insistent that Ludwig rescue him. It would not be difficult, provided the student followed instructions implicitly. There were dangers, but he must have courage, and strive to undo the harm he had done. Only thus could Scott be freed from endless agony and return to earth.

So, Ludwig told Edmond, he went through the crystal — again this vague and extraordinary phrase! — taking those things Scott had said he would need. Chief among these was a razor-keen, bone-handled carving knife. There were other objects, some of them difficult to obtain, which Ludwig did not specify, or which if he did, Edmond did not mention in his notes.

According to Ludwig’s narative, he went through the crystal, and he found Scott. But not at first. There were nights of fumbling progress through fantastic and terrible visions of nightmare, guided always by the insistent whisper of Scott’s voice. There were gates to be passed, and strange dimensions to traverse. And so Ludwig moved through awful abysses of pulsing, fearful darkness; he went through a place of curious violet light that sent tinkling, evil trills of goblin laughter after him; he went through a Cyclopean deserted city of ebon stone which he shudderingly recognized as fabled Dis. In the end he found Scott.

* * *


He did what was necessary. When he came to the hospital the next day Edmond was shocked by the bloodless pallor of his friend, and the little crawling lights of madness that shone in his eyes. The pupils were unnaturally dilated, and Ludwig spoke that day in disjointed whispers which Edmond found hard to follow. The notes suffered. It is only clear that Ludwig declared he had freed Scott from the grip of the Hydra, and that over and over again the youth kept muttering something about the terrible gray slime that had smeared the blade of his carving-knife. He said his task was not yet ended.

Undoubtedly it was the drug-poisoned mind of Robert Ludwig speakking when he told how he had left Scott, or at least the living part of him, in a plane of space which was not inimical to human life, and which was not subject to entirely natural laws and processes. Scott wanted to return to earth. He could return now, Ludwig told Edmond, but the strange vitality that maintained life in what was left of Scott would dissipate immediately on earth. Only in certain planes and dimensions was it possible for Scott to exist at all, and the alien force that kept him alive was gradually departing now that he was no longer drawing sustenance from the Hydra. Ludwig said that quick action was necessary.

There was a certain spot Outside where Scott could achieve his desire. In that place thought was obscurely linked to energy and matter, because of an insane shrill piping (Ludwig said) that eternally filtered from beyond a veil of flickering colors. It was very near the Center, the Center of Chaos, where dwells Azathoth, the Lord of All Things. All that exists was created by the thoughts of Azathoth, and only in the Center of Ultimate Chaos could Scott find means to live again on earth in human form. There is an erasure in Edmond’s notes at this point, and it is only possible to make out the fragment: “…of thought made real.”

White-faced, hollow-cheeked, Ludwig said that he must complete his task. He must take Scott to the Center, although he confessed to a horrible fear that made him hesitate. There were dangers in the way, and pitfalls where one might easily be trapped. Worst of all, the veil shielding Azathoth was thin, and even the slightest glimpse of the Lord of All Things would mean utter and complete destruction to the beholder. Scott had spoken of that, Ludwig said, and had also mentioned the dreadful lure that would drag the young student’s eyes to the fatal spot unless he fought strongly against it.

Biting his lips nervously, Robert Ludwig left the hospital, and we assume met with foul play on his way to Edmnd’s apartment. For Edmond never saw his friend again on earth.

* * *


The police were still seaching for the missing head of Kenneth Scott. Edmond gathered that from the newspapers. He waited impatiently the next day for Ludwig to appear, and after several hours had passed without result, he telephoned his apartment and got no response. Eventually, worried and almost sick with anxiety, he spent a turbulent ten minutes with his doctor and another with the superintendent. Finally he achieved his purpose and went by taxu to his apartment, having overruled the objection of hospital officials.




Ludwig was gone. He had vanished without a trace. Edmond considered summoning the police, but speedily dismissed the thought. He paced about the apartment nervously, seldom turning his gaze from the crystalline object that still rested in the brazier.

His diary gives little clue to what happened that night. One can conjecture that he prepared another dose of the narcotic drug, or that the toxic effects of the fumes Edmond had inhaled several days before had finally worked such disintegration within his brain that he could no longer distinguish between the false and the real. An entry in the diary dated the following morning begins abruptly, “I’ve heard him. Just as Bob said, he spoke through the crystal thing. He’s desperate, and tells me that Bob failed. He didn’t get Scott to the Center, or S. could have materialized again on earth and rescued Bob. Something — I’m not sure what — caught Bob, God help him. May God help all of us… . Scott says I must begin where Bob left off and finish the job.”

There is a soul laid bare on the last pages of that record, and it is not a pleasant sight. Somehow the most frightful of the unearthly horrors the diary describes seem not quite as dreadful as the last conflict that took place in that apartment above Hollywood, when a man wrestled with his fear and realized his weakness. It is probably just as well that the pamphlet was destroyed, for such a brain-wrecking drug as was described in it must surely have originated in some hell as terrible as any which Edmond portrays. The last pages of the diary show a mind crumbling into ruin.






“I went through. Bob has made it easier; I can begin where he left off, as Scott says. And I went up through the Cold Flame and the Whirling Vortices until I reached the place where Scott is. Where he was, rather, for I picked him up and carried him through several planes before I had to return. Bob didn’t mention the suction one has to keep fighting against. But it doesn’t get very strong until I’ve got quite a distance in.”





The next entry is dated a day later. It is scarcely legible.






“Couldn’t stand it. Had to get out. Walked around Griffith Park for hour. Then I came back to the apartment and almost immediately Scott talked to me. I’m afraid. I think he senses that, and is frightened too, and angry.

“He says we can’t waste any more time. His vitality is almosy gone, and he’s got to reach the Center quick and get back to earth. I saw Bob. Just a glimpse, and I wouldn’t have known it was he if Scott hadn’t told me. He was all-awry, and horrible somehow. Scott said the atoms of his body had adapted themselves to another dimension when he let himself get caught. I’ve got to be careful. We’re nearly at the Center.”





The last entry.






“Once more will do it. God, I’m afraid, horribly afraid. I heard the piping. It turned my brain into ice. Scott was shouting at me, urging me on, and I think trying to drown that — other sound, but of course he couldn’t do it. There was a very faint violet glow in the distance, and a flickering of colored lights. Beyond, Scott told me, was Azathoth.

“I can’t do it. I don’t dare — not with that piping, and those Shapes I saw moving far down. If I look in that direction when I’m at the Veil it will mean — but Scott is insanely angry with me. He says I was the cause of it all. I had an almost uncontrollable impulse to let the suction draw me back, and then to smash the Gateway — the crystal thing. Maybe if I find myself unable to keep looking away from the Veil when next I go through I’ll do just that. I told Scott if he let me come back to earth for one more breathing-space I’d finish the job this next time. He agreed, but said to hurry. His vitality is going fast. He said if I didn’t come through the Gateway in ten minutes he’d come after me. He won’t, though. The life that keeps him going Outside wouldn’t be any use on earth, except for a second or two.

“My ten minutes is up. Scott is calling from the Gateway. I’m not going! I can’t face it — not the last horror Outside, with those things moving behind the Veil and that awful piping screaming out—

“I won’t go, I tell you! No, Scott — I can’t face it! You can’t come out — like that. You’d die — I tell you I won’t go! You can’t force me — I’ll smash the Gateway first!… what? No! No, you can’t… you can’t do it!… Scott! Don’t, don’t… God, he’s coming out—”





That was the last entry in the diary, which police found open on Edmond’s desk. A hideous screaming and subsequently a stream of red liquid seeping out sluggishly from beneath the door of Edmond’s apartment had resulted in the arrival of two radio patrol officers.

The body of Paul Edmond was found near the door, the head and shoulders lying in a widening crimson pool.

Near by was an overturned brass brazier, and a flaky white substance, granular in nature, was scattered over the carpet. Edmond’s stiff fingers still tightly gripped the object which has since been the cause of so much discussion.

This object was in an incredible state of preservation, in view of its nature. Part of it was coated with a peculiar grayish slime, and its jaws were clamped tightly, the teeth having horribly mangled Edmond’s throat and sevred the carotid artery.

There was no need to search further for the missing head of Kenneth Scott.




Bells of Horror

by Henry Kuttner


This story was originally titled “Horror at San Xavier", for so Lovecraft refers to it in an April 16, 1936 letter to Kuttner, expressing eagerness to see it. HPL refers to it as a “recent yam”, so Kuttner must have mentioned “Horror at San Xavier* as the title of a finished story, not the working title of a draft. Thus we can safely guess that the title “Bells of Horror” was a typical ham-handed editorial usurpation. (If I felt like doing a bit of editorial tampering with Kuttner’s work, I’d have called it "Death Toll.”)

In general structure “Bells of Horror” has a nagging resemblance to Bertram Russell's “The Scourge of B‘moth” (Weird Tales, May 1929), and it is interesting to speculate whether it might have influenced him here. At any rate, it is noteworthy that Kuttner has taken Lovecraft’s advice about the circumstances of the chance act leading to the unleashing of the cataclysmic horror. Even at that, the story is one more version of the “King Tut’s Curse” scenario of which horror writers have still not grown tired.

First publication: Strange Stories, April 1939.

* * *


A great deal of curiosity has been aroused by the strange affair of the lost bells of Mission San Xavier. Many have wondered why, when the bells were discovered after remaining hidden for over a hundred and fifty years, they were almost immediately smashed and the fragments buried secretly. In view of the legends of the remarkable tone and quality of the bells, a number of musicians have written angry letters asking why, at least, they were not rung before their destruction and a permanent record made of their music.




As a matter of fact, the bells were rung, and the cataclysmic thing that happened at that time was the direct reason for their destruction. And when those evil bells were shrieking out their mad summons in the unprecedented blackness that shrouded San Xavier, it was only the quick action of one man that saved the world — yes, I do not hesitate to say it — from chaos and doom.

As secretary of the California Historical Society, I was in a position to witness the entire affair almost from its inception. I was not present, of course, when the bells were unearthed, but Arthur Todd, the president of the society, telephoned me at my home in Los Angeles soon after that ill-fated discovery.

He was almost too excited to speak coherently. “We’ve found them!” he kept shouting. “The bells, Ross! Found them last night, back in the Pinos Range. It’s the most remarkable discovery since — since the Rosetta Stone!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, groping in a fog of drowsiness. The call had brought me from my warm bed.

“The San Xavier bells, of course,” he explained jubilantly. “I’ve seen them myself. Just where Junipero Serra buried them in 1775. A hiker found a cave in the Pinos, and explored it — and there was a rotting wooden cross at the end, with carving on it. I brought—”

“What did the carving say?” I broke in.

“Eh? Oh — just a minute, I have it here. Listen: ‘Let no man hang the evil bells of the Mutsunes which lie buried here, lest the terror of the night rise again in Nueva California.’ The Mutsunes, you know, were supposed to have had a hand in casting the bells.”

“I know,” I said into the transmitter. “Their shamans were supposed to have put a magic spell on them.”

“I’m — I’m wondering about that,” Todd said. “There have been some very unusual things happening up here. I’ve only got two of the bells out of the cave. There’s another, you know, but the Mexicans won’t go in the cave any more. They say — well, they’re afraid of something. But I’ll get that bell if I have to dig it up myself.”

“Want me to come up there?”

“If you will,” Todd said eagerly. “I’m phoning from a cabin in Coyote Canyon. I left Denton — my assistant — in charge. Suppose I send a boy down to San Xavier to guide you to the cave?”

“All right,” I assented. “Send him to the Xavier Hotel. I’ll be there in a few hours.”

* * *


San Xavier is perhaps a hundred miles from Los Angeles. I raced along the coast and within two hours I had reached the little mission town, hemmed in by the Pinos Range, drowsing sleepily on the edge of the Pacific. I found my guide at the hotel, but he was oddly reluctant to return to Todd’s camp.

“I can tell you how to go, Señor. You will not get lost.” The boy’s dark face was unnaturally pale beneath its heavy tan, and there was a lurking disquiet in his brown eyes. “I don’t want to go back—”

I jingled some coins. “It’s not as bad as all that, is it?” I asked. “Afraid of the dark?”

He flinched. “Sí, the — the dark — it’s very dark in that cave, Señor.”

The upshot was that I had to go alone, trusting to his directions and my own ability in the open.

Dawn was breaking as I started up the canyon trail, but it was a strangely dark dawn. The sky was not overcast, but it held a curious gloom. I have seen such oppressively dark days during dust storms, but the air seemed clear enough. And it was very cold, although even from my height I could see no fog on the Pacific.

I kept on climbing. Presently I found myself threading the gloomy, chill recesses of Coyote Canyon. I shievered with cold. The sky was a dull, leaden color, and I found myself breathing heavily. In good physical condition, the climb had tired me unduly.

Yet I was not physically tired — it was rather an aching, oppressive lethargy of mind. My eyes were watering, and I found myself shutting them occasionally to relieve the strain. I wished the sun would come over the top of the mountain.

Then I saw something extraordinary — and horrible. It was a toad — gray, fat, ugly. It was squatting beside the a rock at the side of the trail, rubbing itself against the rough stone. One eye was turned toward me — or, rather, the place where the eye should have been. There was no eye — there was only a slimy little hollow.

The toad moved its ungainly body back and forth, sawing its head against the rock. It kept uttering harsh little croaks of pain — and in a moment it had withdrawn from the stone and was dragging itself across the trail at my feet.

I stood looking at the stone, nauseated. The gray surface of rock was bedaubed with whitish streaks of fetor, and the shredded bits of the toad’s eye. Apparently the toad had deliberately ground out its protruding eyes against the rock.

It crept out of sight beneath a bush, leaving a track of slime in the dust of the trail. I involuntarily shut my eyes and rubbed them — and suddenly jerked down my hands, startled at the roughness with which my fists had been digging into my eye-sockets. Lancing pain shot through my temples. Remembering the itching, burning sensation in my eyes, I shuddered a little. Had the same sort of torture caused the toad deliberately to blind itself? My God!

* * *


I ran on up the trail. Presently I passed a cabin — probably the one from which Todd had telephoned, for I saw wires running from the roof to a tall pine. I knocked at the door. No answer, I continued my ascent.

Suddenly there came an agonized scream, knife-edged and shrill, and the rapid thudding of footsteps. I stopped, listening. Someone was running down the trail toward me — and behind him I could hear others racing, shouting as they ran. Around a bend in the trail a man came plunging.

He was a Mexican, and his black-stubbled face was set in lines of terror and agony. His mouth was open in a square of agony, and insane screams burst from his throat. But it wasn’t that that sent me staggering back out of his path, cold sweat bursting out on my body.

His eyes had been gouged out, and twin trickles of blood dripped down his face from black, gaping hollows.

As it happened, there was no need for me to halt the blinded man’s frantic rush. At the curve of the trail he smashed into a tree with frightful force, and momentarily stood upright against the trunk. Then very slowly he sagged down and collapsed in a limp huddle. There was a great splotch of blood on the rough bark. I went over to him quickly.

Four men came running toward me. I recognized Arthur Todd and Denton, his assistant. The other two were obviously laborers. Todd jerked to a halt.

“Ross! Good God — is he dead?”

Swiftly he bent over to examine the unconscious man. Denton and I stared at each other. Denton was a tall, strongly-built man, with a shock of black hair and a broad mouth that was generally expanded in a grin. Now his face bore a look of horrified disbelief.

“God, Ross — he did it right before our eyes,” Denton said through pale lips. “He just let out a scream, threw up his hands and tore his eyes out of their sockets.” He shut his own eyes at the memory.

Todd got up slowly. Unlike Denton, he was small, wiry, nervously energetic, with a lean, brown face and amazingly alert eyes. “Dead,” he said.

“What’s happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “What’s wrong, Todd? Was the man insane?”

And all the while I had a picture of that fat toad tearing out its eyes against a rock.

Todd shook his ehad, his brows drawn together in a frown. “I don’t know. Ross, do your eyes feel — odd?”

A shiver ran through me. “Damned odd. Burning and itching. I’ve been rubbing them continually on the way up.”

“So have the men,” Denton told me. “So have we. See?” He pointed to his eyes, and I saw that they were red-rimmed and inflamed.

The two laborers — Mexicans — came over to us. One of them said something in Spanish. Todd barked a sharp order, and they fell back, hesitating.

Then, without further parley, they took to their heels down the trail. Denton started forward with an angry shout, but Todd caught his arm. “No use,” he said quickly. “We’ll have to get the bells out ourselves.”

“You found the last one?” I asked, as he turned back up the trail.

“We’ve found them — all three,” Todd said somberly. “Denton and I dug up the last one ourselves. And we found this, too.”

* * *


He drew a dirt-encrusted, greenish metal tube from his pocket and gave it to me. Within the cylinder was a sheet of parchment in a remarkably good state of preservation. I puzzled over the archaic Spanish script.

“Let me,” Todd said, taking it carefully. He translated expertly.

“ ‘On the twenty-first of June, by the favor of God, the attack by the pagan Mutsunes having been repulsed, the three bells cast a month ago were buried in this secret cave and the entrance sealed—’ but a landslide obviously opened it up again recently,” Todd broke off to explain.

“Inasmuch as evil witchcraft was practiced by the Indians, when we suspended and rang the bells, the evil demon whom the Mutsunes call Zu-che-quon was called from his dwelling beneath the mountains and brought the black night and the cold death among us. The large cross was overthrown, and many of the people were possessed of the evil demon, so that the few of us who retained our senses were hard put to it to overcome their fiend-inspired attack and remove the bells.

“Afterward we gave thanks to God for our preservation, and gave aid to those who were injured in the fray. The souls of those who perished were commended to God, and we prayed that the San Antonio would soon arrive to relieve us from this cruel solitude. I charge whomever may find these bells, should it not please God to allow me to fulfill this duty, to send them to Rome, in the name of our master the king. May God guard him.’ ”

Todd paused, and carefully returned the parchment to its case. “Junipero Serra signed it,” he said quietly.

“Lord, what a find!” I exulted. “But — surely you don’t think there’s anything—”

“Who said I did?” Todd snapped in a voice that betrayed his nervous tension. “There’s some logical explanation — superstition and auto-suggestion are a bad combination. I—”

“Where’s Sarto?” Denton asked with a note of apprehension in his voice. We were standing at the edge of a little clearing, bare and rocky.

“Sarto?” I asked.

“He has the cabin down the trail,” Todd said. “You must have passed it. I left him here with the bells when José had his seizure.”

“Hadn’t we better get José’s body to town?” I asked.

Todd frowned. “Don’t think me brutal,” he said. “But these bells — I can’t leave them here. The man’s dead. We can’t help him, and it’ll take all three of us to get the bells to town. It’s too bad the poor chap didn’t have Denton’s sense of direction,” he finished with a grim smile. “He wouldn’t have run into the tree then.”

He was right. I believe that Denton could have traversed the entire trail blindfolded after having once ascended it. He had a remarkable memory and sense of direction, like those Indians who could unerringly find their way to their wigwams across hundreds of miles of wilderness. Later this trait of Denton’s was to be of vital importance, but no premonition of this came to us at the time.

We had climbed the rocky mountain slope above the clearing and had come out in a little glade among the pines. Nearby was a gaping hollow in the ground — around it evidence of a recent landslide.

“Where the devil!” Todd said, staring around. “How—”

“He’s gone,” Denton said in amazement. “And the bells with him—”

Then we heard it — a faint, hollow musical note, the sound of a bell hitting wood. It came from above us, and glancing up the slope we saw an odd sight. A man, gaunt, bearded, with a blazing thatch of red hair, was tugging at a rope he had stretched over the branch of a pine. At the other end of the rope—

Slowly they rose, silhouetted against the sky, the lost bells of San Xavier. Gracefully curved, they glowed bronze even beneath their stains and verdigris — and they were silent, for they had no clappers. Once or twice they swung against the trunk of the pine and sent out a hollow, mournful note. How the man could lift that great weight was inexplicable; I could see the muscles cord and knot on his bare arms as he strained. His eyes were bulging, and his teeth clenched in a grinning mouth.

“Sarto!” Denton cried, starting to clamber up the slope. “What are you doing?”

* * *


Startled, the man jerked his head around and stared at us. The rope slipped through his fingers, and we saw the bells plunge down. With a frightful effort he clutched the rope and halted their descent momentarily, but the strain threw him off balance. He tottered, overbalanced, and came crashing down the slope — and behind him, overtaking him, rolled and bounded the bells, throbbing and booming as they clashed against rocks.

“God!” I heard Todd whisper. “The mad fool!”

I heard a sickening crunch and saw one of the bells smash down on Sarto

There was a maelstrom of dust and flying shale on the slope above. I heard a sickening crunch and Denton threw himself desperately aside. Through the dust I saw one of the bells smash down on the sliding body of Sarto, and then I was stumbling away, scrubbing furiously at my eyes, blinded by the flying particles of dirt. The rattle and roar subsided slowly as I clung to a tree. I blinked, glanced around.

Almost at my feet was one of the bells. There was a great crimson stain upon it. The body of Sarto was visible, jammed into a bush on the slope above.

And a few feet below it, propped upright against a jagged rock, was Sart’s battered, gory head!

Thus ended the first act of the drama I was to witness.

The bells were to be hung two weeks later. There was some stir in the newspapers, and considerable more among historians. Pilgrimages of various historical societies to San Xavier from all over the world were planned.

In the cold daylight of logic, outside the eerie atmosphere of the Pinos Mountains, the unusual occurrences during the unearthing of the bells were easily explained. A virulent kind of poisoning, perhaps similar to poison oak — or some fungus hidden in the cave with the relics — had been responsible for our optical irritation and the madness of Sarto and the Mexican. Neither Denton, Todd, nor I denied this explanation, but we discussed the matter at length among ourselves.

Denton went so far as to drive down to the Huntington Library to view the forbidden Johann Negus translation of the Book of Iod, that abhorrent and monstrous volume of ancient esoteric formulae about which curious legends still cling. Only a single copy of the original volume, written in the pre-human Ancient Tongue, is said to exist. Certainly few even know of the expurgated Johann Negus translation, but Denton had heard vague rumors about a passage in the book which he declared might be connected with the legends of the San Xavier bells.

When he returned from Los Angeles he brought a sheet of foolscap paper covered with his execrable penmanship. The passage he had copied from the Book of Iod was this:






The Dark Silent One dwelleth deep beneath the earth on the shore of the Western Ocean. Not one of those potent Old Ones from hidden worlds and other stars is He, for in earth’s hidden blackness He hath always dwelt. No name hath He, for He is the ultimate doom and the undying emptiness and silence of Old Night.

When earth is dead and lifeless and the stars pass into blackness, He will rise again and spread His dominion over all. For He hath naught to do with life and sunlight, but loveth the blackness and the eternal silence of the abyss. Yet can He be called to earth’s surface before His time, and the brown ones who dwell on the shore of the Western Ocean have power to do this by ancient spells and certain deep-toned sounds which reach His dwelling-place far below.

But there is great danger in such a summoning, lest He spread death and night before His time. For He bringeth darkness within the day, and blackness within the light; all life, all sound, all movement passeth away at His coming. He cometh sometimes within the eclipse, and although He hath no name, the brown ones know Him as Zushakon.





“There was a deletion at that point,” Denton said, as I glanced up from the excerpt. “The book’s expurgated, you know.”

“It’s very odd,” Todd said, picking up the paper and running his eyes over it. “But of course it’s merely a coincidence. Certainly, since folklore is based on natural phenomena, one can generally find modern parallels. The thunderbolts of Jove and Apollo’s arrows are merely lightning and sunstroke.”

“Never on them does the shining sun look down with his beams,” Denton quoted softly.“ ‘But deadly night is spread abroad over these hapless men.’ Remember Odysseus’ visit to the Land of the Dead?”

Todd’s mouth twisted wryly. “Well, what of it? I don’t expect Pluto to come up from Tartarus when the bells are hung. Do you! This is the twentieth century, such things don’t happen — in fact, never did happen.”

“Are you sure?” Denton asked. “Surely you don’t pretend to believe this cold weather we’re having is normal.”

I glanced up quickly. I had been wondering when someone would mention the abnormal chill in the air.

“It’s been cold before,” Todd said with a sort of desperate assurance. “And overcast, too. Just because we’re having some muggy weather is no reason for you to let your imagination get the upper hand. It’s— good God!”

We went staggering across the room. “Earthquake!” Denton gasped, and we headed for the door. We didn’t race for the stairs, but remained just beneath the lintel of the doorway. During an earthquake it’s the safest place in any building, on account of the nature and strength of its construction.

But there were no more shocks. Denton moved back into the room and hurried to the window.

“Look,” he said breathlessly, beckoning. “They’re hanging the bells.”

We followed him to the window. From it we could see the Mission San Xavier two blocks away, and in the arches in the bell tower figures were toiling over the three bells.

“They say when the bells were cast the Indians threw the body of a living girl into the boiling metal,” Denton said, apropos of nothing.

“I know it,” Todd answered snappishly. “And the shamans enchanted the bell with their magic. Don’t be a fool!”

“Why shouldn’t some peculiar vibration — like the sound of a bell — create certain unusual conditions?” Denton asked hotly, and I thought I detected a note of fear in his voice. “We don’t know all there is to know about life, Todd. It may take strange forms — or even—”

Clang-g-g!

The booming, ominous note of a bell rang out. It was strangely deep, thrilling through my ear-drums and sending its eerie vibration along my nerves. Denton caught his breath in a gasp.

Clang-g-g!

A deeper note — throbbing, sending a curious pain through my head. Somehow urgent, summoning!

Clang-g-g — clang-g-g… thundering, fantastic music, such as might issue from the throat of a god, or from the heart-strings of the dark angel Israfel…

Was it growing darker? Was a shadow creeping over San Xavier? Was the Pacific darkening from sparkling blue to leaden gray, to cold blackness?

Clang-g-g!

Then I felt it — a premonitory tremble of the floor beneath my feet. The window rattled in its casing. I felt the room sway sickeningly, tilt and drop while the horizon see-sawed slowly, madly, back and forth. I heard a crashing from below, and a picture dropped from the wall to smash against the floor.

Denton, Todd and I were swaying and tottering drunkenly toward the door. Somehow I felt that the building wouldn’t stand much more. It seemed to be growing darker. The room was filled with a hazy, tenebrous gloom. Someone screamed shrilly. Glass smashed and shattered. I saw a spurt of dust spray out from the wall, and a bit of plaster dropped away.

And suddenly I went blind!

At my side Denton cried out abruptly, and I felt a hand grip my arm. “That you, Ross?” I heard Todd ask in his calm voice, precise as ever. “Is it dark?”

“That’s it,” Denton said from somewhere in the blackness. “I’m not blind, then! Where are you? Where’s the door?”

A violent lurch of the building broke Todd’s clutch on my arm and I was flung against the wall. “Over here,” I shouted above the crashing and roaring. “Follow my voice.”

In a moment I felt someone fumbling against my shoulder. It was Denton, and soon Todd joined him.

“God! What’s happening?” I jerked out.

“Those damned bells,” Denton shouted in my ear. “The Book of Iod was right. He bringeth darkness — within the day—”

“You’re mad!” Todd cried sharply. But punctuating his words came the furious, ear-splitting dinning of the bells, clanging madly through the blackness. “Why do they keep ringing them?” Denton asked, and answered his own question, “The earthquake’s doing it — the quake’s ringing the bells!”

Clang-g-g! Clang-g-g!

Something struck my cheek, and putting up my hand I felt the warm stickiness of blood. Plaster smashed somewhere. Still the earthquake shocks kept up. Denton shouted something which I did not catch.

“What?” Todd and I cried simultaneously.

“Bells — we’ve got to stop them! They’re causing this darkness — perhaps the earthquake, too. It’s vibration — can’t you feel it? Something in the vibration of those bells is blanketing the sun’s light-waves. For light’s a vibration, you know. If we can stop them—”

“It would be a fool’s errand,” Todd cried. “You’re talking nonsense—”

“Then stay here. I can find my way — will you come, Ross?”

For a second I did not answer. All the monstrous references gleaned from our study of the lost bells were flooding back into my mind: the ancient god Zu-che-quon whom the Mutsunes were supposed to have the power of summoning “by certain deep-toned sounds” — “He cometh sometimes within the eclipse,” “All life passeth away at His coming,” “Yet can He be called to earth’s surface before His time—”

“I’m with you, Denton,” I said.

“Then, damn it, so am I!” Todd snapped. “I’ll see the end of this. If there is anything—”

He did not finish, but I felt hands groping for mine. “I’ll lead,” Denton told us. “Take it easy, now.”

I wondered how Denton could find his way in that enveloping shroud of jet blackness. Then I remembered his uncanny memory and sense of direction. No hominh pigeon could make a straighter way to its destination than he.

It was a mad Odyssey through a black hell of shrieking ruin! Flying objects screamed past us, unseen walls and chimneys toppled and smashed nearby. Frightened, hysterical men and women blundered into us in the dark and went shouting away, vainly searching for escape from this stygian death-trap.

And it was cold — cold! A frigid and icy chill pervaded the air, and my fingers and ears were already numbed and aching. The icy air sent knife-edged pains slashing through my throat and lungs as I breathed. I heard Denton and Todd wheezing and gasping curses as they stumbled along beside me.

How Denton ever found his way through that chaotic maelstrom I shall never understand.

“Here!” Denton shouted. “The Mission!”

Somehow we mounted the steps. How the Mission managed to stand through the grinding shocks I do not know. What probably saved it was the curious regularity of the temblors — the quakes were more of a rhythmic, slow swaying of the earth than the usual abrupt, wrenching shocks.

From nearby came a low chanting, incongruous in the madness around us.

Gloria Patri Filio Spiritui Sancto…

The Franciscans were praying. But what availed their prayers while in the tower the bells were sending out their blasphemous summons? Luckily we had often visited the Mission, and Denton knew his way to the tower.

On that incredible climb up the stairs to the bell tower I shall not dwell, although every moment we were in danger of being dashed down to instant death. But at last we won to the loft, where the bells were shrieking their thunder through the blackness almost in our ears. Denton released my hand and shouted something I could not distinguish. There was an agony of pain in my head, and my flesh ached with the cold. I felt an over-powering impulse to sink down into black oblivion and leave this hellish chaos. My eyes were hot, burning, aching…

For a moment I thought I had lifted my hands unconsciously to rub my eyes. Then I felt two arms constrict about my neck and vicious thumbs dug cruelly into my eye-sockets. I shrieked with the blinding agony of it.

Clang-g-g — clang-g-g!

I battled desperately in the darkness, battling not only my unknown assailant, but fighting back a mad, perverse impulse to allow him to gouge out my eyes! Within my brain a voice seemed to whisper: “Why do you need eyes? Blackness is better — light brings pain! Blackness is best… .”

But I fought, fiercely, silently, rolling across the swaying floor of the bell-tower, sashing against the walls, tearing those grinding thumbs away from my eyes only to feel them come fumbling back. And still within my brain that horrible, urgent whisper grew stronger: “You need no eyes! Eternal blackness is best…”

I was conscious of a different note in the clamor of the bells. What was it? There were only two notes now — one of the bells had been silenced. Somehow the cold was not so oppressive. And — was a grayish radiance beginning to pervade the blackness?

Certainly the temblors were less violent, and as I strained to break away from my shadowy opponent I felt the racking shocks subside, grow gentler, die away altogether. The harsh clangor of the two bells stopped.

My opponent suddenly shuddered and stiffened. I rolled away, sprang up in the grayness, alert for a renewal of the attack. It did not come.

Very slowly, very gradually, the darkness lifted from San Xavier.

Grayness first, like a pearly, opalescent dawn; then yellowish fingers of sunlight, and finally the hot blaze of a summer afternoon! From the bell-tower I could see the street below, where men and women stared up unbelievingly at the blue sky. At my feet was the clapper from one of the bells.

Denton was swaying drunkenly, his white face splotched with blood, his clothing torn and smeared with dust. “That did it,” he whispered. “Only one combination of sounds could summon — the Thing. When I silenced one bell—”

He was silent, staring down. At our feet lay Todd, his clothing dishevelled, his face scratched and bleeding. As we watched, he got weakly to his feet, a look of monstrous horror growing in his eyes. Involuntarily I shrank back, my hands going up protectingly.

* * *


He flinched. “Ross,” he whispered through white lips. “My God, Ross — I — I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t help it, I tell you! Something kept telling me to put out your eyes — and Denton’s too — and then to gouge out my own! A voice — in my head—”

And abruptly I understood, remembering that horrible whisper within my brain while I struggled with poor Todd. That malignant horror — he whom the Book of Iod called Zushakon and whom the Mutsunes knew as Zu-che-quon — had sent his evil, potent command into our brains — commanding us to blind ourselves. And we had nearly obeyed that voiceless, dreadful command!

But all was well now. Or was it?

I had hoped to close the doors of my memory forever on the entire horrible affair, for it is best not to dwell too closely upon such things. And, despite the storm of adverse criticism and curiosity that was aroused by the smashing of the bells the next day, with the full permission of Father Bernard of the Mission. I had fully determined never to reveal the truth of the matter.

It was my hope that only three men — Denton, Todd, and myself — might hold the key to the horror, and that it would die with us. Yet something has occurred which forces me to break my silence and place before the world the facts of the case. Denton agrees with me that perhaps thus mystics and occultists, who have knowledge of such things, may be enabled to utilize their knowledge more effectually if what we fear ever comes to pass.

Two months after the affair at San Xavier an eclipse of the sun occurred. At that time I was at my home in Los Angeles, Denton was at the headquarters of the Historical Society in San Francisco, and Arthur Todd was occupying his apartment in Hollywood.

The eclipse began at 2:17 p.m., and within a few moments of the beginning of the obscuration I felt a strange sensation creeping over me. A dreadfully familiar itching manifested itself in my eys, and I began to rub them fiercely. Then, remembering, I jerked down my hands and thrust them hastily into my pockets. But the burning sensation persisted.

The telephone rang. Greateful for the distraction, I went to it hurriedly. It was Todd.

He gave me no chance to speak. “Ross! Ross — it’s back!” he cried into the transmitter. “Ever since the eclipse began I’ve been fighting. Its power was strongest over me, you know. It wants me to— help me, Ross! I can’t keep—” Then silence!

“Todd!” I cried. “Wait — hold on, just for a few moments! I’ll be there!”

No answer. I hesitated, then hung up and raced out to my car. It was a normal twenty-minute drive to Todd’s apartment, but I covered it in seven, with my lights glowing through the gloom of the eclipse and mad thoughts crawling horribly in my brain. A motorcycle officer overtook me at my destination, but a few hurried words brought him into the apartment house at my side. Todd’s door was locked. After a few fruitless shouts, we burst it open. The electric lights were blazing.

What cosmic abominations may be summoned to dreadful life by age-old spells — and sounds — is a question I dare not contemplate, for I have a horrible feeling that when the lost bells of San Xavier were rung, an unearthly and terrible chain of consequences was set in motion; and I believe, too, that the summoning of those evil bells was more effective than we then realized.

Ancient evils when roused to life may not easily return to their brooding sleep, and I have a curious horror of what may happen at the next eclipse of the sun. Somehow the words of the hellish Book of Iod keep recurring to me — “Yet can He be called to earth’s surface before His time,” “He bringeth darkness,” “All life, all sound, all movement passeth away at His coming” — and, worst of all, that horribly significant phrase, “He cometh sometimes within the eclipse.”

Just what had happened in Todd’s apartment I do not know. The telephone received was dangling from the wall, and a gun was lying beside my friend’s prostrate form. But it was not the scarlet stain on the left breast of his dressing-gown that riveted my horror-blasted stare — it was the hollow, empty eye-sockets that glared up sightlessly from the contorted face — that, and the crimson-stained thumbs of Arthur Todd!




The Hunt

by Henry Kuttner


There is an obvious but insignificant similarity between this tale and Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” This time the sorcerer cannot save himself, but the crook unwittingly summons a terrible doom on himself.

The story is thickly clustered with Kuttner Mythos props such as the setting in the ill-rumored village of Monk’s Hollow, the use of the Chhaya Ritual, the blasphemous Elder Key, Mysteries of the Worm, and the Book of Kamak. What is surprising is the absence of the premier Kuttner grimoire, the Book of Iod. This is all the stranger since the monstrous entity who appears in the story is Iod itself! It is as if Kuttner had only now come to view Iod as an entity, and that when he did, he substituted this identification for the previous one. Otherwise we might expect him to mention the Book of Iod as the chief source of information about the entity Iod. Now there is a Great Old One named lod, but no Book of Iod. Thus there is no real warrant for supposing that earlier references to the Book had anything to do with an Old One of the same name.

Other occult accoutrements mentioned in this story include La Tres Sainte Trinosophie, actually a treatise on alchemy attributed to the long-lived Comte de Saint Germain, and “the monstrous Ishakshar”, the carven artifact in Arthur Mac hen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal.”

One more thing: One can hardly read this story without imagining it illustrated, as for some lost issue of Creepy, by Steve Ditko. It cries out for Ditko! It actually reads like a script intended for his realization. And who else could do it justice?

First publication: Strange Stories, June 1939.

* * *


Alvin Doyle came into the Wizard’s House with a flat, snub-nosed automatic in his pocket and murder in his heart.

Luck favored him in that he had been able to trace down his cousin, Will Benson, before the executors of old Andreas Benson’s estate had found the trail. Now fortune was still on his side. Benson’s cabin was in a little canyon two miles from the village of Monk’s Hollow, and the superstitions of the villagers would not allow them to go near there by night.

Will Benson was next of kin to the dead Andreas Benson. If Will died, Doyle would be the inheriting legatee. Consequently, Doyle had come to Monk’s Hollow, and, with a gun in his pocket, had casually inquired about his cousin, taking pains to arouse no suspicion.

Will Benson was a recluse—and worse, men told Doyle over their beer. They whispered wild tales of what he did at night in his cabin, where drawn blinds hid unknown terrors from the eyes of the hardy prowler, and of ominous sounds that heralded a menace unknown.

But there were no more prowlers now, not since Ed Durkin, the saloon keeper, had come home one night talking about a smoky black horror that he said had squatted on the roof of Benson’s cabin, watching him with flaming eyes until he had ignominiously fled.

Doyle chuckled to himself, realizing that fantastic tales often grow up about a recluse. His task would be easier now, for there would be little danger of a chance that some passerby might hear the gunshot. He had taken the precaution of hiring a black roadster of a common make for his night’s journey, and his dark face was impassive as he steered the car along the rutted dirt road in the dusk.

Doyle’s face seldom betrayed his emotions, save by a slight tightening of his thin lips and a peculiar glazing of the cold gray eyes. He smiled, however, when the door of the cabin opened in response to his knock and a man stepped out on the porch. But it was not a pleasant smile.

Doyle recognized Will Benson from his photographs, although they had been taken nearly twenty years before. There was the same broad, high forehead, the same level stare of brooding dark eyes. The parenthetical lines about the mouth had grown deeper, and Benson’s thick eyebrows were drawn together in a puzzled frown; there were silver flecks about the temples. All at once his eyes lighted.

“Why—Al!” His voice was hesitant. “It’s Al, isn’t it? I didn’t know you at first.”

Doyle’s smile widened, but mentally he cursed his cousin’s memory. He had not been sure; he had not known whether Benson would remember him. Well, it could not be helped now. He had planned two courses of action; one would have to be discarded now in favor of the alternative plan. He put out his hand and gripped Benson’s with hypocritical cordiality.

“It’s Al, all right. Didn’t know whether you’d remember me. It’s been almost twenty years, hasn’t it? I was just a kid when I last saw you—aren’t you going to ask me to come in?”

An odd hesitancy was apparent in Benson’s manner. He frowned, then glanced almost furtively over his shoulder, then stood aside.

"Yes, of course. Come in.”

Benson double-locked the door, Doyle noticed, as his glance swept the room. Amazement gripped him. He stood there staring. The villagers had been right in naming this the Wizard’s House!

Dark hangings swathed the walls, their sable folds giving the chamber an elusive quality of spaciousness. Tables, chairs had been pushed back against the walls, and on the bare floor was traced an extraordinary design. Doyle searched his memory; then he recognized it—a pentagram, with its circles and six-pointed star, drawn in some substance that glowed with a faint greenish light.

About the pentagram at intervals stood intricately engraved lamps of silver metal, and within the design was a chair, a table on which a huge iron-bound book lay open, and a censer suspended from a tripod. The room of a wizard, indeed! Through Doyle went a little surge of petulant anger. What would such a fool do with old Benson’s fortune—should he inherit it? Probably waste it on mummery of some sort!

Another thought came to Doyle: Was the murder necessary? Would it not be easier to prove Benson insane? He put the unformulated thought from him. He dared not take risks. The gun was much the surer way.

Benson was watching him oddly. “Surprised, eh? Well, I guess it does look rather unusual at first. I’ll explain later. First, sit down and tell me about yourself—how you happened to come.”

He dragged a chair out from the wall. Doyle sank into it, drawing out his cigarette case.

“It’s a long story,” he said. “You’ve been out of touch with everything, haven’t you? Your grandfather and I were talking about you just the other day.”

He watched Benson keenly, but the man made no move. Apparently he had not yet learned of old Benson’s death.

“It started me wondering how—”

“Er—excuse me,” Benson broke in. “Would you mind not smoking?”

“Eh?” Doyle stared at him, then returned the cigarette to its case. “Of course.”

Apparently Benson felt the need of an explanation.

“I have a rather delicate—ah, experiment I’m working on. Even small things may endanger its success. I—I’m afraid you’ll think me a poor host, Al, but you really came at an inopportune time.”

He hesitated, and again came that curiously furtive glance over his shoulder.

“Had you planned on staying here tonight?”

Doyle was deliberately tactful. “Why, if you put it that way—I don’t want to intrude. I didn’t mean—”

“No. No, nothing like that,” Benson said hastily. "Only, I’ve started this experiment now, and I’ve got to finish it. Even now it’s dangerous—”

* * *


Doyle thought quickly. The man was obviously mad. What kind of nonsense was this “experiment”, anyway? But Doyle could not leave yet. He winked, and nodded meaningfully. “Expecting some company, eh, Will?”

Benson’s pale face flushed. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong there. It really is an experiment—and a dangerous one, believe me. Look here, Al. Can you go back to the village tonight—now— and come back tomorrow? I’m really awfully pleased to see you, but it’s—well, I can’t very well explain. These things always sound incredible at first. Think of it as a scientific experiment— with high explosives.”

“Lord, I’m sorry,” Doyle said quickly. “I’d be glad to go back, but I can’t. Something’s wrong with my car. I just managed to make it up here, and I’m no mechanic. Can’t we phone the village for somebody to pick me up?”

For a moment he held his breath. He did not believe Benson would have a telephone, but—

“I haven’t a phone,” Benson replied, gnawing at his lip. “You’re here now, Doyle, and I’m responsible for you. I’ll—there’s no danger, really, if you do as I tell you.”

“Of course. If you want me to, I’ll go in another room and read ‘til you’re finished. I—”

He paused, astonished at the curious look that came into Benson’s face.

“God, no! You stay with me! That’s the only place you’ll be safe. The—the—”

He looked quickly over his shoulder. Doyle saw that a thick, bluish coil of smoke was ascending from the censer.

“Come on!” Benson said urgently and Doyle rose, watched his cousin carry a chair within the pentagram. Slowly he followed.

From somewhere, Benson produced a candle, set it in a candlestick on the table. He extinguished the oil lamp that had illuminated the room, so that the only light came from the candle and the six silver lamps. Shadows crept in. Outside the pentagram a wall of darkness seemed to press forward, and the black hangings lent a disturbing air of measureless distances to the blackness. It was utterly silent.

“I’d already started this,” Benson explained. "And it’s something that can’t be stopped. It’s got to run its course. Sit down; you’ve got a long wait.”

He bent over the great iron-bound book on the table, turned a yellowed page. The volume was in Latin, Doyle saw, but he knew little of the language. The pale face of Benson, brooding over the book, reminded Doyle of some medieval magician working his sorcery. Sorcery! Well, the gun in his pocket was a stronger magic than the mumbo-jumbo of half-cracked fools. Still, he would have to humor Benson. The man had an awkward habit of glancing up quickly, and Doyle had no relish for a physical conflict. The first shot must be fatal.

Benson threw some powder into the censer, and the smoke rose more thickly. Gradually a faint haze was beginning to pervade the atmosphere. Doyle quickly repressed a tight smile as Benson glanced at him.

“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” asked Benson.

“No,” Doyle said, and was silent. He had gauged his opponent too well to start a stream of protestations which would inevitably ring false.

Benson, smiling, leaned back, facing his cousin. From his pocket, he drew a battered pipe, eyed it longingly, and thrust it back.

“This is the worst of it,” he said irrelevantly, and chuckled. Abruptly he grew serious.

“They may have told you in the village that I’m mad. But they don’t think so. They fear me, Al—God knows why, for I’ve never harmed them. All I’m after is knowledge, and they wouldn’t understand that. But I don’t mind, for it keeps them away from here, and I need solitude for my research. Besides, it keeps them from blundering in where ordinary people shouldn’t be.”

“They call this the ‘Wizard’s House,”’ Doyle said, anxious to agree.

“Yes, I suppose so. Well, after all, they may be right. Long ago men who sought after hidden knowledge were called wizards. But it’s all science, Al, although a science of which the ordinary man— even your conventional scientist—knows nothing. The scientist is wiser, though, for he realizes that beyond his three-dimensional world of sight and hearing and tasting and smelling there are other worlds, with another kind of life on them.

“What I’m going to tell you may seem unbelievable, I know— but I must tell you, for the sake of your sanity. You must be prepared for what you’re going to see tonight. Another cosmos—.” He pondered, glancing down at the book. “It’s hard. I’ve gone so far, and you know so little.”

Doyle shifted uneasily. His hand went into his pocket, and remained there as Benson looked up at him. He knew better than to jerk it out with betraying haste.

“Put it this way,” Benson went on. “Man isn’t the only type of intelligent life. Science admits that. But it does not admit that there is a super-science which enables man to get in contact with these ultra-human entities. There has always been a hidden, necessarily furtive lore, persecuted by the mob, which delves deeply into this secret wisdom. Many of the so-called wizards of ancient times were charlatans, like Cagliostro. Others, like Albertus Magnus and Ludwig Prinn, were not. Man must indeed be blind to refuse to see the unmistakable evidences of these hidden things!”

* * *


There was a flush creeping into Benson’s cheeks as he talked, and he stabbed a slender forefinger down upon the book that lay open before him.

“It’s here, in the Book of Karnak—and in the other books, La Tres Sainte Trinosophie, the Chhaya Ritual, the Dictionnaire Infernal of de Plancy. But man won’t believe, because he doesn’t want to believe.

He has forced belief from his mind. From ancient times the only memory that has come down is fear—fear of those ultra-human entities which once walked the Earth. Well, dynamite is dangerous, but it can be useful too.

“My God!” Benson exclaimed, a strange fire burning in his somber eyes. “If I had only been alive then, when the old gods walked the Earth! What might I not have learned!”

He caught himself, stared at Doyle almost suspiciously. A gentle hissing began to come from the censer. Benson got up hastily to inspect the six lamps. They were still burning, although a curious blueness now tinged their flames.

“As long as they burn we’re quite safe,” he said. “As long as the pentagram is not broken.”

Doyle could not repress an irritable frown. Benson was mad, of course, but nevertheless Doyle was becoming nervous, and no wonder. Even a man not keyed up to high tension might well be shaken by these fantastic preparations, Benson’s insane hints of monstrous—what was the term—“ultra-human entities?” Doyle determined to end the grotesque comedy swiftly, and his finger caressed the trigger of the gun.

“It’s one of these beings that I am summoning,” Benson went on. "You must not allow yourself to be frightened, no matter what happens, for you’re quite safe within the circle. I am calling up an entity which mankind worshiped eons ago as—Iod. Iod, the Hunter.”

Silently Doyle listened as his cousin spoke of the secret and forgotten lore hidden in the ancient tomes and manuscripts he had studied. He had learned strange, well-nigh incredible things, Benson related. And perhaps strangest of all was the legend of Iod, the Hunter of Souls.

Man had worshiped Iod in older days, under other names. He was one of the oldest gods, and he had come to Earth, the tale went, in pre-human eons when the old gods soared between the stars, and earth was a stopping place for incredible voyagers. The Greeks knew him as Torphonios; the Etruscans made nameless sacrifices diurnally to Vediovis, the Dweller beyond Phlegethon, the River of Flame.

This ancient god did not dwell on Earth, and a certain apt phrase the Egyptians had coined for him meant, rendered into English, the Dimension Prowler. The evilly famous De Vermis Mysteriis spoke of Iod as the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds—which, Prinn hinted, meant other dimensions of space.

For the soul has no spatial limitations, and it was the human soul, the Flemish magician wrote, which the ancient god hunted. It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit; but if an adept took the necessary precautions, he could safely summon Iod, and the god would serve him in certain curious but desirable ways. Yet not even in the suppressed De Vermis Mysteriis could the incantation be found which would summon the Dimension Prowler from his secret dwelling place.

Only by diligent searching through certain half-fabulous cryptograms—the monstrous Ishakshar and the fabled Elder Key—had Benson been able to piece together the incantation which would summon the god to Earth.

No man could say, moreover, what shape Iod would assume; it was whispered that he did not always retain the same form. In Rajgir, the cradle of Buddhism, the ancient Dravidians wrote with a peculiar horror of the god. Reincarnation is a vital factor in the religions of India, and to the mind of an Indian the only true type of death is that of the soul.

* * *


The body may perish, crumble to dust, but the soul will live again in other bodies—unless it falls victim to the dreadful hunting of Iod. For Iod pursues always, Benson whispered; the soul has power to flee through the hidden worlds from the Shining Pursuer, but it has no power to escape. And for a human being to see the shape of Iod in all its frightful completeness, unprotected by the necessary precautions, meant swift and certain doom.

“There’s a parallel in science,” Benson concluded. “Known science, I mean. The synapse gives the clue. The nerve gap over which thought impulses travel. If a barrier is erected in this gap, blocking the impulses, the result is—”

"Paralysis?”

“Rather, catalepsy. Iod extracts the vital forces of being, leaving only—consciousness. The brain lives, but the body dies. What the Egyptians called life-in-death. They—wait!”

Doyle glanced up quickly. Benson was staring beyond the pentagram at a shadowy corner of the room.

"Do you feel any change yet?” he asked.

Doyle shook his head, and then hesitated. “It’s—cold, isn’t it?” he said, frowningly.

Benson stood up. “Yes, that’s it. Now listen, Al, stay just as you are. Don’t move if you can help it. Whatever you do, don’t leave the pentagram until I’ve dismissed the—the thing that I’m calling up. And don’t interrupt me.”

Benson’s eyes were blazing in his white face. He made a curious gesture with his left hand, and in a low, toneless voice began to chant in Latin.

“Veni diabole, discalceame… recede, miser…”

The temperature of the room had changed. It was suddenly very cold. Doyle shuddered and stood up. Benson, his back turned, paid no heed. The incantation had become a rhymed gibberish which was in no language Doyle knew.

Bagabi laca bachabe

Lamac cahi achababe

Karrelyos…

Doyle took a stubby black automatic from his pocket, aimed it with painstaking care, and pulled the trigger.

* * *


The explosion was not loud. Benson’s body jerked convulsively, and he turned to stare at his cousin with astonished eyes.

Doyle thrust the gun back in his pocket and stepped back. There must be no bloodstains on his clothing. He watched Benson intently.

The dying man fell forward, and his body made an ugly thudding noise as it hit the floor. The arms and legs moved feebly, as though in monstrous imitation of a swimmer. Doyle hesitated, half drew the automatic. A sound from nearby made him wheel, gun lifted.

From the darkness outside the pentagram came a faint whisper, a curious stirring in the dark air. It was as though a little breeze had sprung up suddenly within the silent room. Momentarily the darkness in the corner seemed to crawl with movement; then the whisper died. There was a tight smile on Doyle’s face as he lowered the weapon, listening intently. No further sound came until a metallic clatter brought Doyle’s gaze down to the floor.

Benson lay sprawled, his arms outflung. Just beyond his fingers one of the silver lamps lay overturned, its flame extinguished. In Benson’s glazing eyes there was mirrored a look of malevolent amusement, and as Doyle watched, it changed and grew until the white face was all alight with a sort of triumphant, unholy merriment. The expression remained fixed, and presently Doyle realized that Benson was dead.

He stepped outside the pentagram, not without an involuntary shrinking, and hurriedly touched the electric switch. Then, methodically, he began to ransack the room. He had carefully refrained from leaving possible fingerprints, but now, to make doubly sure, he drew on a pair of rubber gloves. There was nothing much of value—a set of silver-backed brushes, a little jewelry, perhaps a hundred dollars in cash.

Doyle stripped a sheet from the bed and made a bundle of the loot. Then he let his gaze travel over the room. It would not do now to blunder through carelessness. He nodded, switched off the light, and left the cabin. Then he found a stick and broke a window, fumbled with the latch. It opened easily.

The moon was rising, and a pale shaft of radiance streamed in through the open window, made Doyle’s shadow a black, misshapen blotch on the floor. He moved aside quickly, and the light fell on the white face of the dead man. Doyle stared through the window for a long moment before turning away.

One thing remained undone. Half an hour later that too was accomplished, and the loot was at the bottom of a stagnant, marshy lake a dozen miles from the cabin. There was nothing now to prove that Benson had not died at the hands of a burglar. As Doyle headed his roadster toward the city he was conscious of a feeling of tremendous relief, as though his taut nerves were at last relaxing.

There was an unexpected reaction, however. Doyle began to feel very sleepy. The lethargic drowsiness that was creeping over him could not be dispelled, although he let down the windshield to allow the cool night breeze to strike his face.

Twice he just avoided going off the road. At last, realizing that he dared drive no further, he drew up off the shoulder of the highway, drew a rug over his legs and relaxed. When he awoke it would take only a few hours to reach home.

He fumbled uneasily with the rug. The night had become very cold. Icy stars seemed to watch him intently from a sky ablaze with chill brilliance. Just as he went to sleep he imagined he heard someone laughing—

Sleep that was haunted with strange, grotesque images—a feeling of dropping through giddy abysses—a horrible vertigo that passed and left him spent and helpless to the dreams that came—

In his dream he was back in Benson’s house. The sable hangings still swathed the walls, the pentagram still glowed faintly on the floor, but the silver lamps were no longer alight. All around were darkness and silence, and a chill wind was blowing.

With the odd inconsequence of dreams, Doyle realized without any particular feeling of surprise that the room was roofless. Cold stars blazed in a jet sky. Without warning an irregular patch of blackness sprang into existence overhead. Something, invisible save as a shapeless silhouette against the stars, was hovering over the roofless room.

Looking down, Doyle saw Benson’s body lying where it had fallen. The glazed eyes seemed to shine with a shocking semblance of internal light. They were not looking at him; they were staring upward, and the light that was emanating from those ghastly hollows was actually beating back the darkness of the room.

And now, Doyle saw that something like a thick, knotted rope was descending from above. It paused above the dead man’s face, coiling and wriggling with a slow, worm-like motion. Following the rope with his eyes, Doyle saw that it disappeared in the black patch of shadow far above, and he was oddly glad that his eyes could not pierce the gloom that shrouded the hovering thing.

Very slowly the lids of Benson’s eyes began to close. There was no other movement in the still white face, save for the almost imperceptible shutting of the eyelids. At last they were completely closed. Doyle saw the black rope move, twisting and coiling restlessly across the room toward him, and slowly a dim radiance began to glow overhead. It waxed and grew until the stars were dim ghosts against its splendor, and then it began to drop silently through the air, slanting toward Doyle as it sank.

Stark horror gripped the man. He tried to fling himself back and found that he could not move; some strange dream-paralysis held him rigid and helpless. And in the pale radiance above him he caught a glimpse of a vague, amorphous shape that swam slowly into view.

* * *


The rope-like thing came on. Doyle made a sudden frightful effort to move, to break the invisible bonds that fettered him. And this time he was successful.

The paralysis fled away; he whirled to escape and saw before him—emptiness. A gulf of blackness seemed to open abruptly at his feet, and he felt himself toppling forward. There was a jarring shock, a wrenching jolt that utterly confused all his faculties at once. For a second Doyle felt himself plummeting down into a gulf of utter abandon, and then gray light enveloped him. The roofless room was gone. Both Benson and the floating horror had vanished.

He was in another world. Another dream-world!

This weird feeling of unreality! Doyle stared about him, discovering that he was bathed in a gray, shadowless light that came from no visible source, while overhead the air thickened into a misty, opaque haze. Curious little crystal formations speckled the flat plain about him, a conglomeration of glinting, flashing light. Extraordinary balloon-like creatures, as large as his head, swung ceaselessly in the air all around him, drifting gently with the air currents. They were perfectly round, covered with flashing reptilian scales.

One of them burst as he watched, and a cloud of tiny, glowing motes floated slowly down. When they touched the ground a strange crystalline growth began to form as the motes were metamorphosed into the little crystals that stretched into the hazy distance about him.

Above the man a dim glow began to wax: a pale, lambent radiance that Doyle watched apprehensively for a few moments before realizing its significance. He recognized it finally as he began to make out vaguely disquieting formations in the brightness. And without warning a black coil dropped down purposefully—questing for him!

Doyle felt a cold shock of dreadful fear. Would this dream never end? The strange paralysis held him again. He tried to cry out, but no sound came from his stiff lips; and just before the worm-like tip of the tentacle touched him, he remembered his former escape and made a frantic effort to break his intangible bonds. And again the black abyss widened at his feet; again came the wrenching jar as he plummeted down—and again the dark veil was withdrawn to disclose a fantastic, alien scene.

* * *


All about him was a tangled forest of luxuriant vegetation. The bark of the trees, as well as the leaves, the thick masses of vines, even the grass underfoot was an angry brilliant crimson. Nor was that the worst. The things were alive!

The vines writhed and swung on the trees, and the trees themselves swayed restlessly, their branches twisting in the hot, stagnant air. Even the long, fleshy grass at Doyle’s feet made nauseating little worm motions.

There was no sun—merely an empty blue sky, incongruously peaceful above the writhing horrors. Doyle saw a crimson, snakelike vine as thick as his arm dart out toward him, and he made again that desperate effort to move. At the same moment he saw the nucleus of a familiar glow pulsing through the air above him. Then the blackness overwhelmed him briefly, and it passed to reveal still another world.

He was in a vast, towering amphitheater, vaguely reminiscent of the Coliseum, but far larger. Tiers of seats rose into the distance, and filling the rows was a surging multitude. There was a square of space separating him from the first row of seats, and on this space four creatures stood facing him.

They were monsters, inhuman and terrible. Set atop fat, puffy, dark-skinned bags were shapeless globes, dead black, save for peculiar whitish markings which followed no particular pattern. From a gaping hole in each globe dangled a string of pale, ribbonlike appendages, and just above this orifice was a pale, glossy disk, with an intensely black center.

The bodies, Doyle saw, were clothed in some black substance, so that only their general anthropoid contour was revealed. He caught a glimpse of unfamiliar appendages protruding through the clothing, but their various purposes were obscure.

One long proboscis resembled the miniature trunk of an elephant, and it hung from where the navel should have been. Another short, dangling flap had an ovoid swelling on it. The worst revelation of all, however, occurred when one of the things lifted up an arm, and from the gaping cavity that was revealed a pinkish tongue lolled forth lazily.

About Doyle a murmuring grew and swelled into a roar. The throngs in the distant seats were cavorting, dancing. The four nearby were waving their repulsive appendages and coming closer.

Above Doyle a spot of light appeared, grew larger. As he watched it began to glow with that strange bright flame he had come to dread. The four nearby scurried ignominiously to a safe distance. But this time Doyle was ready. His flesh crawling at the sight of the horror materializing within the light, he tensed—it was not such an effort this time, somehow—and again he was plummeting into blackness.

From the colorless void he emerged into the glaring blaze of a vast field of frozen white, with not an object visible in its limitless expanse, and a black, starless sky overhead. Abysmal cold seared Doyle to the bone, the utter chill of airless space. He did not wait for the coming of the pursuer to make the effort of his will that sent him into yet another world.

Then he was standing on a black, gelatinous substance that heaved restlessly underfoot, as though it were the hide of some cyclopean monster. The ebony, heaving skin seemed to stretch for miles around. Presently the warning light was fused in the air above Doyle. Shuddering, he fled through the shielding darkness.

Next was a field of hard, frozen brown earth, with a phenomenally beautiful night sky overhead, studded with unfamiliar constellations, with a great comet blazing in its white glory among the stars. And from that world Doyle fled to a strange place where he stood on a surface of ice or glass. Looking down he could see, far below, vague and indistinct figures that were apparently frozen or buried there, colossal shapes that seemed entirely inhuman, as far as he could make out through the cloudy crystalline substance.

The next vision was by far the worst. From the swift plunge into blackness Doyle emerged to find about him a great city, towering upward to a black sky in which blazed two angry scarlet moons, whose flight he could almost follow with his eyes. It was a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and fortresses which seemed to follow some abnormal and anomalous system of geometry. It was in its entirety an indescribable conglomeration of stone horrors, and its architectural insanity sent sharp pains darting through Doyle’s eyes as he tried to follow the impossible planes and angles.

Then Doyle caught a flashing glimpse of the amorphous, nightmare inhabitants that teemed loathsomely in that gigantic city, and a dreadful horror racked him. He flung himself desperately into the black gulf that once more awaited him.

He seemed to fall for endless eons through the limitless abyss. Then suddenly he found himself, gasping and sweating, in his roadster, while the shadowy darkness before the dawn made silhouettes of nearby trees.

Trembling, Doyle groped for the dashboard compartment. His throat was dry, and he had a piercing headache. He needed a drink. His hand closed on the bottle. Then he paused.

An inexplicable light was shining down on him!

Doyle dropped back upon the cushions, his eyes dilated with unbelieving terror. And slowly, from empty air that pulsed with the straining of cosmic forces, a monstrous entity began to emerge. Gradually it swam into view from a blaze of blinding light, until Doyle saw hovering above him the star-spawn of an alien and forgotten dimension—Iod, the Hunter of Souls!

It was not a homogeneous entity, this unholy specter, but it partook hideously of incongruous elements. Strange mineral and crystal formations sent their fierce glow through squamous, semitransparent flesh, and the whole was bathed in a viscid, crawling light that pulsed monstrously about the horror. A thin slime dripped from membranous flesh to the car’s hood; and as this slime floated down, hideous, plant-like appendages writhed blindly in the air, making hungry little sucking noises.

It was a blazing, cosmic horror spawned by an outlaw universe, an abysmal, prehuman entity drawn out of fathomless antiquity by elder magic. A great faceted eye watched Doyle emotionlessly with the cold stare of the Midgard serpent, and the rope-like tentacle began to uncoil purposefully as the thing advanced.

Doyle made a tremendous effort to break the invisible bonds that had again fettered him. He strained and struggled till his temples throbbed with agony, but nothing happened, save that from a puckered orifice on the rugose lower surface of the creature there issued a shrill, high-pitched whistling. Then the tentacle swung up and its tip darted out like a snake for Doyle’s face. He felt a frigid touch on his forehead, and the iron agony of fathomless cold bit into his brain.

In an incandescent blaze of light the world flared up and was gone, and a ghastly suction began to drag inexorably at Doyle’s brain. The life was drained from him in one hideous tide of pain.

Then the agony in his head lessened and was gone. There was a brief, shrill whistling that seemed to recede reluctantly as though into vast distances, and Doyle was left alone in the midst of a brooding, oppressive silence.

Save for the motionless figure in the car, the road was empty.

Alvin Doyle made a move to lift his arm, and found that he could not stir. With chill horror creeping over him he tried to shriek, to call for help, but no sound came from his frozen lips.

Suddenly he thought of the words of Benson. “…Iod extracts the vital forces of being, leaving only—consciousness. The brain lives, but the body dies… life in death.”

Doyle slipped into temporary oblivion. And when he awakened, he found the car surrounded by a dozen onlookers. A man in a khaki uniform was doing something with a mirror. In answer to a question Doyle had not heard, the man shook his head somberly.

“No, he’s quite dead, all right. Look at that.” He exhibited the mirror. “See?”

* * *


Doyle tried to shriek, to tell them that he lived. But his lips and tongue were paralyzed. He could make no sound. There was no sensation in his body; he was not conscious of its existence. Slowly the faces around him receded into white blurs, and the thunder of madness roared relentlessly in his ears.

It was strangely rhythmic thunder. A series of jarring shocks— the hollow thud of clods falling on a coffin—the utter panic of an existence that was neither life nor death.




Beneath the Tombstone

by Robert M. Price

		To eternal life are none but fools disposed.



		The wise thirst instead for oblivion’s repose.



		The slumber of the tomb shall be thy rest,



		A shield for thee from the unwelcome guest.



		If thy clay recline beneath the Elder Sigil,



		Against the shambling foe it shall keep vigil.








    

— The Book of Iod






This story began as a friendly parody of August Derleth's Lovecraftian fiction in Crypt of Cthulhu #6. In an expanded and rewritten form it became something more of a tribute to Derleth and appeared in the pages of Footsteps magazine. But it is equally a tribute to Henry Kuttner and employs some of his characteristic themes, such as the waiting occupant of a grave and the use of the Book of Iod. The controlling conception of that book hen is the Kabbalistic one, implied in Kuttner's use of terms like Tikkoun and kadesh. The Gnostic element derives from the similarity between “Iod” and “Iao”, a Hellenizedabbreviation of“Yahweh” often used in the syncrefistic magic of the Hellenistic age (see Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation andJohn Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World); cf. “lo Sabbaoth, Ialdabaoth” in Gnostic texts.

“Beneath the Tombstone” contains the first reference to the shunned hamlet ofTophet, Pennsylvania, later used in a story by Lin Carter. The name is one of the designations, used by the prophet Jeremiah, for the cursed Valley of Hinnom where Moloch-worshipers once sacrificed infants outside Jerusalem. It later became a garbage dump where bodies wen thrown which could not be given decent burial in sacredground. Tophet is the historical prototype for that place “where the worm dieth not and the fin is never quenched”

First publication: Footsteps TV, 1984.

* * *


I.

I cannot say precisely why my eccentric Uncle Absalom had chosen me to inherit what remained of his worldly estate. God knows there were other surviving kin who had been closer to him than I, or at least I supposed there must have been. At any rate I had had little contact with him that I could remember since the family reunions of my childhood. What interest he could have taken in me then I cannot readily imagine.

Nonetheless on the 5th of March I packed my belongings into my car (it was easy enough to do, there being so few of them), and set off for the old mansion amid the low hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Small towns had never been particularly to my liking, but times being what they were, I was not about to turn down a free house, no matter what shape it was in, nor how isolated it was.

The hamlet to which my uncle had retired was a bit difficult to find. Road maps did not list it, and even locals whom I stopped to ask did not seem to have heard of Tophet. Perhaps I was mispronouncing it. All I knew was that the name had a vaguely biblical ring to it, but then so did most of the towns and villages in this region. That fact became obvious as I drove aimlessly through several of them. If I had to be lost, Lancaster County was at least a picturesque place in which to lose oneself. But towards evening I did find Tophet with directions provided by the proprietor of a small general-store-and-gas-pump down the road.

It was tiny, a backwater really. Once there, it was not difficult to find Uncle Absalom’s homestead. It was actually situated some miles away from the rest of the town, so that I wondered if it were technically included in the municipal jurisdiction. The old mansion rose in all its decadent grandeur amid the wild countryside. It was in fairly good repair, though gloomy in general aspect. The effect was rounded out by the series of chalked and painted hex signs high up near the eaves. Of course, I had seen similar symbols and plaques all day, and appreciated them as true examples of folk art. But I had always wondered how seriously the Amish and Mennonite farmers of the region took their hex icons. These pious folk were not ones for frivolous decorations, but surely their religion was equally unfriendly to superstitious belief in hexes and curses.

The key with which I had been supplied fit, despite the rusty disrepair of the lock, with a ready click, and I roamed the house trying to make its acquaintance. And quite a bit of roaming would be necessary even to cover the floor plan once. Passing from the front hall through the drawing room and study, I was quite impressed with the decor. There was oaken paneling in abundance which should have lent the interior a certain deep warmth, but somehow did not. Perhaps this was due to the neglect the elaborate woodwork had apparently suffered. In the brief time since my uncle’s death, the finish could not have grown so dull unless it had been ignored long before. Uncle Absalom mustn’t have shared the previous generation’s fastidiousness. Perhaps he was, like many an eccentric recluse, altogether oblivious of things mundane, his mind being diverted to other channels. The corroded lock on the front door had already suggested his lack of care for minor repairs. In fact, the only housework with which he might have troubled himself was keeping the rug clean, and this I only noticed because the puzzling geometrical patterns in the rug weave caught my eye. They would not have been so distinct if old Absalom had not groomed the rug periodically. Something in that odd weave seemed familiar, perhaps a coincidental resemblance to the hex signs on the exterior of the house. Well, no matter.

In the study my eyes wandered from the dull finish of the paneling to the well stocked shelves, and finally to the framed portrait above the mantel. Of course it was Uncle Absalom himself. As I have said, I had not seen the man since my youth, yet the sight of the painting instantly filled in the holes the years had worn in my memory. That was he, all right. The skill of the painter had captured even the hint of bored irritation the old man must have evidenced as he sat for the portrait, a chore forced on him, no doubt, by some pestering relative. How must all of his relatives have annoyed this man who sought only silence, for him to have bypassed them, leaving his estate to me!

At any rate, I was his beneficiary, and my uncle’s bequest had been generous enough, despite his rather odd stipulation that I burn several listed volumes from his vast library and fill in the surprisingly large subcellar of the house.

I soon made ready to discharge the first of these obligations, starting a fire in the huge old hearth. I needed the warmth anyway, I reasoned, so why not take care of some business as well? The sooner my tasks were accomplished, the sooner the property would be legally mine.

It was not difficult to locate the books which my uncle had apparently hoped might follow him into whatever afterlife had claimed him. A few volumes were illustrated pornographic works of a quite spectacular character, exploring depths of perversion I had never even imagined. Into the flames they went. My glimpses of random pages had been enough to unsettle my stomach, so it was with relief that I turned to the rest of the books.

Several of the titles meant nothing to me, though languages had been a favorite interest of mine in college, and some of the strange tomes baited my curiosity. One called The Book of lod was written in a scramble of Greek and Coptic, and seemed to be a Gnostic work of some kind. The Cabala of Saboth was apparently a treatise on angelology composed in a kind of barbarous Yiddish of which I could make little sense. Another volume, the Confessions of the Mad Monk Clithanus, was in readable but debased Latin. I dimly recalled having heard of it, an obscure specimen of the vast vision literature of the Middle Ages.

Might not some of these books be worthy of preservation or sale? They might be of real interest to an expert who knew what to make of them. Still, I did not want to violate the conditions of the will and risk losing my inheritance. Nothing, however, was preventing me from a leisurely perusal of the collection.

At last I came to a volume that intrigued me more than any of the others. My first reaction was one of mild revulsion, as its leathery binding seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of human hide. No less disorienting was the utterly unfamiliar tongue (transliterated into English characters) in which it was composed. The only discernible English word occurred in a partial translation of the title, penned in my uncle’s handwriting on the title-page—the R’lyeh Text. I tried my skill at enunciating a few underlined words on the page where a bookmark had been placed: “mglw’ nafh fhthagn-ngah cf ’ayak ’vulgtmm vugtlag’n…”

The words echoed in the large room, then were lost amid the crackling of the fireplace. And it was there, after all, that the books should be going, but the hour had grown late, and I decided to resume my duties in the morning.

Preparing one of the beds upstairs, I turned in for the night. It had been a long day, and I soon fell asleep, disturbed only briefly by the abnormally loud chorus of frogs and whippoorwills in the woods at the edge of the lot. Yet perhaps they troubled my rest more than I realized at the time, for my dreams were shot through with visions of great forms, half saurian, half octopoid, ranged against backgrounds of forested slopes and carven masonry.

II.

Only partly rejuvenated by the night’s sleep, I rose, prepared a light, cold breakfast, and carried my plate to the study where I began again to peruse the contents of the library. Uncle Absalom had made a file of clippings from local papers dealing with bizarre, yet seemingly unrelated, matters. Several items from the Lancaster Record had to do with unexplained disappearances and cattle mutilations. All of these clippings looked to have been filler material from the back pages. What Uncle Absalom could have found to interest him in these peculiar scraps was beyond me, yet already I had seen adequate proof of the old man's salacious and prurient tastes.

My reverie was interrupted by a knock at the door. The noise startled me, shattering as it did the silence which had encompassed me since the previous evening. Opening the front door I was greeted by the sight of a local police officer. The middle-aged patrolman was eyeing me suspiciously, but seemed to relax a bit as we talked. It seemed that during the night some local farmer’s two prize bulls had disappeared. The officer was cruising about in search of any sign of the thieves when he noticed the smoke from my chimney. Knowing that Absalom Mueller had died a month or so earlier, he thought it best to investigate. When I introduced myself as old Absalom’s nephew and heir William, he seemed satisfied and willing to leave to continue his search. Halfway down the steps, however, he turned to ask if I planned on settling down in Tophet. A natural enough question, to be sure, even a polite one under ordinary circumstances, but I could not help noticing a certain anxiety in his manner as I said that yes, I did hope to establish myself in the community.

Closing the door, I wondered what the policeman’s question implied. A moment’s thought suggested that Uncle Absalom might have acquired some kind of unsavory reputation among the townspeople, and this was not hard to imagine given their rural piety and his rather outre tastes. Who knew, or cared, what he had done to earn such ill repute; what worried me was that I might well have inherited my uncle’s outcast status. And this was no way to start fresh in new surroundings. I decided that the books and papers could wait. Perhaps a visit to town would answer some of my questions.

I estimated that by the time I had made myself presentable and arrived on the main street of Tophet, most of the townspeople would be up and around, especially as this was primarily a community of small farmers who rose with the sun. True, most might be expected still to be busy with chores, but I hoped I might meet at least a few of my new neighbors. If I found no clues as to my (perhaps imaginary) mystery, still I might show myself to be no ogre and even make a few new acquaintances. With these calculations I set off for town.

But my hopes were disappointed. The friendliest response I could elicit from the few stragglers I accosted was a hurried “Nice to meet you,” and I suspected that even these scant words were not meant. Was it that they feared me as Uncle Absalom’s successor in some mischief? Or were they simply ignorant peasants who shrank from contact with any newcomer? The latter was not after all unlikely, since I believed I noticed enough similarity in the faces I saw to suspect inbreeding with the consequent mental decadence.

An idea occurred to me, and after picking up a few needed groceries, I returned to my car, heading for the roadside stand where yesterday I had gotten directions. The old fellow who ran the pumps there had at least known the location of Tophet, and he might know more. And not being a resident, he might be less tightlipped than the others.

But here, too, I was disappointed. When I arrived at the station, the door to the cottage was locked and the blinds drawn. Fresh tire-marks in the dust and other small clues made me wonder if the little store were not occupied after all. The silence of the place seemed laden with anxious tension, as of someone hiding—almost as if the proprietor and his customers had seen me approach and frantically sought concealment. Baffled, I went back to the car to return home (for that is how I had already come to regard the old place). But as I pulled out into the road, I caught a glimpse of something that had eluded me before. Suddenly I noticed a makeshift hex sign, painted on a large circle of zinc, perhaps recently the bottom of a wash tub, and nailed onto the front wall of the store, above the door. Somehow I had omitted to notice it just minutes before, but my preoccupation would explain this. What I was fairly sure of was that no such sign had been present the day before!

By noon I had returned to the house more mystified than before. I decided my answer, if answer there were, must be hidden in my uncle’s books, the very books I had almost consigned to the flames the previous night. There I read of fantastic entities with names like Leviathan, Demogorgon, Azathoth, Zeemebooch. Somehow I knew that it was of these very beings I had dreamt last night! Just what kind of researches had Uncle Absalom been engaged in? And, worse yet—what kind of deeds?

III.

Once more my thoughts were interrupted, this time by a strange sound—below me. The subcellar! In my absorption with my uncle’s hellish books I had completely forgotten it. Following the sound as best I could (it was now dying away), I found my way down to the subterranean chamber. By now there were only ringing echoes, which might have been those of a beast’s death agonies. But if the sound were no longer there to greet me, the sub-basement was filled with an equally horrifying stench, like that of a slaughterhouse. For scattered all about, almost concealing the traces of chalk circles and pentacles on the stone floor, were the carcasses of one or more cows, or—bulls?

The cover of night found me two miles further into the countryside, climbing over the rail fence of the Tophet Cemetery. You see, having returned to the pile of occult volumes in the study, I had searched them anew, doubly desperate for some clue. And in an underscored verse from The Book of Iod, I believed I had found it. If my conjectural translation were anywhere near the mark, I felt assured that the end of the whole horrific business lay here in my uncle’s final resting place.

After some searching I found the grave and set to work, swallowing my own disgust and self-revulsion as I did so. Finally, the wood of the coffin came into view. With some surprise I noticed that the casket had been laid so that the grave marker rose directly over the middle of the box, not at its head, as was the usual arrangement. Thus, to unearth the whole length of the casket, I had to displace the gravestone. The stone itself was of curious design, having neither the basic rectangular shape nor that of a cross, but rather of a five-pointed star, with some sort of pattern carved upon it. With the marker thus out of the way, freeing the coffin was comparatively simple.

I paused, momentarily startled by a swelling crescendo of whippoorwills that seemed to explode out of nowhere. Regaining as much composure as the surroundings allowed, I made ready to uncover the corpse. But I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me upon opening the box. For my uncle’s form was just as I had seen in the portrait. He seemed not dead, certainly not decayed, but merely asleep. Yet I had but a glimpse of him in this state. The coffin lid had come open only with difficulty, and I was forced to wrench it free with one great effort. As the lid fell all the way to the ground, the hinges shattered, as did the star-shaped stone, upon which it fell. At this, my Uncle Absalom’s eyes flew open in an expression of sheer terror, matched instantly by my own, as I beheld what followed. For his formerly inert form began to erupt in bloody furrows, rent and mutilated by unseen talons!

The authorities at this place where I am now confined accuse me of desecrating the corpse, but I know only too well that Uncle Absalom’s dismemberment was the work of whatever eldritch entity my idle mouthing of an ancient incantation had released, and which my clumsiness had given access to my uncle’s hitherto protected sleeping form!




Dead of Night

by Lin Carter


Anton Zamak was the name of an occult specialist Lin Carter created in his early novel Curse of the Black Pharaoh. There he was a somewhat colorless figure. Many years later Carter took him out of the mothballs for a pair of stories, “Dead of Night” and “Perchance to Dream. ” Lin has placed Zamak’s sanctum sanctorum, not in Greenwich Village, like the home of Lee and Ditko’s Dr. Strange, whom he so much resembles, but rather in the fictitious River Street district in which Robert E. Howard set his series of Steve Harrison detective stories, including "Names in the Black Book. ” There, in the swirling mists of Oriental intrigue and occultist conspiracy, anything might lurk, even the Cthulhu Mythos.

Many of the artifacts and curios adorning Zamak's residence corresponded to the decorations of Lin’s own apartment. (It was there we sat one Saturday afternoon when Lin proudly told S. T. Joshi and myself the planned denouement of “Dead of Night”, apparently oblivious of the similarity, as Joshi at once pointed out, of his tale to Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” He seemed unmoved by the comparison.) The wooden mask of Yama/Yamath, for instance, is exactly as Lin describes it. It now sits malevolently perched on the wall of my study.

First publication: Crypt of Cthulhu # 54, 1988.

* * *


1. Number Thirteen

Below Fourteenth Street, between Chinatown and the river, extends a disreputable region of cryptic, winding alleys, crumbling tenements, rotting wharves and abandoned warehouses slumping in decay. Here dwell the human dregs of a thousand Eastern ports: Hindus, Japanese, Arabs, Chinamen, Levantines, Turks, Portuguese. Once these dark and sinister side- streets and fetid alleyways were the battlefield of the Tong wars; that was in the days of the legendary detective Steve Harrison, who single-handedly dealt out the white man’s law and the white man’s justice along River Street.

Those days are long since gone—not that River Street has changed in any noticeable way. Urban renewal has yet to touch the decaying tenements, nor has the law managed to close down the dives and dope dens and honky-tonks. Neither has the furtive, polyglot Asian populace altered, and few could guess what drugs are trafficked in these dark rooms or what crimes of violence and greed are done in those black and garbage-choked alleys—

Of all these matters, Dona Teresa de Rivera was all too uncomfortably aware, and with every block her taxi carried her deeper into the tangled maze of filthy slums, her discomfiture grew. Only the urgency of her mission goaded her into venturing into this ill-famed corner of the city, far from the quiet residential streets and fine cafes which were her accustomed haunts.

Fog came drifting in from the riverfront to wind its clammy tendrils about walls of rotting old brick, and to blur the dim luminance of the infrequent street lights.

The cab pulled up before the yawning mouth of a black alley off Levant Street, and the gloom that thickly shadowed the narrow, cobbled lane was feebly dispelled by a single light which burned above a doorway only a few steps from the street.

“That’s it, lady. Number Thirteen China Alley,” announced the driver, cocking his thumb at the dim light. Privately, the cabby wondered what the handsome young Spanish woman could possibly want in this dangerous neighborhood. She had money, that was obvious: No woman wore an expensive frock with such careless elegance unless she had wealth, breeding and taste.

“Are you quite certain this is the address?” the girl faltered.

"Yes, ma’am, Number Thirteen China Alley, between Levant and River Streets. That’ll be six seventy-five.” Dona Teresa gave the driver a ten dollar bill and declined to accept any change.

“How do I get back from here?”

He handed her a card. “Call the garage; they’ll send a cab to pick you up.”

With uneasiness clutching at her heart, the young woman left the cab, which hurriedly drove off, fog swirling in its wake. She entered the dark mouth of the alley, cautiously feeling her way on the greasy cobbles. The light which was her goal burned above the single door of a small, narrow, two-story building, shouldered to either side by larger tenements. The small house would have looked long abandoned, had it not been for that light above the door. Its walls of crumbling brick were black with generations of grime, and the windows peered blindly like cataract-infested eyes, their panes dim and smudged with greasy soot. Dona Teresa shivered and drew her fur wrap more closely about her slim shoulders against the chill, damp air from the river.

The door, surprisingly, was an imposing slab of solid oak. A small brass plate above the bell read Zamak. Shivering a little, the young woman pressed the bell. She did not have to wait long before it opened noiselessly on well oiled hinges.

In the doorway was a tall man, lean and rangy, in an immaculate white jacket—a Hindu of some sort, from his swarthy, hawk-like face and spotless turban. Keen dark eyes as sharp as dagger points scrutinized her closely.

“Pray come in, madame,” said the Hindu with a slight bow. “The sahib is expecting you. Let me take your wrap.”

Mechanically, Dona Teresa handed him her gloves and fur, staring about the foyer with astonished eyes. Nothing about the locale or outward appearance of the little house could have prepared her for its furnishings. The foyer held an immense bronze Chinese incense burner on a teakwood stand; Tibetan tonkas or scroll-paintings adorned the walls, which were hung with watered silk. Lush Persian carpets were soft and thick underfoot.

She was ushered into a small study and informed that her host would attend her presently. As the door closed softly behind the tall servant, Dona Teresa looked about, her amazement growing. All her young life she had been raised in luxury, but nothing like this. Furniture of antique workmanship stood here and there, all of carved and polished teak, inlaid with mother of pearl or ivory plaques. The walls were hung with rich brocade and displayed illuminated cabinets crowded with exquisite antiquities—Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Hittite, Egyptian—museum-worthy pieces all. The carpet underfoot was a superb Ispahan of fabulous value, faded with centuries but still glorious. A subtle fragrance hung on the still air, rising in blue and lazy whorls from the grinning jaws of a silver idol of Eastern work.

Bookshelves held hundreds of scholarly-looking tomes whose gilt titles were in Latin, German, French—Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Litre d'lvon, Cultes des Goules. None of the titles were familiar to her, but they held a sinister connotation of the occult, of the nightside of science and philosophy.

A carven teakwood desk was drawn up before a fireplace. It held a clutter of books, manuscripts and note pads, weighed down with Egyptian tomb figurines of blue faience, huge scarabs of schist, Babylonian or Sumerian tablets of baked clay inscribed with sharp cuneiform. Above the fireplace hung a grotesque mask of carved and painted wood, scarlet, black, and gold. It depicted a hideous devil face with three glaring eyes and open-fanged jaws from which escaped painted gold whorls of stylized flames. She was staring up at it with fascination mingled with revulsion when a quiet voice spoke from behind her, startling the girl.

“Tibetan,” said the voice. “It depicts Yama, King of Devils. Some say that he was worshiped in pre-history, in Lemuria, as Yamath, lord of fire.”

The girl turned swiftly. Her host was tall, slender, saturnine, with a fine-boned visage as sallow as old ivory. His hair was sleek, seal-black, with a dramatic streak of pure silver that began at his right temple and zigzagged to the base of his skull. The dark eyes were hooded and cryptic and thoughtful. His age was indeterminate. He wore a dressing gown of black silk acrawl with writhing gold dragons.

“I am Anton Zarnak,” he said with a slight smile, “and you are Miss de Rivera. Pray make yourself comfortable.” Zarnak glanced at a side-table laden with crystal decanters. “A sip of brandy, perhaps?”

“No, thank you,” the girl declined, sinking into a deep chair. Zarnak nodded, seating himself behind his desk. He opened a notebook and selected a pen.

“How can I assist you?” he inquired.

2. Night-Fear

Dona Teresa twisted her hands together. “Doctor, there is nothing the matter with me. It is my uncle, Don Sebastian de Rivera. We are the last survivors of an old California family of Hispanic origin. Ever since my parents died when I was a child, Don Sebastian has been my guardian and my dearest friend. Now he is suffering in the grip of some terrible thing—some hideous curse—I come to you for aid. No one else can help; my uncle forbids it.”

“Indeed? And what is the problem?”

Dona Teresa lowered her head, veiling lustrous dark eyes behind thick lashes. “It sounds ridiculous—he is afraid of the dark."

When Zarnak made no response, the young woman continued in a rush of words. “He has not always been so! When I was much younger, he owned immense lands in southern California, in Santiago County. He was a gentleman rancher, as our family has always been for many, many generations. He was tall, strong, a veritable lion of a man, afraid neither of God, man or devil.”

“And now?” Zarnak prompted softly. The girl raised eloquent eyes to his.

“Now he is an old man, although still in his prime— a shuddering coward who hides from the dark; gaunt, wasted, bent—old before his time. Stooped as if under the burden of some terrible and nameless guilt—”

“You say that your uncle is afraid of the dark. Can you be more precise?”

She twisted her hands together nervously. “It was our priest who bade me visit you—Father Xavier of—”

“I know him well; an excellent man, and a fine priest. Pray continue.”

“It began about seven years ago. I was scarcely more than a child at the time. You must understand, Doctor: Our family has ranched our ten thousand acres since the days of the first Spaniards. We raise sheep, cattle, grain. My uncle was a veritable bull of a man; I have seen him kill a rattlesnake with his bare hands; once, he slew a grizzly with what you call a Bowie knife. Never in his life did he taste the bitterness of fear; now, he cowers behind shut curtains when night falls, trusting to the blaze of a thousand lights to keep the night away—”

Zarnak meditated briefly. “Has your uncle consulted a physician? A—psychiatrist?”

“The family doctor prescribed nostrums, tonics, a vacation. My uncle, Don Sebastian, despises analysts. He considers them little more than witch-doctors.”

“I am little more than a witch-doctor,” remarked Anton Zarnak with a slight smile. “But please go on; tell me more. Any detail that springs to mind may be of help, offering a clue—”

“I think that it began when my uncle opened an old Indian burial mound which has stood on our property for more centuries than we have owned the land,” said Dona Teresa. “I believe that it was supposed to have been built by a tribe called the Mutsune, long since extinct,

at least in California. It was only after this intrusion upon the sanctity of the ancient dead that my uncle began to—change.” Something leapt to life and alertness behind Zarnak’s impassive gaze at this mention of the Mutsune burial mound. He made a brief note on the pad in his small, precise hand.

“Was anything of interest discovered in the mound?” he asked. The girl shrugged listlessly. “I don’t know—perhaps an anthropologist might find these things of interest or value. It was the tomb, I believe, of some old Mutsune shaman or ghost-doctor or medicine man, whatever you wish to call them. My uncle found clay pots of corn, scattered beads, shellwork, bones. The shaman was well preserved, almost like an Egyptian mummy. The remains, I recall, fell to dust when opened and exposed to the air.”

“Was anything else found in this tomb?”

“Jewelry of hammered copper—silver bracelets studded with uncut but polished turquoises—there was an odd pectoral pendant, carved of black volcanic glass—”

“Obsidian? That is interesting,” commented Zarnak.

“It was some months after opening the mound that my uncle began to display peculiar tendencies to avoid the dark. Within a year, he abruptly sold all of our land to a rival rancher and brought me here into the east. I had hoped we would relocate to San Francisco, a city that I love; but, no, we must put the breadth of the entire continent between us and our ancestral home, it seemed. We took a town house on a lovely tree-lined street off Park Avenue, and have lived in seclusion ever since.”

“While your uncle’s health has declined?”

“In seven years, he shrank and dwindled into an old man, frail and fearful. It is not a physical thing, I am sure; the family doctor assures me that it is merely nerves. As I have mentioned, he refuses to consult a psychiatrist. Even a priest; I am a good Catholic, I hope. My uncle is indifferent to the Church; he supports it but rarely attends. He has not been to confession in more years than I can remember. Sometimes, I fear for his soul.”

“Tell me more about his fear of the dark.”

“It sounds absurd and childish, doesn’t it? But to him the peril is horribly real. In the daylight hours he is normal enough, takes meals with me, talks, even jests. But when twilight nears, Uncle commands the servants to close the drapes over every window, and to light every light. Then he retires to his own quarters. He is armored against the darkness by powerful electric lamps contrived in such a manner that no corner is shadowy. He detests even shadows. And he lives in constant dread of a power failure; every room of the house contains dozens of candelabra and flashlights with fresh batteries. It is a fearful thing to see a grown man cower before night-fears—”

“How does your uncle pass his time?”

“In research; he digs through old, moldering books; he writes to scholars all over the world, he is in constant touch with great libraries—to be honest, sir, I have no notion of the nature of his research. We never talk of it—but he is horribly afraid of something —it is almost as if my uncle had somehow incurred the wrath of some demon of the darkness, and clings with frail hands pitifully to the light.”

Zarnak made a small notation in his careful hand.

“What became of the relics which your uncle discovered in the Indian burial mound?” he asked quietly.

“He has them with him. Keeps them in his rooms. He clings to them, seems to cherish them,” said the girl.

“I see. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

Dona Teresa thought for a moment. “Perhaps, Doctor, but whether it’s of any value or not—anyway, before Uncle sold the ranch, we had a priest staying with us. He was of pure Indian blood, of a race descended from the Mutsunes. I’ll never forget how violently agitated he became when he discovered that Uncle had disturbed the mound, and brought the artifacts to light—he was transfixed with horror, as if of a sacrilege or the exposure of some dreadful danger.”

“Was there any one of the artifacts in particular that seemed to alarm him?” inquired Zarnak.

The girl considered. "Yes; the tablet or pectoral of black obsidian. I remember how he stared at my uncle in frozen shock, and what he said. It was—‘You dared expose this thing to the light of day?’ And then he went into a sort of Indian chant, repeating one name or phrase over and over, swaying to the rhythm of the sound.”

“Can you recall what the phrase was?”

The young woman shuddered. “I certainly can! It made a frightful impression on me at the time. Three sounds, repeated over and over —‘Zoo, Chee, Khan… Zoo, Chee, Khan…

Zarnak made a notation, then rose and pulled a bell cord.

“I will visit you and your uncle tomorrow morning. It might be better for you not to address me as ‘Doctor’, since Don Sebastian seems adverse to such; while I have a doctorate in psychology, I am not a practicing analyst. Best, however, not to arouse his emotions. Introduce me merely as an antiquarian and amateur collector of antiquities; you may have seen my small collection and it will be no lie. My Rajput servant, Ram Singh, will call you a cab. Good evening.”

Once the young woman had left, Zarnak studied his notes with a thoughtful expression on his sallow visage.

Under the name she had repeated, which he had written down in phonetics, he added a brief notation.

Zulchequon?

3. The Black Tablet

Despite the darkness, for night fell early during these seasons of the year, it was not too late for Zarnak to make a few phone calls. From an anthropologist friend who was an expert in American Indian cultures, he learned that the Mutsune tribe were related to the Zuni Indians, and that their culture was obscure. Little was known of their beliefs, as they were extinct in California, but they were known to have feared a demon whom they called Zu-che-quon; even less was known of this dark demon, but another call to an old friend who was on the staff of the library of Miskatonic University in Massachusetts recommended that Zarnak consult, if at all possible, the Book of Iod for information on this demonic entity. The text itself was fabulously rare; only one copy was known to exist, and it was in the translation by one Johann Negus, from which the translator had rigorously excised many fearful matters of which he deemed it better that mankind remain mercifully unaware.

A work of such rarity was not in Zarnak’s private collection, although many other obscure and suppressed volumes were. However, Zarnak took down a lengthy manuscript indited by several different hands over many generations, bound in snakeskin. The book consisted of excerpts copied from many little-known texts, and one of these was the Book of lod. The quotations had been copied from the only extant copy of the book, preserved in the locked shelves of the Huntington Library of California, and the copyist had been a man named Denton, whom Zarnak had known many years before. He read:

The Dark Silent One dwelleth deep beneath the earth on the shore of the Western Ocean. Not one of those potent Old Ones from hidden worlds and other stars is He, for in Earth’s hidden blackness He hath always dwelt. No other name hath He, for He is the ultimate doom and the undying emptiness and Silence of Old Night…

There was more in this vein; Zarnak read on, skipping quickly, until a passage near the very end of the excerpt arrested his attention with a sudden chill of menace:

…He bringeth darkness within the day, and blackness within the light; all life, all sound, all movement passeth away at His coming. He cometh sometimes within the eclipse, and although He hath no name, the brown ones know Him as Zyshakon.

They knew him anciently in elder Mu, and in Xinian under the Earth’s crust, they worshipped Him in strange ways by the ringing of certain small, terrible bells, as Eibon telleth. He feareth nothing more than the light of day, which He abhors, but even artificial light is enough to drive Him down whence He came. He is the Bringer of Darkness, the Hater of Day, and Ubbo-Sathla was His Sire. As a crawling clot of darkness, and as a writhing of clotted shadows shall ye know Him.

A note in Denton’s hand explained that the last eighty-nine words of this excerpt were deleted from the expurgated copy of the

Huntington Library, and had been found in a citation by Von Junzt, who had obviously enjoyed access to the uncensored text.

Zarnak closed the manuscript volume and replaced it on the shelf, brows furrowed in deepest thought.

* * *


The next morning, Doctor Anton Zarnak travelled by taxi uptown, to the residence of Don Sebastian de Rivera and his niece. The cab drew up before a handsome building on a quiet street lined with old beech trees. When a butler, apparently of Hispanic descent, answered the bell, Zarnak identified himself and was ushered into a sunlit parlor where Dona Teresa awaited him.

“My uncle will be down to breakfast at any moment,” the girl said. “Surely you will join us?”

“For coffee only,” Zarnak smiled. “I have already eaten. I prefer my coffee black, with no sugar, please.”

A pretty Mexican maid named Carmelita served them both. Silver dishes on the sideboard held steaming bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, toasted muffins. A frosted decanter held freshly squeezed orange juice. The coffee was a superb blend of Columbian beans.

When Don Sebastian appeared, Zarnak found his host in shocking condition. Despite his relatively youthful age, the man was shrunken, wasted, his gaunt shoulders bowed as if beneath some intolerable weight, his features pasty, prematurely lined with age, the eyes shifty and red-rimmed.

Don Sebastian accepted without comment the information that Zarnak was an antiquarian, interested in ancient artifacts. During the meal they conversed on American Indian artifacts. Zarnak’s host seemed almost pathetically pleased by his visitor, as if normal human contacts were somehow denied him, except for his niece and the servants.

After breakfast, Zarnak was shown Don Sebastian’s private collection of rarities. There were some fine examples of Zuni silver, set with polished but uncut turquoises, miniature totem poles from the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and examples of bead work that would have been the pride of any museum. Zarnak innocently mentioned the mound-builders of the southwest, and was, however reluctantly, shown the artifacts he had come uptown to examine.

For the most part, the artifacts were innocuous: As Dona Teresa had said, they consisted of clay pots of withered corn, pottery shards, beadwork belts, and bracelets. Certain motifs in the beadwork held a sinister connotation for Zarnak, who had been up much of the night consulting reference works on American Indian anthropology. The mummy in the mound had been given to the worship of dark subterranean forces, it became evident.

The black tablet was not in view. Eventually, Zarnak was forced to inquire of the obsidian pendant, saying (quite truthfully) that he had heard of it as unique and curious. With obvious reluctance, his host displayed the peculiar object.

It was irregular in shape and the volcanic glass from which it had been carved was oddly heavy in the hand, unnaturally so. Holding the black pendant to the light, Zarnak discovered it hewn with an odd design, resembling a hooded man-shaped figure surrounded by fawning, groveling shadowy shapes, curiously repellent. Strange characters in a tongue unknown to human science ringed the emblem about. The object was unique to Zarnak's experience, but he recalled to mind another passage from the Book of Iod that might prove of relevance: “Power and peril lurk in those images They brought down from the stars when the Earth was newly formed…”

Dr. Zarnak engaged his host in conversation as he strolled about examining the superb small collection. While the gaunt, wasted man seemed distraught, even feeble, his speech was coherent and his knowledge of scientific matters extraordinary for an amateur. It was apparent that his intellectual faculties remained unimpaired. And Zamak’s keen knowledge of medicine led him to the conclusion that whatever had so deeply troubled Don Sebastian was of a mental and not of a physical nature. There were no obvious symptoms of disease.

Zarnak asked for, and received, permission from his host to take a rubbing of the carvings on the black tablet. Later, having returned to his residence at Number Thirteen China Alley, he studied the cryptic characters with bafflement, consulting text after text from his extensive library. The writing was in neither the Tsath-yo language of elder Hyperborea nor the Naacal of primal Mu, nor was it R’lyehian. The faint possibility that it might be in the queer characters of the Aklo tongue led Doctor Zarnak to peruse certain texts of fabulous rarity.

This study led him eventually to a copy of Otto Dostmann’s book, Remnants of Lost Empires, published in Berlin in 1809 by the Drachenhaus Press. Therein he found the notorious “Aklo Tables” and compared the curious hooked and looped characters to those in the rubbing he had taken from the tablet from the mound: They were the same.

In translation they read: Keep me from the Light, for Night is my friend and Day my foe, lest Zulchequon consume thee utterly. He then studied those parts of the Livre d' lvon wherein the Lord of Darkness is described and came to a sudden realization of the extremity of peril in which Don Sebastian de Rivera had lived daily since the excavation of the burial mound of the Mutsune shaman.

Light—even artificial light—held the Dark One at bay and helpless to visit His wrath on mortals. Only during the hours of darkness could He strike and slay, to avenge Himself upon the disturber of ancient relics never meant to be exposed to the luminance of day. Whatever perversity of greed had caused Don Sebastian to cling to the black obsidian tablet had placed him in perpetual peril all these years; and this was the season of the year in which the overuse of electricity, together with sudden electrical storms, frequently caused power failures—

Disturbed by these discoveries, which seemed ominous, Zarnak telephoned the town house of Don Sebastian and his niece. Some sort of trouble on the line had rendered their residence temporarily beyond the reach of telephonic communication. Zarnak went to the window and drew aside the heavy drapes: Night had fallen, and the sky was a sullen and sulphurous hue, wherein lightning flickered. The radio warned of sudden and unexpected electrical storms, which might paralyze portions of the city with the brief loss of electrical power to certain areas.

Zarnak doffed his robe, donned his coat and took up a slender black case that was seldom far from his side by night or by day. He then rang his tall Rajput servant and ordered a taxi.

4. Thing of Darkness

The cab seemed to take forever to forge its way through streams of heavy traffic uptown, and all the while the sulphurous sky, turgid with thunderclouds, lowered threateningly, and tongues of lightning flickered in their dark masses. At any moment one such bolt might strike a power line, causing a brief but fatal—fatal to Don Sebastian, that is—cessation of electricity.

At length the cab pulled up before the imposing facade of the de Rivera residence on that quiet, tree-lined street of Park Avenue, and Zarnak emerged, hastily tossing a bill to the driver. His repeated ringing of the bell eventually elicited a response, in the lissome form of Dona Teresa. Her lustrous eyes widened at the sight of Doctor Zarnak; she opened the door swiftly.

“Is all well?” he demanded harshly. She nodded mutely, then explained that radio warnings of temporary power blackouts had driven her uncle into a frenzy of fear, and that he had the servants lighting scores of candles in his rooms against the possibility.

“Take me to your uncle at once, I implore you! I must take the black tablet with me, to neutralize it as best I can—”

They ascended the stairs and entered the rooms where Don Sebastian lived. Every tabletop held silver candelabra filled with lit tapers, and all electric lights were blazingly alit. The room fairly teemed with luminance, to such an extent that even the shadows in far corners were dispelled. Don Sebastian himself was in a frightful condition, hands shaking, spittle dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He seemed scarcely aware of Zamak’s presence, such was his agitation.

Carmelita and the other servants departed to seek additional candles in some storage space in the cellar, when Zarnak implored Don Sebastian to let him borrow the obsidian pectoral overnight; so distraught was the older man that he seemed scarcely to hear the words of his guest, and paid them little heed.

And then it was that it happened.

Suddenly, the electric lights waned and died. Don Sebastian screeched like a doomed soul and cowered in a corner. Dona Teresa ran to comfort him, while Zarnak sprang to the windows and tore asunder the heavy curtains to peer out. All up and down the street the lights in windows were dying, and the street lights faded into gloom. The threatened power blackout had occurred.

A great gust of icy, fetid air burst through the parted curtains, curiously sub-arctic in this sweltering temperature.

The candles blew out, all at once, as if simultaneously extinguished by a giant’s breath!

Zarnak sprang to his black case and snapped it open. He withdrew therefrom a curious object, like a magician’s wand. The handpiece was a tube of copper with a core of magnetized iron, and the rod was tipped with a curious talisman of gray-green stone, shapen like a five-pointed star. As the light died to densest gloom, a faint halo of greenish luminance flickered and shone about the star-shaped stone.

In one comer of the room, shadows swirled, clotted, thickened.

Cold perspiration bedewed Zarnak’s ascetic features. He brandished the star-tipped wand, whose luminance brightened, but when he thrust the wand towards the cloud of gathering shadows, the darkness drank the dim light and failed to disperse. Don Sebastian shrieked!

Zarnak looked desperately towards the open, undraped window. Fomalhaut leered like a dim eye above the horizon, barely visible through the sulphurous murk. He tried a last resort:

la! la! Cthugha!

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh

Cthugha Fomalhaut

N’gha-ghaa nafl thagn

Ia! Cthugha!

Three times he recited the uncouth vocables of this strange incantation, and all the while the dark thing thickened and grew ever more substantial in the far corner of the room, until it was veritably palpable.

Minute sparks of golden fire flickered into being, like a whirling cloud of fireflies. Their luminance did little to lighten the impenetrable gloom, but they warmed the air. There came a rustling as of gigantic, unseen wings—

Then the lights came on, dazzling, blinding!

The blackout had been very temporary, blessedly. The whirling cloud of pale golden sparks faded as Zarnak dismissed them. The heavy clot of darkness in the corner shrank; Zarnak advanced upon it, brandishing the star-stone rod. The massed darkness that was Zulchequon faded from view, leaving only icy fetid air behind.

Zarnak composed himself, turned to see Dona Teresa where she knelt in the opposite corner of the room, cradling her uncle’s still form in her arms, weeping. His face was white as milk, features distorted in a hideous grimace of sheer terror. Zarnak crossed the room in swift strides, knelt, examined the wasted form swiftly. No breath, no pulse, no heartbeat; the old man was dead.

* * *


The police came with an ambulance and a medical examiner. Zarnak took it upon himself to explain, in brief terms, that Don Sebastian had suffered from a neurotic fear of darkness. There were no signs of foul play. The medical examiner diagnosed the cause of death as a massive heart seizure. The police were satisfied. Ambulance workers in long white coats placed the corpse on a stretcher.

Observing the horrible expression of pure terror graven on the dead man's features, the doctor murmured, “Looks like I should write up this one as ‘dead of fright.’”

Zarnak, who stood with his arm around the shaking, sobbing form of Dona Teresa, permitted himself a small, grim jest:

“No, doctor. I would say ‘dead of night,”’ he muttered.




About Robert M. Price


ROBERT M. PRICE has edited Crypt of Cthulhu for fourteen years. His essays on Lovecraft have appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Lovecrafter, Cerebretron, Dagon, Etude Lovecraftienne, Mater Tenebrarum, and in An Epicure in the Terrible and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. His horror fiction has appeared in Nyctalops, Eldritch Tales, Etchings & Odysseys, Grue, Footsteps, Deathrealm, Weirdbook, Fantasy Book, Vollmond, and elsewhere. He has edited Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos for Fedogan & Bremer, as well as The Horror of It All and Black Forbidden Things for Starmont House. His books include H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (Borgo Press) and Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds (Starmont). By day he is a theologian, New Testament scholar, editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism, and pastor of the Holy Grail Ecumenical Church.