The Fishers from Outside

Lin Carter

STATEMENT OF HARLOW SLOAN

When Mayhew found the Black Stone beneath the ruins of Zimbabwe, it was the culmination of many long and weary years of work. His quest had begun twenty years before, when as a young student at Miskatonic he had first heard of the “Fishers from Outside” in the unpublished journals of the explorer Slauenwite. That odd and curious term was the name by which the Gallas of Uganda referred to a mysterious race that had ruled Central Uganda—according to the legend—before the first mammals were.

Intrigued, Mayhew read on with growing excitement as Slauenwite told of certain hellishly old stone ruins which the local tribes dread and avoid, of jungle-grown megaliths believed to be “older than man,” and of a certain stone city somewhere in the south which their witch-doctors whispered was an abandoned outpost of creatures “flown down from the stars when the world was young.”

I suppose it is hard for a scholar or a scientist to exactly pin down what first impelled him in the direction of his future work. But Mayhew always said it was the native stories Slauenwite recorded in 1932 in his journals. At any rate, he embarked on a search for more information about the Fishers from Outside. He found fragments of lore concerning the mystery-race in such old books as the dubious Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, the notorious Book of Eibon, Dostmann’s questionable Remnants of Lost Empires, De Vermis Mysteriis by the Flemish wizard, Ludvig Prinn, and the frightful Ponape Scripture that Abner Exekiel Hoag had found in the Pacific islands. In the fervor of his growing obsession, Mayhew even dared to look into the nightmarish pages of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the Arabian demonologist.

According to Alhazred’s account, the Fishers were the minions or servants of the demon Golgoroth, who had anciently been worshipped on Bal-Sagoth, which some rather questionable authorities claim to have been the last foundering remnant of the mythical Atlantis. On Bal-Sagoth he was worshipped both as the “god of darkness,” and in his “bird-god” avatar, wrote the Arab. Most scholars would dismiss the legend as idle tales, but Mayhew knew there was independent corroboration for at least part of the account, for Norse voyagers during the early Crusades had seen Bal-Sagoth, recording something of its strange gods in their sagas.

         

After completing his doctorate, Mayhew obtained a grant and went to Africa. He followed the footsteps of Slauenwite, exploring Central Uganda, studying native myths and stories. Tales came to his ears of an ancient stone city buried in the southern jungles of the Dark Continent, which some thought the ruins of the legendary King Solomon’s mines but which others ascribed to the handiwork of Portuguese slavers or traders. Mayhew knew that the Egyptian geographer, Ptolemy, had written many centuries ago of “Agysimba” the stone city in the jungle. Doubtless the Ugandan myth and the old Egyptian story referred to the same ruin . . . and that could hardly be anything else than old Zimbabwe itself, that immemorial and mysterious stone city deep in the jungled heart of Rhodesia . . . Zimbabwe, whereof so much is whispered and so very little known for certain.

I joined him at the site of Zimbabwe in 1946. I had been studying at the University of Capetown, and one of his papers—a monograph on Ugandan petroglyphs, still undecipherable—caught my eye. I wrote, applying for a job, and was promptly accepted.

I knew little of Zimbabwe. I knew it was the focal point of a vast system of mighty towers and ramparts spread out over something like three hundred thousand square miles of trackless jungle. The ruins are found in Mashonaland, the mining areas of Gwelo, Que-Que and Selukwe. At the center, deep in Southern Rhodesia, about two hundred and eighty miles from the sea in the valley of the Upper Metetkwe lie the colossal fortifications of enigmatic Zimbabwe—greatest and most fabulous of the roughly five hundred stone structures found in this wide zone, which seem the work of a race unknown to history, and whose puzzling architecture has no parallel elsewhere on this planet, save in certain fearfully ancient ruins in Peru.

This little I had gleaned from that tantalizing book, Hall’s Great Zimbabwe, which raises so many disturbing questions and settles so very few—if any—of them. And soon I was to see the fantastic city myself!

         

My first sight of mysterious Zimbabwe came at dusk. The sky was one supernal blaze of carmine and vermilion flame, against which the titanic walls of the enclosure soared impressively, composed of massive blocks weighing each many tons, the wall extending hundreds of feet, enclosing the weird, uncanny “topless towers” of which I had heard. Mayhew’s workmen had cleared away the vines and undergrowth which for ages had encumbered the gigantic rampart, but the jungle, I somehow knew, had not surrendered, but had merely retreated before superior force, and was biding its time, waiting for the puny, ephemeral children of men to leave that it might inexorably regain its antique dominion over the mighty walls and towers.

A shudder, as of eerie premonition, ran through me as I first gazed upon lost Zimbabwe drowsing the ages away. But then I forced a shaky laugh, and put such trepidations from me; after all, night had nearly fallen, and the breeze was dank and wet . . .

Mayhew I found a devoted, even fanatic, scientist. His peculiar fixation on the legend of the “Fishers from Outside” set by, he was a learned and scholarly man. He told me something of the Golgoroth myth, and discussed what scraps of knowledge had been accumulated as to the history of the stupendous ruin before us. The Portuguese had first glimpsed it about 1550, he told me, but the first explorer did not reach these parts until 1868.

“I understand no inscriptions have ever been found,” I murmured. He nodded, his lean, ascetic face serious and troubled.

“Yes, and that’s another mystery! A race that can build a stone wall fourteen feet thick, in an elliptical enclosure eight hundred feet in circumference, should surely have some form of writing, if only for the required mathematics,” he mused.

“And no artifacts have ever been found?” I hazarded.

“Only these,” he said somberly, holding out a wooden tray. Within I saw a number of small, oddly-shaped objects of baked clay and carven stone. They resembled curiously stylized birds, but not like any birds I knew . . . there was something misshapen, deformed, even—monstrous, about them. I repressed a shiver of distaste.

“Do you know what they represent?” I asked faintly.

For a long moment he peered down at the tray of tiny artifacts, peering at them through his eyeglasses, a pair of pince-nez spectacles he wore always, looped about his throat on a long ribbon of black silk. These pince-nez were his most famous affectation, and I knew of them long before I ever came to know the man himself.

Then he turned and looked at me.

“Perhaps the Fishers from Outside,” he said, his voice dropping to a faint, hoarse whisper. “Or, perhaps their mighty Master . . . Golgoroth.”

Something in the uncouth, harsh gutterals of that strange name made me wish, obscurely, that he had not spoken it aloud. Not here, amidst the immemorial ruins of elder Zimbabwe. . . .

         

I shall not bore you with any extended account of the many weeks it took to complete our excavations. First, we investigated the weird topless towers, which were devoid of any interior structure, save for thick stone piers jutting at intervals into the hollow, chimney-like interior. They were uncannily reminiscent of the pegs in an aviary, the perches in a birdcage, it seemed to me; but I said nothing, leaving the Professor to his own conjectures.

Within a month I was sent upriver to obtain supplies. I was rather glad of this, for I would miss our work in the Plain of Megaliths. There was something about this vast and level field, covered with row on row of mammoth stone cubes, that made me think of hundreds of Druidic sacrificial altars, and as the date of their excavation approached, my sleep was disturbed by dark dreams in which I seemed to see hundreds of squirming naked blacks bound to row after row of the altar-stones . . . while weirdly bird-masked shamans raised an eerie, cawing chant beneath the peering Moon whose cold eye was obscured by drifts of reeking smoke from many fires . . .

Terrible dreams they were!

Upriver, I found the trading post and loitered there long enough for the excavations to be completed on the Plain of Megaliths. My host was a local tradesman of Boer descent, who questioned me intently about our work, and eyed me furtively from time to time, as if there were questions he did not quite dare ask.

“Ever heard of the ‘Great Old Ones’?” he blurted one night, his courage bolstered by rum. I shook my head.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “What are they, some native legend?”

“Yes . . . but, mein Gott! . . . native to what world, I could not say!”

I stared at him, baffled; but before I could ask another question, he abruptly changed the subject and began to talk lewdly and disgustingly about the local native women. I left downriver the next day with the supplies.

It seems I had lingered at the Ushonga trading-post longer than had been needful; the Plain of Megaliths had been excavated, and the diggers had turned up nothing more interesting than hundreds of the little birdlike stone images. Mayhew had therefore turned his attention to the great Acropolis, and beneath the foundations of the huge center-stone a remarkable discovery had been made.

He showed it to me by the wavering light of a hissing kerosene lamp, tenderly unwrapping the odd-shaped thing with hands that shook with excitement. I stared at it in awe and amazement . . . yes, even as I had stared at Zimbabwe itself that first night . . . and with a cold inward shudder of ghastly premonition, too.

THE BLACK STONE.

It was a decahedron, a ten-sided mass of flinty, almost crystalline black stone which I could not at once identify. From the weight of it, I guessed it to be some sort of metal . . .

“Meteoric iron,” Mayhew whispered, eyes alive with feral enthusiasm, behind the glinting lenses of his pince-nez, for once askew. “Cut from the heart of a fallen star . . . and look at the inscriptions!”

I peered more closely: each of the ten angled sides was a sleek plane of glistening black, covered with column on column of minute characters or hieroglyphs in a language unknown to me, though naggingly familiar. They in no slightest way resembled hieratic or demotic Egyptian, or any other form of writing I could remember having ever seen. I later copied some of them down in my notebook and can reproduce a few specimens here:

The Professor reverently turned the metallic block over. “This side in particular,” he said in a low voice.

I stared at the weird, stylized profile figure of a monstrous thing like a hideous bird with staring eyes and a gaping beak filled with fangs. There was a stark ugliness to the depiction that was quite unsettling.

I looked up at him, a mute question in my eyes.

“. . . Golgoroth,” he breathed.

         

Within the week we departed for the States. Nor was I at all loath to go, for all the excitement of our excavations and the discoveries they had unearthed. To tell the truth, ever since that night I had first set eyes on the Black Stone, I had not been sleeping at all well. A touch of jungle fever, perhaps, but night after night I tossed and turned, my dreams a mad turmoil of frightful nightmares . . .

One night in particular, after I saw the Stone, I again dreamed of Zimbabwe as it might have looked at its height, the sacrificial smokes staining the sky and obscuring behind lucent veils the white face of the leering Moon as it gloated down on scores of writhing blacks bound to the stone altars, grotesquely masked priests leaping in a wild and savage dance . . .

I knew that they were trying to call down from the stars some monstrous horror-god, but how this knowledge came to me I cannot really say. But then the moon was hidden by black, flapping shapes that circled and swooped like enormous fishing-birds, darting down to the altars to pluck and tear at the wriggling bodies bound there . . . and one of the huge, queerly deformed-looking bird-things emerged into the moonlight, and I stared with unbelieving horror at its hulking, horribly apterous, quasi-avian form, clothed with scales not feathers . . . one glimpse of the repulsive thing with its one leg and one glaring Cyclopean eye and hideous, hooked, fang-lined beak—

I woke screaming, with a bewildered Mayhew shaking me by the shoulders, demanding to know what was the matter.

No, I wasn’t unhappy to be going home: I had had more than my fill of the sinister brooding silence of that thick, fetid jungle, crowding so ominously close to the ruins as if waiting, waiting . . . of that horribly old stone city, whose mysterious past contains hideous secrets I did not wish to plumb . . .

The reason for our abrupt departure was quite easily explained. It would seem that Professor Mayhew had found what he had been looking for. The discovery of the Black Stone from Zimbabwe would make him very famous—and his fame would be all the greater, of course, were he able to decipher the inscriptions.

For he, as well, had half-recognized them. My vague, teasing recollection of having somewhere once seen something very much like those queer glyphs tormented me; I could neither pin it down nor could I get it out of my mind.

It was Mayhew, however, who remembered where he had seen symbols very much like them, and the moment he spoke of it I felt certain that he was right. The Ponape Scripture! I must have seen the glyphs reproduced in some Sunday supplement article about the cryptic old book. But the Professor, of course, had studied the actual Ponape Scripture itself, in its repository at the Kester Library in Salem, Massachusetts. He had examined the actual book, written in an unknown tongue, and had compared it against the debatable English version prepared by Abner Exekiel Hoag’s body-servant, a Polynesian halfbreed from the isle of Ponape.

Mayhew hoped to find, somewhere, somehow, the key to the unknown language. On the boat he fretted over that, sending radio-telegraph messages.

“Churchward would know, if he were alive, I’m sure of that,” he muttered. “His Naacal Key has never been published, but I have seen his speculative work on Tsath-yo and R’lyehian. Somewhere among his notes there might be data on this Ponapian glyph-system, whatever it is called . . .”

One night, as we neared the coastline, he burst into my cabin, triumphantly waving a piece of yellow paper.

“Churchward’s widow has given me permission to borrow his unpublished notebooks and papers!” he crowed, face unhealthily flushed, eyes bright with excitement. “A chance, at last!”

Privately, I doubted it. But I kept my reservations to myself.

We disembarked, and went immediately to Salem, where the Professor had reserved rooms for us at the University Club. The next morning, leaving me to unpack our notes, records and sample artifacts, he was off to await the arrival of Churchward’s papers. For days he pored through them in growing exasperation, for the author of The Lost Continent of Mu and other dubious works of pseudo-scientific speculation had known nothing of the unknown language, it seemed.

“What about Hoag’s papers?” I suggested. “Perhaps his servant left a glossary or something; I know it was back in the seventeen hundreds, but still, since the Scripture is right here at the Kester, perhaps they hold the remainder of his library, as well.”

His eyes flashed and he smote his brow with a groan, dislodging his pince-nez from their perch. “A splendid idea, young fellow!” he cried. “My intuition on hiring you was right.”

The next day, I accompanied the Professor to the Library, where his scholarly credentials quickly gained us access to a private reading-cubicle and to the strange old book itself. While he pored over it eagerly, I regarded the volume with thinly disguised repugnance. I recalled what little was known of its curious history: the famous “Yankee trader,” Abner Exekiel Hoag of the Hoags of Arkham, had discovered the ancient book on one of his rum-and-copra trading ventures in the South Seas, back in 1734.

It was a weird document of many pages, inscribed with metallic inks of several colors on palm-leaf parchment sheets, which were bound between boards of archaic wood, carven with grotesque designs . . . the very reek of the ages rose from it, millennia made almost palpable, like the miasma of age-old rottenness . . .

I had read what the famous Pacific archaeologist, Harold Hadley Copeland, had written of the book in his own shocking and controversial The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the ‘Ponape Scripture,’ which only increased my repugnance. Poor Professor Copeland, that once-brilliant and pioneering scholar, had developed an uncanny fixation regarding the so-called “lost continent of Mu” which some occultists and pseudo-scholars, like Colonel Churchward, consider to have been the original birthplace of humanity—the “Atlantis of the Pacific.”

Suddenly I became aware that Mayhew had turned upon me a glittering eye, bright with excitement.

“What is it, Professor?”

“Sloan, my boy, it’s here . . . many of the identical symbols we traced and copied from the Black Stone! See—” he indicated several of the symbols on the crumbling, half-decayed sheets of leather-tough native parchment, “—here—and here, and—here!”

“Odd that you didn’t recognize them at once, when you first began making your tracings from the Stone,” I murmured inanely, searching for something to say. He shrugged, restlessly.

“I only glanced over the original codex,” he explained, “as I was more interested in the English version . . . but look: I have tried as best I could to match the hieroglyph to the English text, with the following conjectural result—”

I glanced at the sheet of scribbled note-paper he brandished before me. I do not recall all of the symbols or their meanings, but of the three symbols I drew earlier in this statement, the first stood for the name or word “Yig,” the second for “Mnomquah,” and the third for . . .

“Golgoroth!” Mayhew breathed, almost reverently.

For some reason, I shuddered as if an icy wind was blowing upon my naked soul.

         

The Curator of Manuscripts at the Kester Library was Professor Edwin Winslow Arnold, a chubby-faced man with a cherubic smile and piercing blue eyes. He had obviously heard of my employer and I knew somewhat of his academic reputation, for we found no obstacle in our path which would prevent us from examining the miscellaneous diaries and papers of Abner Exekiel Hoag. A large number of these were in the Massachusetts Historical Archives, of course, but these could hardly be expected to contain the information Professor Mayhew desired. The documents which related to the Ponape Scripture were in the “sealed” files, and were made available only to reputable scholars.

Within a day or two, Mayhew found what he was looking for, in the form of a battered, water-stained notebook obviously kept by Hoag’s man, Yogash. This Yogash was the bodyservant Hoag had “adopted” in the Pacific islands, a Polynesian/Oriental halfbreed of some kind (weirdly there filtered into my memory a bit of nonsense poor mad Copeland had recorded in his book, The Prehistoric Pacific, in which he conjectured that this mysterious Yogash person might be, in his inexplicable phrase, “a human/Deep One hybrid,” whatever that might mean).

Yogash had kept a workbook in which the English equivalents, often marked with an interrogation-point in the margin, perhaps to indicate that the equivalency was dubious or uncertain, were aligned with columns of minutely-inked glyphs. This was the key to the language of the Scripture, by perusal of which Mayhew hoped to be able to translate the secrets of the Black Stone.

“They are all here,” gloated Mayhew, peering enthusiastically over the blurred, stained pages of the old notebook. “Nug, and Yeb, and their mother, Shub-Niggurath . . . Yig and Mnomquah and Golgoroth, himself . . .”

“Are these the gods of some Pacific mythology?” I hazarded.

“So they would appear to be, from their prominence in the Scripture,” he murmured abstractedly.

“But—if that is true, then, how do you explain their recurrence on the other side of the globe, in the depths of South Africa?” I cried.

The Professor peered at me over his pince-nez.

“I cannot explain it,” he said finally, after a moment’s silence. “Any more than I can explain how virtually the same characters found on the Easter Island Tablets, whereof Churchward wrote, appear in the Mohenjo-Daro inscriptions, found in the northerly parts of India.”

“Churchward was an occultist of sorts,” I protested. “His reputation as a scientist has never been taken seriously!”

“Nevertheless, the Easter Island Tablets exist—you can find excellent photographs of them in backfiles of National Geographic, without needing to search more deeply into the scholarly periodicals. And I trust you are aware of the veracity, if not of the significance, of the inscriptions found at the site of Mohenjo-Daro?”

I nodded, my resistance to his arguments subsiding. But—how could this mystery be explained, save by postulating some worldwide prehistoric race or network of religious cults which have hitherto eluded the attention of scholars?

Baffled, I turned to other tasks, abandoning speculation.

         

With the help of the amiable Dr. Arnold, Professor Mayhew and I had clear and distinct photographic copies of the notebook made for further study and comparison with the inscriptions on the Black Stone, since obviously the Kester Library could not permit Yogash’s notebook to leave the premises, as it was a part of the Hoag Papers.

For days and weeks we compared the symbols, jotting down a rough rendering into English. The grammar and punctuation, of course, had to be supplied by the Professor and myself, as it was not possible to deduce from the notes of Yogash what equivalents of these were in the unknown language of the Scripture. From a study of the notebook, many bits of data came to light which meant little to me at the time, but which excited the Professor tremendously.

“So!” he exclaimed one evening, “the language is neither any known form of Naacal, neither is it R’lyehian or even Tsath-yo . . . I had rather conjectured it might be a form of Tsath-yo . . . but, no, Yogash refers to it in six places as ‘the Elder Tongue’ and in two places as ‘the Elder Script’ . . .”

“I’ve heard you mention that word ‘Tsath-yo’ before,” I interjected. “What exactly does it refer to?”

“It was the language of ancient Hyperborea in prehistoric times,” he muttered off-handedly.

“Hyperborea?” I exclaimed, skeptically. “The polar paradise of Greek mythology? I believe Pindar refers to it in—”

“The conjectural name—lacking a better one!—for a polar civilization which was the presumed link between elder Mu and the more recent civilizations of Atlantis, Valusia, Mnar and so on. Although Cyron of Varaad, in his brief Life of Eibon, does indeed suggest that the first humans migrated from foundering Mu to Valusia and the Seven Empires, and Atlantis as well, then in its barbaric period, before traveling north to Hyperborea . . .”

I could make little or nothing of these rambling explanations, but filed them away for future reference. My concepts of ancient history, I perceived, were going to require some extensive revisions, if I must include therein, as true and veritable cultures, such fairy-tales as Mu and Hyperborea and Atlantis.

That night my bad dreams bothered me again, and I awoke soaked in cold sweat, and shivering like a leaf in a gale. Across the room I saw the white moonlight bathing the eerily-inscribed facets of the Black Stone, and suddenly I felt an uncanny and inexplicable fear. Or was it—foreboding?

         

Before many weeks had passed, Professor Mayhew gradually came to understand the purpose and nature of the mysterious inscriptions on the Black Stone from Zimbabwe.

They were nothing less than litanies and ceremonials for the summoning—the “calling down,” to employ the ominous phrase of the Stone’s language—of the Fishers from Outside which were the minions and servitors of the dark demon-god, Golgoroth. Odd, how my weird dreams had seemed to predict this very discovery, for those horrible nightmares which had plagued me from the first day I laid eyes on the accursed Stone had been of rituals whereby the hideously masked priests had seemed to call down from the nighted skies those horrible bird-things (the Professor had discovered, in deciphering the Stone, that they were properly termed “Shantaks”)! But here I caught myself beginning to take almost for granted that one’s dreams can actually presage the future.

As for the dark divinity they served, Golgoroth—at least in his bird-avatar form—was presumed by mythology to dwell beneath the “black cone” of Antarktos, a mountain in Antarctica, at or very near to the South Pole. (Of course, I am translating these concepts: the actual text calls it “the ante-boreal Pole,” and the name “Antarktos” was supplied by the Professor himself.)

When he had gotten to that portion of the translation, he seemed to hesitate, to become lost in dreams. I asked him if all was well, if he felt ill; he roused himself with an effort, and gave me a shadowed smile.

“It is nothing; a momentary qualm. No, Sloan . . . I called to mind a scrap of verse I have somewhere read—I cannot think just where—but the name Antarktos was attached to it—”

And in a low, throbbing voice, he recited these strange lines:

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet, lone and drearly
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced . . .

Something in his hushed, hoarse voice—or was it in those grim and ominous lines of verse?—made me shudder uncontrollably. And I thought again of my weird dreams of that Plain of Megaliths, of those naked bodies bound for sacrifice, and of the semi-avian, semi-apterous bird-monstrosities as they swooped, and plunged, and clutched and clawed, ripping and tearing the naked, writhing meat staked out for them. And again that night I had . . . unwholesome dreams.

         

Two days after this incident—and fear not, officers, my story is very nearly done—the Professor seemed to have concluded the major portion of his researches. That is, as far as I could tell he had finished deciphering the last of the summoning-rituals of the Shantaks cut deep on the slick metallic planes of the Black Stone.

“Sloan, I want you to go to the Kester today,” he told me that afternoon, just when I had assumed our day’s toil was done. “I will need the text of this part of the Book of Eibon—” and here he handed me a scrap of paper torn from his pocket-notebook, with page numerals scribbled down. I gave him a surprised look.

“But surely the Library is closed by this time, Professor, and I could make the trip tomorrow morning—?”

He shook his head. “I need the text of that passage tonight, and the Library, while it may be closed to the public, will still be open in that the staff are on hand and qualified scholars with passes signed by Dr. Arnold should be able to gain entry without difficulty. Take care of this at once, please.”

Well, there was no refusing such a request—Professor Mayhew was my employer, after all—so I left the University Club and caught the streetcar on Banks Street to the Library. The sky was lowering and gray; a fitful, uneasy wind, chill and dank as a breath from the very grave prowled amidst the dry leaves of early fall as I hurried between the granite pillars and into the bronze gateway.

I found no difficulty in securing the Book of Eibon from the files and began copying down the passage which the Professor required. It consisted of certain matter from the sixth chapter of Part III of the Eibon, a lengthy mythological or cosmogonical treatise called ‘Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom.’ The passage read as follows:

. . . but great Mnomquah came not down to this Earth but chose for the place of His abiding the Black Lake of Ubboth which lieth deep in the impenetrable glooms of Nug-yaa beneath the Moon’s crust; but, as for Golgoroth, that brother of Mnomquah, He descended to this Earth in the regions circumambient to the Austral Pole, where to this day He abideth the passage of the ages beneath the black cone of Mount Antarktos, aye, and all the hideous host of Shantaks that serve Him in His prisonment, they and their sire, Quumyagga, that is the first among the minions of Golgoroth, and that dwelleth either in the nighted chasms beneath black Antarktos or in the less inaccessible of peaks of frightful Leng; where also did great Ithaqua, the Walker Upon the Wind, take for His earth-place the icy Arctic barrens, and mighty Chaugnar Faugn dwelleth thereabout as well, and fearsome Aphoom Zhah, who haunteth the black bowels of Yaanek, the ice-mountain at the Boreal Pole, and all they that serve Him, even the Ylidheem, the Cold Ones, and their master, Rlim Shaikorth—

It was with a distinct shock that I realized suddenly that there was nothing—nothing at all—in this Eibonic material that the Professor and I did not already have recorded in our notes, and that the only explanation for my being sent on this false errand was to get me out of the way while the Professor did—what?

Seized by a nameless premonition, I snatched up the papers in which I had copied the passages from Eibon, returned the old book to the clerk, and left the grounds of the Library. Dark clouds had come boiling up over the horizon, drowning the long narrow streets in gloom. The wind blew from the north, cold and dank as the panting breath of some predatory beast.

Abandoning the notion of waiting for the streetcar, I hailed a passing taxi and drove back to the University Club. I had the horrible feeling that every moment might count against life or death; and yet I could not have told you what it was that I feared. There are certain times in our lives when knowledge comes to us by unknown paths, and woe unto him who ignores the warnings explicit in that fore-knowing!

Tossing a crumpled bill at the driver, I sprang from the cab and raced into the building. Plunging up the staircase, I entered the rooms assigned to us, only to find no sign of the Professor.

But even as I turned to descend the stair and to seek for Mayhew in the Club library, there came to my ears a weird, ragged, chanting ulullation from the roof directly above our rooms, and among the weird vocables I recognized certain words—

Iä! Iä! Golgoroth! Golgoroth
Antarktos! Yaa-haa
Quumyagga! Quumyagga!
Quumyagga nng’h aargh—

These were the opening words of one of the summoning-litanies to the Shantaks, for I clearly recalled them from the manuscript of Professor Mayhew’s tentative translation of what he called the “Zimbabwe Rituals.” And then I knew, with a surge of cold fear that closed like a vise about my heart, that the Professor had employed a mere subterfuge to get me out of the way while he went up to the roof and tried out the summoning-litany . . . and I cried out, and I cursed the unholy curiosity of the scholar that would dare such an enormity.

Up to the roof I ran, stumbling over the stairs, and burst out upon the rooftop to see before me a scene of horror!

A dome of leaden clouds hid the sky, as if some immense lid of gray metal had been clamped down upon the world, from horizon to horizon. The wan luminance that filtered through the roiling vapors was lurid, unnatural, phosphoric, sulphurous yellow. For a fleeting instant I was reminded of the skies over Zimbabwe in my dreams—the flaring bale-fires, the drifting smokes, the bird-masked priests, the leering Moon—then I shrieked and saw—and saw—

Down they came, the apterous, semi-avian hurtling shapes, all slimy scales where feathers ought by rights to be, hippocephalic clubbed heads hideously grinning . . . and hovered on scaly, translucent wings: hovered and swooped and dipped, to tear and tear at the shrieking scarlet-splattered thing that jerked and jiggled prone on the rooftop, wallowing in a bath of blood—that shrieking thing that I could never have distinguished as having once been human, had it not been for the one detail to which my shuddering gaze clung with unbelieving terror . . . the blood-spattered pince-nez on their sodden ribbon of black silk, about the crimson ruin of what had once been a man’s head.

The Keeper of the Flame

Gary Myers

The great stone face of the temple of Kish looks out over the broad plain of Shand from the lofty precipice that rises above it. Out of the precipice it looks indeed, for its makers carved it from the living rock, and the rubbish of its carving can still be seen heaped against the bottom of the cliff. The shaded archway of its wide front door, through which three elephants might easily pass, is on clear days visible even as far as the gates of Shand itself. Not so visible is the little path that winds its way down the face of the cliff, the only road between the temple and the plain.

It is hard to imagine how the temple can exist in a place so little accessible to the city it serves. It is no less hard to imagine how faith alone can sustain a regular traffic between them. Yet the day seldom passes that has not seen its little band of pilgrims climbing the path from the plain below, to say its prayers on the temple’s steps, and to leave its offerings of wine and meal and oil on the porch before the temple’s threshold. Before the threshold the offerings are always left, for it is the law of the temple that no pilgrim may advance beyond it. Only the priest of Kish may cross the threshold. Only he may enter the holy of holies and the presence of the living god.

But upon a time there came to the temple one who cared nothing for its law. At that period the priest of Kish was a man whose exceeding holiness was matched only by his exceeding age. For more than half a century he had performed faithfully the duties of his office, greeting the pilgrims when they came, giving them words of hope and comfort, hearing their prayers and accepting their offerings all in the name of the god. But on the morning of the day of which I tell, he was sitting in the sun on the temple’s porch when a lone pilgrim came to stand at the foot of the temple’s steps.

The old priest had greeted many pilgrims in more than half a century, but the young man now standing before him was like no other pilgrim he had ever seen. For one thing, he lacked the pilgrim’s wonted humility. He bore himself as proudly as an emperor, though there was little in his worn tunic and broken sandals to justify such bearing. For another, he had not brought the customary offering. But the strangest thing about him was the answer he gave when the old priest asked him who he was and why he had come. For he answered in a loud clear voice that must have been heard in the heart of the temple itself: “I am Nod, and I have come to seek an audience with Kish.”

Even to conceive of such a purpose was a violation of the temple’s law, yet the old priest did not denounce the young man who had expressed it. For he hoped that he had spoken thus out of ignorance or misunderstanding. He therefore proceeded to explain to him that the privilege he sought was reserved to the priest of Kish alone, and that any prayer intended for the god must be entrusted to the priest. For it was the function of the priest of Kish to be the messenger between his worshippers and the god. But Nod denied that he had spoken out of ignorance. He needed no messenger to go between him and Kish. For the freedom to worship was the right from birth of every man, and access to his god could no more justly be denied him than access to wind and sun.

Then the old priest knew beyond any doubt that this was no common pilgrim. Yet he still had hopes of recalling him to reason. If he did not admit the arguments of law, he might admit those of tradition. For it was the glory of the worshippers of Kish that they had worshipped their god in this way and no other for as long as his worship had been. By following these traditions the worshipper of today could partake of the timelessness of the god himself, and quench his thirst at the same cool stream that had soothed the parched throats of generations. But Nod only mocked at the metaphor. For an old thing was not necessarily good simply because it was old. And when tradition came to choke the stream it should have let flow freely, it was every man’s duty to break it.

The old priest was still undaunted. The young man might fail to see the timeless beauty of tradition, but even he could not be blind to the eternal truths of philosophy. For the gods, being as it were the embodiments of the sacred, could not be approached by the profane. Only their priests who had undergone a rigorous course of purification and enlightenment, only they could approach the gods with impunity. But Nod denied these truths as well. For how could the gods be offended by honest worship? And so far were they above men that for them the distinction between priest and layman could hardly be said to exist. That distinction had been invented by the priests themselves to enlarge their importance among men, and to divert the blessings of the gods toward their own selfish ends.

The old priest sat in silence after that, considering how to proceed. He felt no animosity toward this young man, in spite of his heretical words and their thinly veiled personal attack. He could only admire this fiery zealot who would let nothing stand between him and his god. He wondered if in his own forgotten youth he had ever been as passionate in his faith. He had hoped to send the young man away with his faith intact. But now that law, tradition and philosophy had failed to turn him from his purpose, the old priest was forced to admit that the time had come for stronger measures. So, “Come with me,” he said, and rose and turned toward the temple door.

Just inside the door the priest took up the small clay lamp which he had left burning there against his return. And by its light Nod saw for the first time what lay within the temple walls. It may be that he had expected to find a rich display of gold and jewels, a shining monument to mere worldly splendor. If so, he must have been surprised at the truth. For the interior of the temple was only a tunnel cut in the stone, a tunnel continuing the colossal scale of the entrance, but no less dark and depressing for that. The few doorways that opened in the walls on either side showed only dark and comfortless cells more befitting a prison than a temple. But maybe Nod was not surprised: For what need had they of worldly splendor who could bask in the glory of a god?

Proceeding down the tunnel, they came presently to a gate of iron bars that spanned it from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling. The gate was too large for the men to move, but there was a smaller gate framed within the larger, and this the old priest unlocked and opened to let Nod and himself pass through. Beyond the gate the tunnel continued as before. But by the time they reached the second gate, they might have seen a greenish light glowing faintly in the distance. This light grew brighter the farther they advanced, until the little flame of the small clay lamp seemed to extinguish itself for shame. And when they arrived before the third and final gate, the light had become a luminous green mist that filled all the tunnel before them, a luminous green mist that rolled like the sea along its shore, and grew now brighter, now dimmer as it rose and fell.

Here the old priest turned to reason with Nod for the last time. He had brought him here, where none but a priest of Kish had ever been, in a final attempt to turn his feet from the ruinous path they were set upon. What did Nod really know of the nature of the gods? How could he be sure that the priests had set themselves between men and gods to deprive them of their blessing and not to defend them from their curse? Nod thought of his god as a comforting flame whereat he might warm his spirit. But what if the reality was a fiery furnace that might burn his spirit to ashes? Let him heed therefore the old priest’s warning. Let him abandon the dangerous quest for truth, and take refuge in the comforting lies of faith. For there alone was any hope for man.

So said the old priest, speaking with the eloquence of desperation. But his eloquence only stirred Nod to anger. For this was blasphemy and rank atheism. Nod would not have his ears polluted with such filth. If the priest again profaned the name of the gods within his hearing, he would drag him from the temple, and cast him down the precipice to his death on the stones below. So spoke Nod in his anger. But his words did not trouble the old priest half as much as the look in his eyes when he spoke them. For they never turned from the greenish vapor, and they responded to its unearthly glow with a more than answering fire. It was this more than anything else that finally persuaded the old priest to unlock and open the gate.

Finding the last obstacle gone from his path, the young man began to move forward, slowly at first, but with gathering speed as the green vapor rose to engulf him. His figure dissolved in its misty radiance, so that only the sound of his sandals on the stone remained to tell of his further progress. And soon even this was lost in the distance. The stillness that followed was complete. Even the mist had ceased its heaving. And then, suddenly and without warning, the greenish light began to strengthen in intensity. Brighter it grew and brighter, feeding its power from some hidden source, until it reached a level of blinding brilliance. Then, the source of its power exhausted, it began to die back down again, and to return by slow degrees to its old sullen glow.

Only then did the old man close and lock the gate, clumsily with shaking hands. Only then did he grope his way back to the clean white light of the sun.

Dead Giveaway

J. Vernon Shea

I

Miss Mary Peabody (you can give her surname the New England pronunciation! Peb’-uh-dee) turned as was her wont into the street that led to Old Dethshill Cemetery. It was almost a daily ritual with her, barring abominable weather. Her progress down the sharply sloping street did not go unobserved! The few people outside (it was a blustery day, with tall trees bent low as if trying to send more roots into the ground) turned to stare at her, and people inside pushed aside curtains for a better look.

For Miss Peabody had become somewhat of an institution upon the street. It always looked as if she had picked the clothes that were closest to hand, and her wardrobe must have bulged with bizarre items. People were curious (and even made bets) as to what the next day’s outfit would be like. Today’s ensemble was a conglomeration of clothing of various periods, all completely out of fashion.

Tonight would be Hallowe’en, but she wore a summery flowered hat; although the flowers were artificial, they somehow looked wilted and dusty. Her red velvet dress was of 1910 length, and in the rear it was stuck in the crack of her behind, exposing a great expanse of petticoat. Over it she had put on a button-down man’s sweater which may have belonged to her brother, and upon her feet she wore black high-button shoes. She carried an unraised pink parasol which the wind sought, ruffling its silk furiously.

She was walking into the wind, and its sharp sting brought an unaccustomed rosiness to her withered cheeks.

And then the calls came:

Crazy Mary, won’t you go home,
Crazy Mary, won’t you go home.

It was the children, sprung up magically everywhere. A few of the bolder ones would approach her closely, recite their lines, then dart giggling around the corners of houses. Miss Peabody did not mind them, having become accustomed to them, but as usual she passed her hand across her brow in bewilderment, wondering who “Crazy Mary” might be.

The children followed her at a distance down the street, chanting. And now she was approaching the old Elmer Harrod house. Usually deserted, for the city had boarded it up and shut off the utilities after Harrod’s mysterious and horrifying death, it now thronged with life; a group of teenagers were upon the porch, watching her.

One of them, whose name she had never known, but whom she recognized as one of her principal tormentors, came from the porch over to her.

He recited some just-coined lines:

Dress up your ass,
High-button shoes.
Want something else up your ass?
It’s time to choose.

She caught her breath in shock at the foulness of the language. Just then the teenager seized the parasol and gave it a twirl. Still clinging to it, Miss Mary Peabody was spun around, and she almost fell to the sidewalk in dizziness.

“Oh, you want to dance?” the teenager said, and he pushed her backwards in a parody of the waltz.

“Let her alone, God damn it!” someone said.

It was old Emil Weiskopf, who lived two doors away, Old Emil Weiskopf, who kept to himself and never bothered much with children.

The teenager let Miss Peabody loose in astonishment. Old Emil picked up the parasol, which had fallen to the sidewalk, and handed it ceremoniously to Miss Peabody.

“Would you come to my house and rest awhile?” he asked her.

“Oh, no, no,” she said. “I must get to the cemetery.”

“But why today? It’s cold and windy out there.”

“I must get to the cemetery,” she said, as if by rote. And she wore the bewildered look again.

Why must she get to the cemetery? She couldn’t remember. Oh, yes, it was to find Benjy, her little brother. She had lost Benjy somewhere, and she could never remember just where. She had a hazy recollection that it had something to do with Old Dethshill Cemetery, and that was why she made her daily trips there, in the hope that someday she would remember exactly. She wanted Benjy back. She needed him. It was so lonely in her apartment without him. He had always known what to do. A man knows such things; a woman doesn’t. (Had Benjy grown to manhood, or was she thinking of someone else? She wished she could remember.)

The wind died down strangely as she entered Old Dethshill Cemetery. The death of Elmer Harrod, the TV horror film host, had received national publicity, and the cemetery was now somewhat of a tourist attraction (tourists came once, and never returned); so the city officials had been compelled to cut a road through the back section into which the street debouched, and had even razed some rundown houses of a nearby slum area to make room for a new section of the cemetery, as some of the city residents had expressed a perverse desire to be buried there. But even with the changes, Old Dethshill Cemetery remained much the same. It was still a place which did not welcome intruders.

She shivered with sudden cold. Despite the frequency of her visits, Miss Peabody still felt herself an intruder. The cemetery gave her a feeling of guilt, as if she had done something very wrong there years before. But she could never remember just what. Her visits were, in a measure, an atonement.

As she made her way into the cemetery grounds, she could hear the old scuttering sounds with which the place abounded. Something was lurking behind that tree over there; if she remained quite still, she might catch a glimpse of its face. Could it be little Benjy, playing tricks upon her?

“Benjy!” she called out with a sudden impulse. “Where are you? It’s your sister Mary. You called me Mamie, don’t you remember?”

There was no response, but the scuttering sounds seemed to be intensified. And down the hillside, thick now with once splendid leaves, the figure with the red velvet dress and pink parasol strolled, calling out “Benjy!” time and again, the sunlight muted and without warmth as it struggled to penetrate the maze of trees overhead.

Miss Peabody was seeking one particular grave, her own discovery. Now that the city provided caretakers, who mowed the grass occasionally, but with the greatest reluctance (caretakers never stayed on their jobs very long), graves were easier to find; she had merely to brush the dead grass away from the markers with her foot. She was engaged in doing so when she noticed a very curious thing.

She had frequently passed the grave of Obediah Carter in her trips here, one of the oldest graves in the cemetery, one whose marker bore almost obliterated dates: 179_–18_7. But today all the grass and weeds surrounding it were cleared away, and the marker looked freshly washed—and, much more disturbing, the marker did not quite meet the packed earth around it; it looked for all the world like a fresh grave.

The Carter grave had always seemed to Miss Peabody much too close to the place which Elmer Harrod had called “Witches’ Hollow”—a place she always skirted—for her liking, and she hurried on. (Not that she had ever met a witch there; she always was afraid that if she did meet something there, it would be something far worse than a witch.) She reached the object of her search almost too soon, almost unexpectedly.

It was another very old grave, probably even older than Carter’s, for the time had done even more damage to the carving. Only BENJAMIN was decipherable, the eroded surname defying identification. The little she could make out certainly didn’t look like PEABODY, but it might be. One part of her brain told her that this couldn’t be Benjy’s grave, for Benjy wasn’t that old, but it was the only Benjamin she had ever been able to discover in the cemetery, and she felt for it a sense of proprietorship. Sometimes she even brought flowers to strew upon it (which someone had always removed by the next day). The grave was always the end point of her journey and, as was her wont, she stretched herself tiredly upon its marker.

But the cold air and the cold marble soon penetrated her dress and thin sweater, and she had to rise. She thought she would return by a different route, and she chose to go by way of the new section. Perhaps she might even find Benjy there.

She didn’t much like the new section, for, as today, it usually had a few visitors. It had an air of modernity not in keeping with Old Dethshill Cemetery. The graves were packed much too closely together, and the grass looked freshly watered and manicured. The newest grave, which bore the name RUSSELL CARMODY, was blazing with flowers, cut ones and potted ones.

“This fellow has too many flowers,” Miss Peabody said to herself, “while this poor soul doesn’t have any.” So, putting her parasol down, she picked armfuls of flowers from the Carmody grave and placed them upon the grave of his neighbor, distributing them equally.

It was becoming dark as she approached the new shaft which had become the tallest thing in the cemetery, a focal point. As always, she felt a touch of chill as she gazed up at it. It was made of some curious black polished stone, and it stretched up much higher than Miss Peabody could reach, and it rested upon a thick circular platform composed of the same black stone.

Both sides of the shaft (it was really an obelisk, but Miss Peabody didn’t know that) were covered with some very weird and outre drawings and sentences (presumably) in a great many languages, none of which Miss Peabody understood. For instance, the top lines were in Assyrian cuneiform symbols which an amateur linguist amongst the city officials had transliterated as kutullu, shub, and nagarra. The sounds of these symbols had so disturbed him (he had the eerie sensation that something close by had stopped to listen) that he had refused to continue his research. And the drawings were of a nature which Miss Peabody refused to contemplate steadily. There were faces there which reminded her of the statues of Easter Island; and there was something which looked like a horrendous goat; and there was something much worse which had a great many tentacles; there were depictions of actions which were obviously obscene, and, even more nauseating, depictions of people being devoured by nameless monsters.

It must have taken the stonecutter (or stonecutters) tremendous time and effort to perform so horrifying a task.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice behind her said, and turning, Miss Peabody saw that the speaker had a profile which reminded her of a frog or toad. He was obviously some inhabitant of nearby Innsmouth. But there was no longer an Innsmouth. Trembling, Miss Peabody hurried away as fast as she could, her parasol bounding ahead of her like a jackrabbit.

II

At the approach of twilight Mrs. Charlotte Carmody seated herself in the chair by the window which commanded the best view of the street. The strong winds had not yet subsided, and she was conscious of a draught from the window. The furnace was on, but she felt cold, and she rose and got herself a sweater. She had not felt really warm since the moment last week when she had seen the casket of her son Russell being lowered into the new grave in Old Dethshill Cemetery. She shivered at the memory, and she dabbed with her handkerchief at her red, swollen eyelids.

The house was cold, cold, old and empty like herself. Why had she picked such sombre furniture? She needed bright, warm colors. Russell cold in his grave and she here all alone . . . the bleak years without Russell stretched interminably ahead. She was not really old, and she knew she was going to live for a long, long time. . . .

And now the street was becoming dark, and already people were beginning to welcome the Hallowe’eners. She pursed her lips. The good, generous people. What an easy way to buy friendship, with just a few bags of penny candy! “Trick or treat” indeed! It was really a kind of blackmail. Nobody had ever given her anything when she was a girl in St. Louis. Children then were content just to dress up in costume and parade up and down the streets. But the kids today were spoiled, spoiled rotten. Look at the way they went through her garden after a ball and trampled her roses! And daring to ride up and down her sidewalk on their bikes! “Oh, mother, they don’t mean anything!” Russell used to remonstrate. But Russell was too easy-going. One had to assert one’s rights. And so she had had to yell at them, “If you don’t get out of my garden, I’m going to call the police!” And she had meant it. Let them call her “the mean old lady”!

Well, she had no intention of turning on her porchlight. She never had before, and she wasn’t going to set a precedent tonight. The children on this street knew her too well; they’d never dream of ringing her doorbell. She’d never let them in if they did. She saw now a car being driven slowly down the street and coming to a halt, and a mother letting her small children, just wee tots, out and waiting while they rang doorbells and came back to the car loaded with gifts. And then came a mother walking with her children and bending over them and tying their scarves tighter, bundling them against the cold. They bulged so with clothing that their skeleton costumes were incongruous.

Well, Mrs. Carmody thought, the city streets were so dangerous nowadays it was no wonder that parents were afraid to let children venture out after dark.

Blaring sounds came suddenly from further down the street, from Elmer Harrod’s old place. It wasn’t Harrod making all that racket, that was sure.

And now it was really dark out, and time for her to repair to the back of the house. On Hallowe’en night she always turned off the lights in front to make the children think she wasn’t home.

She sat down at her kitchen table and began to read the evening paper. But it was even chillier facing the north with its cold wind, and she had to turn on the stove to get more heat. She rubbed her hands together over the gas flame. How prominent the veins on the backs of her hands were getting to be—and there were even a couple of horrid brown spots. Oh, she was getting old, getting old. . . .

She was in the midst of reading her paper when the doorbell rang. It must be some mistake: Some child new to the neighborhood who didn’t know her reputation. But the ringing persisted for long minutes, and at last Mrs. Carmody went to her seat by the window and pushed aside her curtain. A group of masqueraders was on her porch, carrying shopping bags already almost filled; mostly small children, but they were accompanied by some larger boys. The leader seemed to be the rowdy red-haired teenager who used to be her paper boy. He must have sensed her presence by the window, for he called out suddenly, “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” And after a moment he added the grim line: “Treat or you’ll be tricked!”

You can stay there all night if you want to, Mrs. Carmody thought; I’m not going to open the door. Where was Russell when she needed him? Oh, yes, oh, yes . . . She started to cry again and returned to the kitchen. She had barely begun to read again when there came a tapping at her high side window and, looking up, she saw a blazing orange face leering down at her.

Pains shot sharply across her heart, but after a moment she recognized it for what it was: It’s just a jack o’ lantern. “Come out, Charlotte,” a voice came, “we know you’re in there.”

“If you children don’t go away,” she screamed then, “I’m going to call the police.”

“Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte,” the voice said mockingly, and she heard feet running away. And silence held—for a little while.

III

Old Emil Weiskopf was the first person upon the street to switch on his porch light. The porch was decorated with Hallowe’en motifs: pumpkins and Indian corn and cornhusks upon the railings, cut-outs of black cats in the windows, and upon the porch a witch (driven by an electric motor) who rocked back and forth upon her broomstick, tittering evilly. He went back to the kitchen and removed the last tray of candy molds from the refrigerator. The tray contained chocolates which he had been preparing lovingly all day.

He touched one of the chocolates tentatively: yes, it was sufficiently hard. He sat down at the kitchen table and began to wrap the chocolates in the expensive-looking wrappers he had carefully saved all year. He had quite an accumulation of them, for, like his dear Fuehrer before him, he indulged his craving for sweets.

The table was piled high with his day’s handiwork: hand-dipped chocolates. He hadn’t the slightest desire, of course, to nibble upon one of them, for he knew what they contained. Things carefully preserved for just this day, things selected just for the children of his street. Things like used razor blades and ground glass and dead insects and rat excrement.

Oh, they would serve the little bastards right! Scarcely a day passed that they didn’t disturb him with their noise and their tricks. Almost every day some youngster—he could never catch him at it, or he’d box his ears—twisted the outside rear-view mirror around so that he could no longer see if a car was approaching, and this was dangerous, especially in the winter months when his rear window was steamed up or thick with ice. You’d think the youngster would eventually tire of his little game, but he never did. And once he had found the mirror with its cracked glass hanging by shreds: it looked as if someone had deliberately struck it with a hammer—or possibly it had been shattered by a ball thrown in a game. And sometimes the children stole the cover of his gasoline tank, or filled the tank with dirt, and once they had removed his hubcaps and filled them with stones and replaced them, and such a dreadful racket had developed when he started out that he had thought his muffler was dragging along the street. In the summer months the children were always darting out into the street unexpectedly to retrieve a ball or riding their bicycles in the middle of the street, and when he returned from work they would be out in the street playing baseball, that stupid American game, and practically dared him to run over them. Or they would ask him not to park in just that spot, as it was first base, but to park further up the street! (They would not soap or damage his car tonight: he had it stored away in a safe place.)

And the racket they created was even worse: The calls and the screams and the off-key singing. His sense of hearing had always been extremely acute, and age had dimmed it only a little. It had been an asset in the grand old days of the fatherland, when he had served as concertmaster with the leading orchestras. The proudest day of his life, of course, had come—and he shivered in ecstasy at the memory—when the Fuehrer had attended a Wagnerian matinee and had come backstage and personally shaken his hand.

         

Oh, the fools, the swine-dogs, the poor, benighted fools! Germany was no longer a fit place to live; they had thrown him into prison and carefully “de-Nazified” him (as if anyone could erase those glorious years!) and no longer wanted him in their orchestras, so now he was a “DP” in this boobland, where he could not play his Stradivarius because of his arthritic fingers, but instead served as a . . . as a . . . (he could not force himself to complete the thought).

The doorbell rang just then, and old Emil Weiskopf began to hum triumphantly the opening bars of the Beethoven Fifth (the Fate knocking at the door theme) as he hurried to answer it.

         

It was much later, and old Emil had disposed of almost all his chocolates. He went to his front window and peered out. The wind had died down, and the trees and the few flowers which had survived the cold were barely quivering. The street was deserted except for one figure, a tall and very emaciated one, dressed very fittingly in a skeleton costume, which leaned against Emil’s gatepost, as if too weary or too shy to enter the yard.

Emil gathered up the rest of his chocolates and put them in a bag and opened his door.

“Come here, lad,” he called. “I have a nice treat for you.”

The figure with the skeleton mask looked up and shook its head. It raised a bony finger and beckoned to Emil.

OK, if you want to play games, thought Emil, a trifle annoyed.

He hurried over to the figure.

And now he could see the figure more clearly.

The skeleton face was not a mask.

IV

“Cut it down a bit, guys,” said Ronnie Sears, “or old Charlotte will be calling the pigs.”

Still in Hallowe’en costume, they were sprawled comfortably—upon the floor or upon sofas, feet over the sides—in the room Elmer Harrod had used as a recording studio. A few of the younger ones were puffing upon reefers (which they didn’t really like but felt that they should) but most of them stuck to cigarettes adulterated only by their natural poisons.

Ronnie’s parents were away for the evening, not willing to cope with the Hallowe’eners, and as usual upon such occasions, Ronnie had run a cable from his house next door to the Harrod house for lights and had turned on the water from the street main. The Harrod house served effectively as a clubhouse for the neighborhood children, although usually they just played Harrod’s old tapes or leafed through his books (they didn’t know how to operate his movie projector).

“Aw, don’t be a candy ass, Ron,” one of them said. “This music is cool.”

“Right on, brother.”

“Yeah,” said Ronnie Sears, “but what we need now is some real creepy music, you know, like Dr. Phibes played on the organ. What we have here is a failure of communication: we’re supposed to be scaring the hell out of the old bastards.”

“Right on, man. Creepy music for the creeps. Like old Emil Wisehead. Did you notice how sweetly he handed out his candy? I’ll bet it’s full of bugs.”

“Shit, man, I’m not going through all these tapes just for spook music. Say, here’s something we haven’t played yet,” and he picked up a small tape recorder from Elmer Harrod’s writing desk.

It was the tape recorder which had been found upon Harrod’s corpse. The police had played it back repeatedly for a possible clue to his death, but the words didn’t make sense. They were just gibberish.

“Well, play it, man.”

Night. The sighing of the wind in the trees. Little odd scuttering sounds.

“Say, that sounds just like the cemetery.”

“Aw, turn it off. It don’t say nothin’.”

As if to refute him, words suddenly tumbled forth, in Harrod’s recognizable voice.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn.

“What in the hell is that?”

“Great, man, great! It’s just what we needed! Turn it up louder. This’ll frighten ’em out of their fright wigs.”

“No, don’t! I don’t like it. It’s s-scary.”

“Listen to the candy ass! Why don’t you go home to mama?”

The volume was increased, and they played the recording endlessly. There was something oddly fascinating about the uncouth sounds, something that seemed to evoke memories. They thought of nearby Innsmouth, now destroyed, and of the great reef out in its harbor, and of the fish-faces and the frog-faces who had dwelled there, who had practiced unseemly rites.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wagh-nagl fhtagn.

They heard the sounds again, but this time they seemed to be coming from a great distance. They couldn’t seem to pinpoint the direction; some claimed that they came from the cemetery, while others insisted that they were in the house itself, at a point beneath them, possibly the basement.

The sounds were clearer now, clearer and closer. They were changing into a chanting, at a faster tempo, and words were being added, words not to be found upon the tape recorder:

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

“ ‘The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!’ Man, is this far out!”

“I’m getting out of here!” one small boy said, and he departed to derisive cries.

Nyarlathotep . . . N’gah-Kthun . . . Hastur! . . . Yig, Father of Serpents . . . Tsathoggua . . . Yog-Sothoth . . . Yian . . . Azathoth . . . Iä! Iä! Great Cthulhu . . . L’mur-Kathulos . . . He Who Is Not To Be Named.

“You think it could be the old creeps, trying to play tricks upon us?”

“You’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind!”

For some time, unconsciously they had been aware of sounds, sounds odious, inexplicable, and they seemed to denote movement of some kind, for they were obviously coming nearer. They were accompanied always by the chanting of the gibberish words: gibberish to the boys, but obviously not gibberish to whomever was making them. They had a perceptible rhythm, and were apparently an incantation, an evocation of some kind. A calling forth of what?

“They must be coming from the cellar,” said Ronnie Sears. “Agreed?” There was a murmur of assent. “Let’s take a look-see.”

“Aw, do we have to?”

“Don’t be a candy ass all your life.”

But there was nothing in the cellar, a dank and cobwebbed place where Elmer Harrod had stored things which must have spoiled by now, for there was quite a perceptible stench.

But they were obviously closer to the source of the sounds and of the chanting; when they pressed their ears against one wall, the sounds were magnified.

“Say, didn’t Harrod say something about a secret passageway down here in one of his broadcasts?”

“No, he said he had a dream about a secret passageway.”

“Well, there must be one somewhere. Let’s try pressing on the bricks or looking for a switch.”

The switch was soon discovered. A section of the wall moved back with a squeaking protest from unoiled fixtures, and a surprisingly wide and high tunnel was revealed. The air from the tunnel was musty and foul, hinting of things long dead, strong enough to make them recoil involuntarily.

And at the tunnel entrance the sounds and the chanting could be heard with considerable clarity. Somewhere there was a splashing sound, like that of a hippopotamus dropping into water.

“Man, I’m not going in there!”

“Oh, yes, you are—” and he was pushed into the tunnel.

Nothing came along to gobble him up.

None of the boys really wanted to enter the tunnel, but none of them wanted to be accused of cowardice either. The longer they looked at the tunnel the more their curiosity grew—and with it the fascination which tunnels and secret passageways have always exerted upon mankind.

“Well, let’s go, men,” Ronnie Sears said, and he took the initiative.

The tunnel dipped sharply into the burrows of the earth, a tunnel which many people had passed through before, for there were fixtures to hold torches and little recesses cut into the walls which, so far as Ronnie’s flashlight could discover, were quite unoccupied now. Nothing disturbed their progress, not even a rat.

Progress—for, for some odd reason, they found themselves hurrying. None of the boys wanted to be at the tail of the procession, so they were all bunched together as closely as the width of the tunnel would permit. The tunnel took weird twists and turns: sometimes the sound of the chanting seemed to be above them, sometimes even beneath them—and such was the subtle insistence of the rhythm that one or more of the boys would find themselves chanting along with it; they had picked up the words very quickly.

Bethmoora . . . Leng . . . Bran . . . Innsmouth . . . The Lake of Hali . . . The Stalker Among The Stars . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath . . .

It was very much later that they detected illumination toward the tunnel’s end, and the chanting that assailed their eardrums increased now many-fold, and the foolhardiness of their venture struck them all at once, and they stopped in their tracks.

But the sounds and the chanting continued without pause. And presently they could see in the distance the flaring of torches borne aloft, torches which lit up a noisome black lake into which water from the roof of the tunnel constantly dripped, and the torches were being carried by a number of people with monstrous frog faces, the people formerly of Innsmouth.

It was time then to retreat, and they started to do so, but just then one of the boys cried, “Look!” and pointed to the tunnel ahead.

An entire block of the flooring was being raised slowly, and from it an overpowering sea-stench was emanating, and an ever-lengthening coil of tentacle came probing across the floor toward them.

V

Miss Mary Peabody had been wandering dazedly through the cemetery for hours. She couldn’t seem to be able to find the way out. She had never been in the cemetery at night before, and everything looked different—different and much more malign. The little scuttering sounds were much louder now, and once and again she could hear the cry of something apparently in mortal agony.

She leaned against the bole of a tree and shivered, for her thin sweater afforded scant warmth and it was very much colder now. From quite a distance away she could hear dogs barking, and she felt a moment of relief, for the sound denoted the street by which she had entered, and people there.

Oh, she had been seeing people—of a kind—all night; she seemed perpetually to be turning into the Witches’ Hollow, where were gathered the fish-faces and the frog-faces performing some strange ritual or other and chanting the most frightening sounds.

But she preferred even them to the sight of the tall shaft in the new part of the cemetery. Whenever she passed by it, it seemed to be slowly revolving upon its platform, and she grew quite dizzy at the sight.

“Ma-mie!”

The call came from not far away. Miss Peabody listened intently.

“Mamie, where are you? I’m cold and I’m lonely.”

“Benjy? Benjy? Is that you, Benjy?”

There was no immediate answer. Miss Peabody hastened in the direction of the voice, almost tripping over her parasol.

“Oh, there you are, Benjy.” She hurried to what seemed to be Benjy as she remembered him, a small boy in a cap and old-fashioned knickers, but which turned into a tree trunk when she got there.

It was so dark in here under the trees. She would never find Benjy now.

She turned away in disappointment—and almost ran into something in her path, something very tall and very dark and quite distinguishable.

It blocked her path again and wrapped itself around her.

“Let me go! You’re not Benjy!”

“Oh, yes, I am—or used to be. Did you really want to find Benjy—Benjy, remember, whom you hit over the head with a rock and buried here? I was not quite dead then.”

“Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

“Yes, I’m Benjy. I’m so cold and so lonely and so very, very hungry.”

VI

The night wore on, so full of horrors that Mrs. Carmody felt that she would never be able to sleep. The wind rose again and rattled the windows of her bedroom, and it moaned occasionally like a banshee. A dog kept barking and then the sound became a duo and then a trio and then a quartet, a contagious thing, but there was nothing joyous about it; they seemed to share, mutually, a misery. The dogs seemed disturbed by the presence of some stranger or strangers upon the street. But presently their sounds were transmuted oddly; they became whines and moans and whimpers to be let in. Then one of them yelped out in agony, and the other three became panicky and Mrs. Carmody could mentally visualize their straining at their leashes.

The sounds from Elmer Harrod’s old house frightened her even more. She had heard Harrod’s familiar sardonic voice repeatedly, and her heart had pounded wildly, but then she had realized that these must be playbacks from old broadcasts. Playbacks—for she recognized the music and some of the lines from years ago.

But then, still in Harrod’s voice, came some new words. Words they must be, but they didn’t make sense, yet they were curiously—detestable. Words like Biblical lines read backwards at a black sabbath. Words that seemed to evoke some ancestral horror. She felt that she had heard these words somewhere before, and she didn’t want to remember where.

Then, from the direction of the cemetery, the words were repeated. Repeated, and then new words were added, in the same kind of abominable gibberish. Words that were like the names of forbidden places. The words increased in volume, and Mrs. Carmody had the chilling sensation that whoever was uttering them was coming nearer, was approaching her street. Not whoever, for there was more than one voice, there were many voices.

Then, abruptly, the sounds from the Harrod house ceased. But there still sounded as if there were a great deal of activity in the cemetery—once she thought she heard a woman screaming, and the voices repeating their sinister doggerel did not die down, but came ever closer.

And now it was her house that was being besieged. She had heard the trundle of heavy wheels from the cemetery—there had been a cart upon her street before—and the whinnying of horses, and the group of people driving the cart speaking minimally among themselves. They were stopping at each house in turn, like garbage collectors making their rounds, and they moved quite slowly, as if their burdens were heavy. The dogs were frantic at their approach. And now they were in front of her house.

Ice seemed to engulf her in her bed. Her curiosity had quite forsaken her; she had absolutely no desire to see whom or what was out there. She was a woman who had rarely experienced terror, but she was afraid now as she had never been afraid before in her life.

There came the sound of someone or something laboriously climbing her steps, dragging himself or itself across the porch, trying the door, rattling the doorhandle, scrabbling as with claws at the door and windows. She listened in an agony of suspense. Then, getting no repose the visitant reversed his or its procedure, and retreated from her steps. But then she could hear the unwelcome visitor coming with what seemed like infinite slowness down her sidewalk and stopping under her bedroom window.

         

“Mother,” the voice came, “let me in. Please let me in.”

         

She felt an excess of fury. It must be the teenage redhead coming back to pester her. How could anyone be so cruel as to torment a bereaved mother in the middle of the night, even going so far as to imitate the voice of her dead son? Well, she would get on her ’phone in the morning and make him wish he hadn’t!

Her feeling of fury quite supplanted her terror, and in a few minutes she was sleeping quite soundly.

VII

Morning broke sharp and clear. There was little wind, and the sun promised to break through its bondage of clouds at any moment. It was going to be a fine day.

The people who lived upon the street rose reluctantly from bed, some to get ready for work. Most of them had gone without sleep, awake the night through because of the fearsome sounds. For some obscure reason they all postponed looking outside for as long as possible.

When they did, they were aghast at what they saw, and most of them called the police immediately. The police cars came presently with sirens shrieking, a number of them, and almost the first act of the policemen was to barricade the street against traffic. Passersby and people from the neighboring streets, drawn by the sirens, came hurrying up and gazing down the sharp slope of the street which led to Old Dethshill Cemetery. The crowds increased greatly, and before long there were people there hawking balloons and roasted chestnuts and hot dogs. And downtown the city editors left their front pages open for photographs.

There was really quite a lot to photograph, although later most of the pictures were “killed” as being too gruesome. For the night’s visitors had been quite generous, bestowing upon each house in turn—either upon their lawns or propped up on steps or against trees of the trim lawns—a corpse from the cemetery. Some of the corpses were in an advanced state of putrefaction and stank quite dreadfully, while others had been stripped clean of flesh and were only skeletons, like the one which had a death-lock upon the throat of old Emil Weiskopf, who stared up at the sky in a perpetual look of disbelieving horror.

The very first stop the visitors had made was to Elmer Harrod’s old home, and they had left Elmer himself, or rather his skeleton, for he was recognizable only by his clothing. Elmer’s body had lain long unclaimed in the city morgue, and it was the first one to be buried in the new section of the cemetery, dubbed Harrod Place in his honor. What no one could quite understand was why it was wrapped now in a cocoon of tapes.

The street’s inhabitants had a considerable problem with their pets. Some of the dogs came up sniffing at the corpses and stole back to their doghouses and lay there quivering in terror, while others worried the bones and had to be driven off by their owners. Inexplicably, there was the body of a dog there also, its body contorted quite oddly. There was one cat which had retrieved the liver from a corpse and sat there devouring it, and which spat out with blazing eyes when its owner approached it.

Mrs. Charlotte Carmody had had to be removed to the hospital suffering from shock. When she had come out early that morning to sweep her sidewalk, she had found on the sidewalk beneath her bedroom window, scrabbling at the stucco, a corpse. Its face was already too decomposed to permit identification, but she had recognized the suit it wore as the suit in which she had buried her son Russell.

The police had found the old Harrod house still blazing with lights, and in one room a tape recorder which was still turned on. Leaving it on all night must have ruined it, for the words upon replay were quite indecipherable, just outlandish gibberish. But of the children of the neighborhood who had occupied the house the night before there was no trace. The police had searched the house thoroughly, and in the cellar had eventually come upon the secret tunnel, but in the tunnel itself there was nothing but a fearful odor, mostly compounded of the sea. The tunnel led up to the freshly washed grave of Obediah Carter, elegant in the sun.

The new section of Old Dethshill must have been visited by vandals during the night, for each of the graves had been torn up and its contents removed. The caskets had been smashed and piled up like so much kindling wood. The police were inclined to attribute the damage to the neighborhood children, who, tiring of the Harrod house, had sought more mischief elsewhere. An intensive search for the children was instituted and their descriptions broadcast to neighboring cities.

But the police didn’t know what to make of the death of Miss Mary Peabody. Her pink parasol had been raised and tossed up into the limbs of a tree, and its handle pointed mockingly toward her corpse. Whatever it was which had eaten her had been quite selective, scooping out just the torso and leaving her head and thin, scrawny arms and legs attached precariously to her spine; when the police had carefully lifted the corpse, it had bounced up and down upon its spinebone like a jumping jack.

Nor could the police quite understand why, of all the things in the new section of the cemetery, the only thing which had been left undisturbed was the tall obelisk. It stood there triumphantly and the sunlight which fell upon its black stone seemed to linger longest upon the carved letters CTHULHU.

Those Who Wait

James Wade

Fortunate indeed is he whose range of experience never exceeds that tiny segment of Infinity which it is meant that Man should explore and subdue. He who steps beyond these borders walks in dreadful danger of life, sanity, and soul. Even if he escapes the peril, life can never be the same again—for he cannot escape his memories.

It is now seven months since I came to the archaic Massachusetts town of Arkham, to attend the small but widely-known Miskatonic University. Since then, my knowledge has increased in an unprecedented manner, but not in the ways I had expected. For me, new worlds have been opened—new worlds containing fascinating vistas of wisdom, and also undreamable abysses of horror, in which I learned the fatal weakness of the human mind in dealing with forces beyond its comprehension.

The first few weeks of my attendance at the university were occupied with settling myself in the new surroundings and becoming accustomed to my classes. My room-mate, Bill Tracy, I instinctively liked. A tall, blonde, self-effacing fellow, he was one of those utterly frank and compatible individuals one meets all too seldom. He was a sophomore, and helped my absorption into the school’s routine by answering my innumerable questions as to the location of rooms, the dispositions of instructors, and the thousand other things about which the beginner at a school is ever curious.

Almost a month elapsed thus when the event occurred which was to set in motion a train of events unparalleled, so far as we know, in the history of the Earth. It began, however, prosaically enough.

One evening, rather late, I suddenly remembered some quotations from Shelley I would be expected to know by the next day for my literature class. Apprehensively I asked Bill Tracy, “Do you suppose the campus library is still open?”

“Probably,” he replied, “but better hurry. They close at ten. You should have gone earlier.” He grinned at my negligence.

I hurried from the dormitory and took the gravel path across the campus toward the large brick library building. On nearing it, I was relieved to notice that faint lights were still burning on the ground floor. Inside, I procured the needed book, and, passing the busy librarian, I suddenly turned on an impulse and made my way into the rare books room, which was then completely empty, as was the rest of the library. Seating myself at one of the tables, I prepared to delve into Shelley’s odes, when suddenly I saw it—the thing which was to change my very life.

It was nothing but a sheet of paper lying on the table near me, written part of the way down one side. Out of idle curiosity I picked it up. It seemed but a series of notes, such as students might jot down when sitting together rather than disturb the quiet of the reading-room by speaking aloud. There were short sentences in two alternating hands. I was about to toss the paper aside, when something caught my eye, and I read it with ever-mounting interest and mystification. As nearly as I can remember, this is what the written conversation said:

“What time is it?”

“9:15.”

“I wish they’d leave.”

“There are only two. They will leave soon.”

“Hope they hurry. I’d like to let Ithaqua get the—”

(Here the script was hurriedly broken off, and there had been an only partially successful attempt to cross out the cryptic word. After which:)

“Fool! I have told you—never write those names!”

“All right.—Can we finish tonight?”

“I can copy the chant.”

“We can open the Gate by—”

(Here again the writing was interrupted)

“They’re leaving. Bring the key.”

This completed the contents of the paper. I was baffled. What were these two planning—a robbery? But what about the cryptic reference to a “chant” and “opening the gate”? Who was “Ithaqua” and why shouldn’t that name be written?

I was interrupted in these speculations by the opening of a nearby door marked “Private,” and the emergence of two men. I caught a momentary glimpse of the rows of books within the room, and then a piercing gaze was directed upon me and the paper before me.

The gazer was tall, beetle-browed, and excessively dark, and had the appearance of being too adult for a student, but both he and his companion—a shorter, stouter, and younger-looking fellow who carried a brief-case—wore school sweaters. The younger man, apparently quite agitated at seeing me, quickly closed and locked the door, and then stood waiting for his older companion to act, which he immediately did. Striding forward, he addressed me in low, fierce tones with a hint of fear in his voice.

“Pardon me, sir, this paper is mine.” And without further ado, he snatched it up and turned away.

“Just a moment!” I exclaimed angrily, “What are you up to? Have you two been stealing rare books from in there? What’s in that brief-case?”

Seeing he could not get away without an explanation, he stopped and became immediately suavely polite.

“Pardon my haste,” he said, smiling blandly. “My companion and I are engaged in no untoward activities. It is true: We were using the so rare books within that room, but we were merely copying portions of them, for a—thesis; yes, a thesis on demonolatry.” Something in the inflection and wording suggested that he was a foreigner. “You will excuse us now.” Grasping the arm of his companion, he turned once more.

“Do you think he understood—?” began the smaller man, but he was hushed by a gesture from the other, who looked guardedly back at me. The two quickly left the library, leaving me to muse on what I had witnessed.

My work was soon finished, but as I walked across the campus, thoughts of the two strange men obsessed me. If they had been engaged in authorized reference work, why had the note hinted that they wished to be left alone before entering the locked room? Too, parts of the dark, moody note seemed curiously irreconcilable to that explanation.

Over the thickly clustered, shadowy grove to the east hung a waning moon. Stars, those bright specks of light from distances incomprehensible, held dominion over the more subdued hues of darkness at the zenith. Ahead of me stretched the half-lit dormitory. Within was Bill Tracy. Perhaps he could shed some light on this matter.

I hurried to our room. Bill greeted me with a cheery, “Hi! Get your work done?”

“Yes,” I answered abstractedly; then: “Have you ever seen a tall, dark, foreign, older-looking fellow in the student body?—Maybe tagged by a stoutish, younger fellow?”

“I think I know who you mean. His name is Renaunt. He is older. Taking a post-graduate course in Ancient Literature and Folklore.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Oh, nothing in particular. Rather reserved chap. You meet him?”

“In a way.” I told him what had occurred. He seemed peculiarly disturbed when I mentioned the strange name Ithaqua and the locked room.

“He’s up to no good,” muttered Bill, more to himself than to me.

“What do you know about it?”

“It’s more than you can imagine. I was born and raised here. There are legends. . . .”

He told me then: fantastic tales of ancient books on malignant evil come down from ages immemorial, kept in Miskatonic Library’s locked room. Sane or not, the dark beliefs and rituals contained in these books have been practiced even down to the present. The thick woods bordering the Miskatonic River had seen hideous, illogical rites celebrated within ancient circles of standing stones, and the forgotten hamlet of Dunwich, surrounded by altar-crowned hills, degenerated year by year from more cause than mere isolation. There were those, especially among the oldsters of Arkham, who averred that dark things could be called from the hills or the sky, if one was willing to pay the price. It was universally admitted that at certain seasons the sky lit up disturbingly over the hills, and queer rumbling earth-noises were heard. Scientists mumbled about seismographic shocks and Aurora Borealis, but few dared to investigate. In the old days, it had been quite generally believed that indescribable legions of demons were served there by wicked cults. Strange disappearances of those who lived or ventured too near the woods at night were invariably laid to the cult or its hideous deities, especially when the bodies would be found months later far away, only a few days dead.

Here my informer paused.

“Surely,” I prompted, “you don’t believe that!”

“Believe it? I wouldn’t believe that Renaunt believed it if it wasn’t for that note you told me about. They sound in earnest.”

“Couple of crackpots!”

“If you really want to know something about this crazy business, just ask tomorrow to examine some of the books in that room. They’ll let you. But as for copying wholesale from them, there’d be suspicions. That’s why your two playmates made their own key and nosed in on the books secretly.”

That night I had little rest. Indeed, my loss of sleep was not the result of vague and later definite fears which would soon beset me, but was rather caused by excitement: I thought perhaps I had discovered a new myth-pattern (new to me, at least), as my hobby had for years been the gathering of native legends from my home state, Wisconsin.

Suddenly in the middle of the night, I remembered where I had heard that cryptic name, Ithaqua. During my explorations of Wisconsin’s north woods in search of lore for my collection, I had met an old Indian who had told me vague legends of the Wendigo, sometimes called “Wind-Walker” or Ithaqua—a titanic and repulsive monster, haunter of the great unfrequented snow-forests—a being who took men with him high and above the woods to the far corners of the Earth, but who never relinquished his victims until they had been frozen to death.

Such, then, was the thing which these unusual collegians spoke of as a reality, or—?

The next day passed slowly for me, but at last my classes terminated and I went quickly to the great library. Rather timorously I approached the aged librarian, and asked whether I might examine the rare occult books contained in the locked room. He eyed me oddly but assented, and, giving me a key from the ring at his side, bade me lock the door carefully when I finished.

With queer misgivings I approached the fated door and applied the key. Inside, I was confronted with several rows of books held in wall-shelves. The immense antiquity of the rotting tomes greatly impressed me. Many were incomplete or mutilated; others merely bound manuscripts. I saw such titles as the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, Unaussprechlichen Kulten by Von Junzt, Liber Ivonis, and De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn. I was blissfully ignorant of the hellish evil around me, but was not long to remain so.

To open the Necronomicon (one of the largest and best preserved of the lot) was the work of the moment. Thumbing through it, I learned for the first time of Great Cthulhu; of Azathoth, the Lord of All Things, of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, of Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua, and of other horrors the nature of which I could grasp no better. Had I believed what I read then, I should inevitably have gone mad at once, but thinking it merely a particularly malignant myth-pattern or a devilishly clever hoax, I read on with only a curious interest.

There were many hundreds of pages of rambling, disconnected essays in Latin, containing charms, counter-charms, spells and incantations (which latter seemed to be entirely in a laboriously spelled phonetic language). Frequently there was a crude diagram of complicated signs, such as a pattern of intersecting lines and concentric circles, as well as a fire-outlined star designated as “The Elder Sign.”

From the particularly lucid passages, I gleaned a strange story. It seems, according to the crazed Arab author that, billions of aeons before Man, great cosmic entities “from the stars” had come to Earth. These Things (possessing the queer names that had so puzzled me) were extra-dimensional and beyond the ties of Time and Space. They were the personifications of universal Evil and had fled from cosmoses beyond human ken the wrath of the benign Elder Gods, against whom They had rebelled. These evil Great Old Ones built cyclopean cities according to non-Euclidean geometric principles, and from Earth planned to renew their fight against the Elder Gods. But before They were fully prepared, “the stars went wrong” as the author put it, and these Great Old Ones could not live. Neither could They ever die, but being preserved by the black magic of Their high priest Great Cthulhu, slept within Their monster cities to await a coming time. Some were banished into caverns in the bowels of the Earth; others, imprisoned beyond the known universe.

In the course of an unbelievable passage of time, Man had arrived and the Great Old Ones had communicated with some individuals telepathically, telling them of the great awakening that was to come, and instructing them in the chants and rituals which, together with proper sacrifices and worship, could bring the gigantic Things temporarily to great circles of stone monoliths set up in abandoned places, and further hinting that Man would be instrumental in the permanent release of the Old Ones, as They could not yet move under Their own volition.

These secrets had been learned and passed on by wicked groups of men even after R’lyeh, the nightmare-city of Cthulhu, had sunk into the sea in the same cataclysm that spelled doom for Atlantis and Mu. The cults would go on until “the stars again became right” and the release of the blasphemous elder monsters would be accomplished as the culmination of its supreme purpose.

In addition to these wild historical notes, the book held hundreds of stories of various strange happenings, authenticated by long-forgotten witnesses and inexplicable save in the light of the lore the book expounded. Concerning the physical aspect of these extra-terrestrials and Their minions, the book was distressingly hazy. Once it alluded to Them as “of no substance”; other times mentioning a hideous plasticity and the capability of becoming invisible.

Being so completely absorbed in the book, I failed to notice light steps approaching the door, but I dropped the Necronomicon in fright as a menacingly familiar voice sounded behind me.

“Are you perhaps looking for something?”

It was Renaunt, of course, not far preceding his pudgy accomplice with the eternal brief-case. In strange agitation I tried to reply lightly.

“I was just checking up to see what interested you so much last evening.”

“I thought you perhaps might do so,” he returned narrowly. “Have you found anything of interest?”

“Yes, indeed! Here seems to be a myth-pattern of great antiquity upon which I have never before stumbled.”

“You are interested in the ancient religions?”

“Very much.”

“So are we. You must pardon me. I am Jacques Renaunt—that is my so good friend Peterson.”

We shook hands. I did not enjoy the experience.

“I have something you might like to see,” said Renaunt in a disarmingly friendly manner. “Perhaps last night you thought us devil-worshippers, to copy from these old books, but this is uncorrect.”

“Incorrect.” Peterson spoke his first word in the conversation. “You mustn’t forget your English.”

“Quite right. Thank you. As I was saying, we are merely amateur archaeologists, but we have discovered, not far from here, some very unique ruins, which, if we are not mistaken, were once used in connection with rites given in this books.”

“These books,” put in Peterson.

“No matter. The point is, we have been perusing—these books to gain further information. We planned to visit these ruins toni—this afternoon. We would be glad for a—companion.” The two exchanged glances.

Did I let my instinctive aversion to these men cause me to refuse their bland offer? No; logic conquered instinct, and I made myself see only a new and fascinating experience in a venture against which my every dormant intuition cried out loud.

“I would be delighted. First let me tell my room-mate . . .”

“Peterson will do that when he gets the car. Hurry, Peterson.”

The stout man scuttled away, while Renaunt let me rather furtively out a side exit. In a surprisingly short time Peterson drove up in the car. Renaunt opened the back door for me and then climbed in beside Peterson. For a few minutes, silence prevailed as the car swept swiftly across the leaf-strewn campus grounds and through the autumn-tinted, rolling Massachusetts hills. Then Renaunt turned and addressed me politely.

“You must pardon me while I converse with Mr. Peterson in my native language. It is tiring for me to constantly formulate my thoughts into the English.”

They immediately began talking in some foreign dialect. Listening idly, I could not trace any Romance language or Greek or even Slavic in what they said; it seemed a kind of guttural Oriental tongue, but as I sat listening to it, mile after mile in that stuffy car, I could take no pleasure in the beauties of the wooded hills, or of the forest-cradled Miskatonic River, now tinted a flaming orange by the rays of the descending sun.

Much further than I had expected we drove. The sun was hidden behind the tall pines of the mountains ahead when we turned from the main road. The eastern sky was dusky behind us as the car jogged along a narrow, rough dirt trail. Several times it branched off again on bypaths leading through quiet forest glades of the greatest sylvan beauty. The trail became barely wide enough to permit passage to the sedan. Few were the farms we passed, and these few were always in a deplorably run-down condition. It was a poor district, ruled by Nature and not Man.

Long after losing sight of the last farmhouse among the thickening trees, Peterson brought the auto to a lurching halt.

“This is as far as we can go by the car,” said Renaunt, opening the door.

Within a few minutes we were plunging through thick undergrowth among the huge boles of an amazing cluster of trees. This, I thought, must be one of the few out-of-the-way virgin forests in the state. Another thought occurred to me and I asked Renaunt, “Why were these ruins not discovered before? They are reasonably near human habitation.”

“The natives around here fear these woods,” answered my guide cryptically, “and few others have occasion to visit them.”

In silence we covered the distance of perhaps a mile. The ground gradually became damp and spongy until it was apparent that we were nearing a swamp.

“The ruins are on a kind of island in the midst of a marshy crescent lake near the Miskatonic,” explained Renaunt in response to my query.

A deep dusk, enhanced by the somber shade of the forest, had now indeed fallen.

“How can we see when we arrive? We have started too late,” I commented.

I received no reply, save the pulsing croak of frogs which now reached us from somewhere ahead in the leafy labyrinth.

Little by little the trees thinned and I saw stretched before me, surrounded by woods like those from which we were emerging, a low, open, marshy spot in the shape of a giant crescent moon. Reeds and rushes grew at the margin, while near the middle the water was clear and deep, albeit rather stagnant. Near the center of the lake rose a small island, almost covered with the sprawling ruin of a strange, irregular grey stone platform surrounded by a crumbling parapet, much in need of repair. Low stone columns rose at intervals from it. The last reflected rays of the setting sun shone behind it, outlining the skeletal remains of a once-great and still imposing structure. I was astounded to find such a complex piece of architecture in apparently unexplored wilds.

“The lake of Y’ha-nthlei,” breathed Peterson, “Iä! Cthulhu!”

“What did you say?” I exclaimed, “I—”

But Renaunt interrupted me with a terse command to Peterson.

“Now is the time!” he snapped. “Concentrate!”—and I felt all suddenly go black around me. My last conscious impression was one of the two grasping my arms to keep from falling as I slipped into the black trough of insensibility.

         

When I awoke, the deepest night had fallen. My first sensation was of lying uncomfortably on a very hard substance; my second was of bewilderment: I could not realize the significance of the bonds around my wrists and ankles. I knew now that I was a prisoner. Then, suddenly, the meaning of my situation came back to me. I remembered the strange trek through the shadowy woods with my queer companions; the marsh lake, the ruins. I remembered too my faint (for such I then deemed it) at the edge of the woods. Then I began to struggle, for, gazing around, I discovered that I was lying on the rough stone flags comprising the floor of the island ruin. My companions must have brought me here, I thought; but why bound?

The extent of Renaunt’s treachery was soon to be made clear to me, however. I heard voices approaching and soon, from behind a pile of crumbling stones, two robed figures appeared. They were Renaunt and Peterson, hooded and encased in black garments. With a shudder of unbelievable terror, I realized that they planned to stage a ceremony, of which I might be a part. That was why I had been enticed on this devilish trip!

Renaunt approached me, more than human wrath and contempt glowing in his eyes.

“Ah, my so curious young friend, you will not let well enough alone, and now see what it has got you!”

“Let me go!” I stormed, with more courage in my voice than in my heart. “What is the meaning of this?”

“It means you shall be a living sacrifice to Those Who Wait!”

“Madman! You plan—to sacrifice me in some idiotic ritual? Are you going to kill me?”

“Our hands will be clean, I assure you—you will leave this island alive.”

“Then you—?”

“But you will never be seen so again!”

“Nonsense!”

“You will see!” he cried in a fit of anger. “We are come from the Supreme One of Irem to open the Gate for the Great Old Ones! The stars are almost right again! Tonight, we will tell Great Cthulhu so He may prepare. Soon shall They do battle with Those of Betelgeuze, and—!—But light the torches, Monog!”

The one I knew as Peterson, with a long flambeau, fired masses of dry wood atop the pillars of the parapet. “You,” said Renaunt, “will be the bait to draw Great Cthulhu here, as is written in the Old Books.”

Peterson, or Monog, had by then completed his task, and he and Renaunt lifted my bound body, tossing me roughly upon a high pile of crumbling stones.

The ceaseless piping of frogs, which all the while had formed a weird background to the words of my captor, now seemed to increase in intensity and to fill the night air. Beneath me, Renaunt and Peterson were stooping to chalk diagrams drawn from papers they held (doubtlessly copies from the Necronomicon and the other books) on the stone flags. Renaunt then began a weird chant, while Peterson cowered beneath an outcropping of stone. What would these lunatics do, I wondered, when they realized that their mad activities brought no result? Then all speculation was swept away and I abandoned my soul to terror!

For something was happening—not only below me but all around; on the lake, on the rampart—as the meaningless mouthing continued. The landscape seemed to change subtly under the pale rays of the dying moon; a blur dimmed the horizon; angles shifted and solid stone swayed formlessly. The waters of the lake were wildly stirring, though there was no wind. From all sides, great waves broke over the low parapet, threatening to douse the frantically flickering fires. A stench as of all the dead and rotting water life of the world nauseated me. A strange wind now stirred, moaning, through the tumbled stones, and above the chorus of frogs, Renaunt’s voice was lifted in a primal incantation:

“Iä! Iä! N’gah-hah! N’yah ahahah! Cthulhu fhtaghn! Phn’glui vulgmm R’lyeh! Ai! N’gaii! Ithaqua vulgmm! N’gaaga—aaa-fhtaghn! Iä! Cthulhu!”

The leaping flames of the great torches now revealed to my horrorstricken eyes a thin, wavering line across the sky. More appeared, traversing the space above my head. A low, thunderous roar competed with the truly cacophonous chant of the frogs and the incantation shouted by Renaunt, while greenish flashes from over the horizon lit the scene fitfully. A great blast of cold air swept over the lake, followed immediately by a foetid warm draft, as with a hideous stench, and an uncouth bubbling sound, a giant shape sprang seemingly from the lake itself and hovered over us without visible means of levitation! Mercifully, I fainted.

When I regained my senses (it must have been but a moment later) the Thing was still there. It is beyond the power of any pen to hint adequately at the aspect of It. An alien, undimensioned entity from beyond the known Universe, It seemed by turns to be a great, green, monstrous tentacled squid; a boiling, changing, flowing mass of protoplasm, constantly altering yet ever the same, having malevolent red eyes opening from every part of its non-terrestrial body, and a swollen, empurpled maw from which issued an idiotic, frantic, bubbling ululation, so low in timbre that it struck one as a physical vibration rather than a true sound.

Great Cthulhu! High Priest of the Old Ones! Carried from His crypt in sunken R’lyeh by Ithaqua the Wind-Walker; summoned by the evil man in whose hands I was prisoner! Great God! I believed; I saw! But I could not die; I could not even faint again. Even now my hand trembles when I think of my hideous captivity as the helpless prey of that hellish daemon!

Below, Renaunt was conversing with It, in the same unholy dialect with which he had summoned It (the same, indeed, in which he had talked with Peterson in the car), mentioning such names as Azathoth, Betelgeuze, R’lyeh, the Hyades, as well as the names of the other weird monsters. As his monologue progressed, Cthulhu became greatly excited, quivering in agitation as His great body overshadowed the entire lake, and later uttering a few ghastly mouthing sounds which thrilled my soul with a new fear when I had thought I had reached the extremity of terror.

Abruptly, the awful communication ended. Renaunt fell on his knees below the Thing and extended his hand toward the pile of debris on which I lay bound. It flowed toward me, extending from Its plastic self a tentacle or trunk which groped downward at me. Directly above me, the savage opening of what It used as a mouth yawned wide, disclosing a hollow body cavity striated with red bands. In another moment I would have known a thing far worse than merciful death; but at that instant, something intervened to save me.

Bill Tracy—what tributes are due his courage!—appeared at the top of the sacrificial mound, approaching from the side opposite that of Renaunt. Sickening horror showed in every line of his face, but he nevertheless sprang to my side and slashed my bonds with a ready knife. As I leapt up, he extended his right hand towards the excrescence of Cthulhu, which had almost reached us. It recoiled, and the massive bulk overhead lumbered away.

“Run!” shouted Tracy. “Swim the lake! Get to the car!”

We were off, racing madly over the shattered flags and plunging into the stagnant lake. Behind us, Renaunt was imploring Cthulhu, and as we swam frantically for shore, we heard him racing in pursuit. He and Peterson dragged a small rowboat to the margin of the lake and pulled after us. Overhead, the great bulk of the monstrous entity Cthulhu flowed along, lashing the affrighted air with thousands of loathsome tentacles. Fortunately, Tracy and I were both good swimmers, and the surprise instituted by Tracy’s daring move gave us a head start.

Upon reaching the shore, we plunged into the pitch-dark forest. The sounds of frantic shouts and the ululant mouthings of Cthulhu (who had evidently joined the chase) goaded us to frenzied exertions.

“We must separate,” gasped Bill. “They know these woods. I’ll go this way, but if I don’t get through, remember: don’t go to the police. It won’t do any good. Go to Professor Sterns.”

Thus saying, he plunged off to the left, attempting to cross a clearing whose edge I was skirting. As he reached its center, Renaunt and Peterson broke from the woods on the opposite side. Behind them, over the tops of the trees, Cthulhu rapidly neared. Renaunt, with amazing speed, sought to grapple with Tracy, but again extending his right arm, on which I saw something gleam, my deliverer caused my former captor to fall. In doing so, he clutched Tracy’s knees. The latter, after a desperate struggle to retain his balance, plunged heavily to the ground. As they rolled free, Renaunt half-rose, extending one arm toward Tracy, the other toward the blasphemous monstrosity hovering overhead. He shrieked a flaming command, and immediately the Thing put forth dozens of squamous tentacles which entangled the struggling body of my rescuer. He was lifted, screaming hideously toward the frothing maw of the monster.

Cold with icy terror, I ran on through the clutching undergrowth of those haunted woods. After what seemed an almost interminable interval, the trees thinned and I emerged on the highway less than a quarter of a mile from the cars. Tracy’s vehicle was parked near Renaunt’s. He had obviously suspiciously trailed us, perhaps becoming lost in the forest, and arriving only in time to save my life at the cost of his own.

With a prayer of thanks, I saw that the keys were still in the ignition. Moments later, I was speeding recklessly over the deserted highways, caring only to get far from that awful spot. Through the blackest hours of the night I was lost, but at dawn I found myself approaching Arkham. What had poor Bill said? “See Professor Sterns.” A short consultation with the telephone directory in a small confectionery told me his address. As I was leaving the store, I shuddered to see blatant headlines on a cheap astrology periodical proclaiming, “Portentous Events in the Stars—Something Unprecedented!”

         

I drove slowly along pleasant, tree-lined residential streets, hazy in the early morning sunlight, and stopped at a decaying mid-Victorian mansion bearing the number I had memorized. And so, shaken in body, mind and spirit, with an indelible memory fomenting in my consciousness and a gnawing fear tormenting me, I lifted the knocker beside the ancient nameplate with the legend, “Professor Arlin Sterns, Ph.D.”

A mellow-faced, white-bearded elderly man opened the door and in response to my agitated query introduced himself as Professor Sterns. Upon learning my name, he grew pale, but civilly invited me in.

“How much do you know,” I began hurriedly, “of Bill Tracy and me and what goes on in that—”

“I know,” he said laboredly, “that a young man came to me this morning and told me of two college students he believed to be engaged in very nasty business. He expressed fear that you, his friend, might be drawn into it. I advised him to keep a watch on you, and I gave him a certain bracelet which I felt would give him protection. What has happened?”

I thereupon told him my full story, ending on an almost hysterical note as I recounted my mad flight through the forest and the endless race along tree-lined highways. As I spoke, the savant stroked his stubby goatee, but when I told of Bill Tracy’s gruesome fate, he stopped abruptly and muttered, “I told him the grey stone from Mnar wouldn’t stop the Old Ones Themselves.”

“Do you believe what I say?” I asked. “I can hardly believe it myself!”

“Unfortunately, yes,” replied Professor Sterns. “Before my retirement as Professor of Anthropology at Miskatonic, I had occasion to be convinced in a most horrible manner. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is,”—his face showed worried lines—“the world, the whole universe as we know it, is in danger of being obliterated in a terrible way in a coming battle between extra-dimensional entities whose nature we cannot even begin to grasp. That is the purpose and purport, veiled, garbled and cloaked in mysticism, of all religions and cults, and, more directly, of the evil books now found in only a few scattered libraries and manuscript fragments in private possession.” He turned. “But I must not keep you waiting out here. Please come into my study.”

He led the way through a dark, narrow hall into a large room, lined with bookcases and strewn with the odds and ends of a long and varied career. With a serious demeanor he unlocked one of the lower drawers of his desk, and drew forth a folio of manuscript. After bidding me seat myself on a chair near the desk, he addressed me in this fashion:

“These are the extracts I copied from the Necronomicon and other books while I was at Miskatonic. Allow me to point out to you some pertinent passages.” He passed over to me one of the sheets. I took it and read,

Nor is it to be thought that Man is either the oldest or last of the Masters of Earth; nay, nor that the greater part of Life and Substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces known to us, but between them, They walk calm and primal, of no dimensions, and to us unseen . . . They walk foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons . . . The winds gibber with Their voices; the Earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest. They raise up the wave; They crush the city—yet not forest nor ocean nor city beholds the hand that smites. They ruled; soon shall They rule again where man rules now. After Summer is Winter and after Winter is Summer. They wait patient and potent for here shall They reign again, and at Their coming again, none shall dispute them. Those who know of the Gates shall be impelled to open the way for Them and shall serve Them as They desire, but those who open the way unwitting shall know but a brief while thereafter.

“Now this,” said the professor, handing me another sheet.

I read,

Then shall They return and on this great returning shall Great Cthulhu [—I shuddered at the name—] be freed from R’lyeh beneath the sea, and Him Who Is Not To Be Named shall come from His City, which Carcosa near the Lake of Hali, and Shub-Niggurath shall come forth and multiply in His hideousness, and Nyarlathotep shall carry the word to all the Great Old Ones and Their minions, and Cthugha shall lay his hand on all that oppose Him and Destroy, and the blind Idiot, the noxious Azathoth, shall rise from the Middle of the World where all is Chaos and destruction, where he hath bubbled and blasphemed at the Centre which is of All Things, which is to say, Infinity, and Yog-Sothoth who is the All-in-One and the One-in-All shall bring His globes and Ithaqua shall walk again, and from the black-litten caverns within the Earth shall come Tsathoggua and together shall take possession of Earth and all things that live upon it and shall prepare to do battle with the Elder Gods. When the Lord of the Great Abyss is apprised of Their returning, He shall come forth with His Brothers to disperse the Evil.

“You mean,” I exclaimed, “that this book—written a thousand years ago—actually foretells what is happening now?”

“I’m sure of it!” said the professor forcefully. “Look: astrologers proclaim that something unprecedented is in the stars. The writer of this mythology claims that ‘when the stars are right’ those who know ‘shall be impelled to open the Gates.’ These men come, frantically study the books, and conjure up a monster beyond the wildest dreams of a hashish-eater. They admit their purposes. What could be plainer?”

I was convinced for once and all of the absolute veracity of the Arab necromancer.

“But,” I inquired, “Renaunt mentioned something about being sent ‘by the Supreme One of Irem.’ What does that mean?”

“Let me read you what Alhazred says; here—

But the first Gate was that which I caused to be opened, namely, in Irem, the city of pillars, the city under the desert.

“Irem is the headquarters of this hellish thing. There, the entire purpose of the Old Ones is known, or at least as much as Man can know of it, and there are some things in Irem that are not even human, unless I miss my guess. Renaunt and Peterson, or whatever their names are in Irem, must be high up, if they were sent on this crowning mission. The island must be a vital spot if it was chosen for Cthulhu’s awakening. We must prevent this, my boy! It is bound to come some day, but if we can stop them now, it will be thousands of years before the stars are right again!”

“But how?” I gasped. “Aren’t the Old Ones already loosed? How about last night?”

“That was just a warning to Great Cthulhu,” said Professor Sterns. “The real awakening can only be scheduled for All-Hallows’ Eve; a month yet.”

“How can you know?”

“There are certain times when these ceremonies grow more potent; stronger; intenser. The times are May Eve, Walpurgis night; Candlemas; Roodmass; and All-Hallow’s Eve. The opening of the Gate will be a difficult thing. It will shake the Earth, and its consequences will destroy mankind. It is infinitely important to—Them.”

“How can we hope to stop these invincible monstrosities?”

“It will be hard; hard! But Their weak points are Their minions. They must be there to perform the ceremonies. And though all the powers of Irem and the Old Ones Themselves protect them, they’re only human. Not much more than human, anyway—I hope.”

         

During the following month, both Professor Sterns and myself were feverishly busy. I was able to continue my classes at the university, but every day after their termination I hurried to the ancient savant’s crumbling brownstone house, which I had come to look upon as not only a second home, but as a sort of mecca for all the world’s hopes. It was fantastic: a world of beings living in complete ignorance of a ghastly and unspeakable fate which was inexorably approaching and threatening their very souls, while two men struggled to avert the catastrophe with all the knowledge and skill, human and inhuman, in their possession.

Or, rather, not just two, for I found that there was a considerable band of learned men, all over the world, united in a common knowledge of and belief in the nightmare myth, and a desire to thwart the Great Old Ones and Their minions. There was a steady stream of strange visitors to the weathered old house on Harper Street, and an equally strange flow of outlandish letters and parcels. Professor Sterns’ large desk in the library became heaped with neat folios of papers and small packages. What were they? All manner of charms, spells and diagrams helpful against the malignant monsters and Their worshippers. Professor Sterns was particularly excited over the arrival of a large crate from a Buddhist priest in Tibet. This, the professor informed me, contained the Elder Gods’ benign sign, carved by Their Very Selves on a stone brought from another world and spirited away from the ancient and accursed Plateau of Leng expressly to aid us in our mission.

Weeks went by; Bill Tracy, whose disappearance had caused a wide stir, was not found, alive or dead. The beings known to us as Renaunt and Peterson had also vanished.

On a pale, sombre October evening late in the month, Professor Sterns telephoned me and asked me to visit him for final instructions. I left for his house, feeling acutely the nervous apprehension under which I had so long labored.

         

A near-full moon, rising above the trees surrounding Professor Sterns’ house shot feeble rays glinting along the ridgepole of the roof, along the old tin spouting, along the banisters of the wide front porch. A queer chill gripped me as I approached along the gravel walk; the house was lightless. Half formed fears stirred uneasily in my mind as I plied the knocker, but after a short, suspenseful interval I recognized the slow tread of my aged friend approaching the panel from within. It opened slowly and I discerned the kindly, bearded face peering narrowly through the gloom. Almost instantly a look of relief and welcome swept over it.

“Ah! You!” muttered the professor. “I am glad to see you. You came sooner than I had anticipated. Step into the hall.”

Inside, he spoke quietly but rapidly.

“There has been a change in plans. I—we have a guest. He is to help us. He’s—strange. Doesn’t speak English, but he’s on our side. Do you remember how you lost consciousness at the edge of the lake after Renaunt told Peterson to concentrate? That was instantaneous hypnotism, showing a great development of mind-power. Well, our guest has just such mind-power, and more. He will be an immeasurable aid to us.”

Professor Sterns led the way into the study, switched on the light, and there, standing by the desk, was the Guest. Little could be seen of him, for he wore a long, tightly-buttoned overcoat which dragged on the floor. It had been thrown over his shoulders, so that the arms dangled uselessly at his sides. On his head he wore a large hat pulled far down, and (strange to tell!), over his face he wore a grey scarf, knotted firmly at the back of his head. Thus not an inch of his person was visible. Only once did I see him without all this paraphernalia intact.

“This is the young man I was telling you about,” the professor was saying. He seemed highly respectful, almost reverential, toward the muffled figure. But what was it he had said?—“He doesn’t speak English!” He must understand it, though, I thought.

The figure made a movement which might be construed as a bow, and I murmured conventional words of greeting to it. I noticed that the top of the desk had been cleared, and that three suitcases lay in the shadows. I flashed a questioning look to Professor Sterns.

“We are leaving,” the savant spoke nervously. “I have discovered where the Great Awakening is to take place. The information is hidden by a clever code in the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, but I haven’t deciphered it. In fact, we are leaving immediately. You won’t need to pack anything. It will all be over—one way or the other—soon. You see, tomorrow night is All-Hallows’ Eve!”

         

The street was dark, the walk was long, the suitcases heavy. I carried two; Professor Sterns carried the remaining one. Our Guest followed us in a peculiar quiet and gliding manner, unburdened. He seemed shorter than when I had first seen him, but I put this down to a trick of light and shadow.

It may have been half an hour later when we arrived at the field. Under the rays of the moon, dry stubble took on a beautiful yellow sheen, and the airplane shone with a pale silver glow. For there was an airplane on the field, and in it the professor placed his suitcase, instructing me to do the same with mine.

“But,” I stammered, “where are we going? Who is taking us?!”

“We are going,” replied the aged man grimly, “to the north woods of Maine; to a place which I will not name and for a purpose you know too well. Get in, my boy.”

Inside the tiny cabin Professor Sterns settled himself at the controls, with me beside him, while the Guest sat on the suitcases behind.

“I learned to fly,” explained the professor, “from Professor Peaslee, the man whose father had such a dreadful experience when those singularly ancient ruins were discovered in Australia that he committed suicide.”

With a whine and a growl that deepened to a roar, the motor awoke and in a few moments we were bouncing swiftly down the field. At its extreme end our pilot lifted the plane’s nose and we were airborne, climbing sharply to gain altitude and leveling off to streak swiftly northward.

Looking down, I could see the thin line of light that was the Miskatonic River fade into the distance. Silence and darkness (save for the monotone of the motor and the illuminating instruments) closed in on us, wrapping us in a pall of almost sentient gloom as we sped on for hours over northern Massachusetts and the southeastern corner of New Hampshire.

Midnight found us over Maine. Professor Sterns was explaining to me more in detail about both our mission and our adversaries. Some of what he said I cannot bring myself to repeat, for the world is better off without it, but other parts of his information were vital and pertinent.

“As you know, the Great Old Ones are elementals; that is, each is identified with and has dominion over one of the ancient so-called elements. Cthulhu is the deity of water, Cthugha of fire, while Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath seem associated with Earth. The air-beings are Hastur, Zhar, Ithaqua, and Lloigor. Yog-Sothoth, who is spoken of as the ‘All-in-One and the One-in-All,’ seems not to be associated with an element.

“From hints in the Necronomicon, I can guess at some of the things that will happen at the Great Awakening. First of all, there will be the celebration of rites for days in advance. Of their nature, there is no need to speak. Then, on All-Hallows’ Eve (tomorrow night) there will be a long ritual beginning at sunset. Then, at midnight, the book says,

. . . shall the sky be torn away and from Their dimensions on Outside shall the Old Ones be seen upon the Earth. And the Earth shall tremble at Their aspect, and the Old Ones shall descend and inhabit and ravage.

“What we must do is to stop that ritual, to which there are two parts. The first ‘Opens the Gate’ and the second frees the Old Ones to move. If we can stop it before the end, then the fleeting moment in which the stars are in the right position for it to take effect will pass, and Earth will be saved.”

“How can we stop the ritual?” I asked. “Murder?”

“That is neither necessary nor would it be effective. There will be far too many there. Renaunt and Peterson may or may not be there. What we must do is to counteract their spells and charms with our own, and, finally, destroy their lair of cosmic evil by sealing it with the Elder Sign on that stone block from Tibet. But there are many risks. We may be apprehended before we can do any of those things. For that reason, I have wrist-bands for us to wear. None of the minions of the Old Ones can bear to touch these stones with the Elder sign on them, but only on the Tibetan enchanted stone is it potent enough to stop all evil. Remember, Bill Tracy found the weakness of the bracelets his undoing.”

For hours we droned on over northern Maine. The hands of the clock on the instrument panel pointed to 4 a.m. when suddenly I noticed something.

“Look!” I murmured to the professor, “There ahead!”

Shifting his gaze slightly, he too saw what had attracted my attention. Miles ahead of us, a titanic shadow had blotted out the stars, a shadow whose blurred outlines seemed a hideous caricature of the human form, and from the space where the head appeared to be, there shimmered with an unholy light what seemed to be two great green stars!

And the Thing was moving, rushing to meet us; a giant shape, miles high, whose colossal bulk filled the horizon and stretched to the zenith! Simultaneously, a howling wind sprang up, bearing on its wings the sound of shrill, terrible music, as of great flutes or reed pipes being played all around us in the air.

“One of the Old Ones sent to destroy us!” shouted Professor Sterns. “An air-elemental. It is Ithaqua the Wind-Walker!” Black terror gripped me. . . .

The shadow-like Being neared rapidly, yet our pilot held his course, flying straight at the mound-like, neckless head and the star-eyes.

“We must flee!” I exclaimed.

“No use,” said the professor, “this is the only way.”

Louder sounded the demoniac music, nearer rushed the monster. For a moment Its flaming eyes shone directly before us, and then I closed my own. When I opened them, the sky ahead was clear.

“We have cut across another dimension and passed directly through His body,” breathed the professor. “He cannot touch us because of the grey stone. We are safe!” But just then a tremendous gust of wind threw the plane into a dangerous spin. “He is sending His winds to wreck us!”

Through the black night tore howling, whistling blasts of air, throwing us off our course despite everything the professor could do. For minutes he fought valiantly with the controls, but at last a seething vortex of cyclonic strength seized the machine like a huge black fist and seemed about to hurl it to destruction on the earth below. But at the last moment, the winds subsided and the plane righted itself.

“What . . . ?” I began, when Professor Sterns interrupted me with a whispered, “Look!”

On the horizon a pale, opalescent glow broadened imperceptibly, reflecting thin rays upon the mists above.

“Dawn!” The first night of terror had passed safely, but the Great Adventure was just beginning.

         

Less than half an hour later, our plane landed near the village of Chesuncook. There, the professor loaded our luggage into a car which was somehow waiting for us, and, with the Guest in the back seat, we embarked on a trip very similar (and yet how different from) one I had taken a month before.

The day was damp, foggy and uncomfortable. The pine forests on either side of the road stood dark and expectant, unwarmed by the cloud-obscured sun. About noon, the professor extracted a box lunch from one of the suitcases, but the Guest did not partake, nor did the professor offer him any of the food.

It was long past noon when the car stopped. The grey clouds in the sky were still unrelieved, save for a dull glow between zenith and horizon which was all that was visible of the sun.

Professor Sterns then opened another suitcase and extracted a queer apparatus consisting of a square board with a circular hole in the center. In the hole was fastened a shallow metal tray of the same shape, with a curved glass over it which prevented the spilling of the liquid in the tray. In this clear fluid floated an oblong piece of dark wood several inches long, whittled to a point at one end. On the outside board, queer designs were carven.

Holding this odd contraption level, the professor gazed intently at the wooden pointer. It seemed to turn slowly counter-clockwise, but suddenly it reversed its direction and jerked quickly three-quarters of the way around, there remaining immovable.

“This is our guide,” remarked the professor. “It’s a kind of compass, but it doesn’t point north!”

We set off into the woods, following the direction set by this compass that was not a compass. I took the two remaining suitcases (one was very heavy), and the aged savant went ahead with the direction-finder. The Guest moved unobtrusively along in the rear.

The undergrowth was very thick, and the pines seemed to grow abnormally close together, so our progress was slow and none too steady. I called frequent halts for rest when I noticed that the professor was staggering from fatigue.

Imperceptibly, the shades of the forest deepened and it was night. I began to feel an indefinable aura of evil surrounding these black woods; a sense of cosmic dread and alien purpose, so that I did not like to let my mind dwell on our mission.

Quite abruptly, we came to the clearing. It was about a quarter of a mile across, and in the center was a stone structure resembling a well, bathed in rays of a ghostly full moon which shone from a rift between two clouds. This, the professor informed me, was the only entrance to the most unholy and accursed temple on earth; a place where dark things dwelt with degenerate men, and the site of the All-Hallows’ Great Awakening.

A flickering light as of torches came from the mouth of the open cylinder-shaft, and a faint murmur also reached us from it.

The following events which occurred on that hellish night I must be very careful in describing.

We scuttled across the clearing and crouched by the lip of the round shaft, which rose perhaps a yard from the ground.

“The ceremony has started,” whispered Professor Sterns. “Watch the sky and do what I say.” He unlocked both suitcases, took from one a folio of papers from amongst many more, and from the other eased the great grey Tibetan stone, with its queer carving, laying it between himself and the Guest.

For a long time, the only thing audible from below was the murmur of chanting men’s voices, occasionally broken by a strange, deep, ecstatic moan. Then, syllables in English floated up to us.

“Oh, Raythore, the time has come. Begin, thou!”

I started wildly as another voice began in chant-like speech. For the second voice was that of Jacques Renaunt!

“Death-Walker! God of the Winds! Thou Who walkest on the Winds—adoramus te!”

The sky slowly faded to a dark grayish-green, and the wind stirred.

“Oh, Thou Who pass above the Earth; Thou Who hast vanquished the sky—adoramus te!”

The wind grew in a few seconds to a cyclonic pitch, and high in the sky the clouds rushed back with breath-taking speed, as if its force up there were thousands of times greater than we felt below.

“Ithaqua! Thou Who hast vanquished the sky—-vanquish it yet again that the Supreme Purpose may be fulfilled. Iä! Iä! Ithaqua! Ai! Ai! Ithaqua cf’ayak vulgtmm vugtlagln vulgtmm. Ithaqua fhtaghn! Ugh! Iä! Iä! Iä!!

Thunder rumbled and crashed around us, adding yet another voice to the insane canticle of chant and wind. The chorus of men’s voices welled up deep and strong as a climax approached in the indescribable chaos of the elements.

“Iä! Azathoth! Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! Cthulhu! Iä! Cthugha!”

Flashes of light showed the straining sky flecked with lines of glowing green.

“Iä! Hastur! Iä! Ithaqua! Iä! Zhar! Iä! Lloigor!”

A loud buzzing sound seemed borne on the shrieking blasts of wind.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Tsathoggua! Iä! Nyarlathotep! Ai!”

On the last word, a fiendish shout of expectancy echoed up from below. Why didn’t the professor do something? I wondered shudderingly. Glancing at him, I saw him worriedly watching the passive Guest. But all thought was extinguished as, with a noise unequalled since the birth of the world, the sky cracked!

There is no other way to express it. The darkness split, shrivelled and rolled up, and, from Outside, a hideous and unknown light bathed the Universe, as the Great Old Ones once more looked upon Earth.

Of what I saw beyond the ragged shreds of the borders of our Space-Time continuum as new, final chants rose from the temple below, I can only begin to hint. I had the simultaneous impression of stupendous, amorphous entities; of fluid hyper-intelligences of dominating universal Evil; of an undimensioned chaos of impossible angular curves and curved angles; of a boiling, changing cauldron of moving, massing monstrosities approaching; then, being a mere human being, I fell backward to the ground and turned my face away. What I saw on the ground was almost as stupefying as the sky’s ghastly change.

For there in the dirt was an overcoat, a hat, and a gray scarf, lying in crumpled disarray, while in the shadows of the wood a black form was disappearing!

Seconds later, a titanic column of flame exploded from the forest and shot upward, sending showers of sparks flying everywhere. Its base left the Earth and it expanded swiftly, while moving upward at a rate inconceivable. Simultaneously, from the four points of the compass, four similar pillars of fire were propelled to the zenith, where they were superimposed on one another in the form of a colossal pentagram, or five-pointed star, silhouetted against the torn sky and the amorphous shapes streaming across it. I cowered in abject terror!

“Come!” whispered Professor Sterns. “We have work to do!” He began copying strange designs, from the papers he held, onto the ancient stones of the shaft with a queer paste-like substance from a metal tube.

“Now!” he exclaimed, throwing the implement aside, “help me with this stone!”

We lifted the heavy Tibetan mystical stone, which had begun to glow with a curious russet light, to the lip of the shaft and cast it over. It fell inside with a crash, and immediately the shaft caved in amid cries of agony from below, which superseded the former chanting. The professor murmured a few indistinguishable words and made a curious sign with his right hand.

“Our job is finished,” he said in a trembling voice. “We must escape the forest-fire.” For the woods from whence the Flame-Being had risen were indeed burning fiercely.

We fled swiftly the way we had come, but not too swiftly for me to glance back and catch a glimpse of the fiery star vanquishing the beings from Outside, the hellish vision fading away, and the heavens returning to normal.

But the rest of that flight through the fear-haunted forest is to me even more nightmarish than what had preceded it, and I shall never again know peace of mind, even though the newspapers babble reassuringly about a volcanic disturbance in Maine and its strange effect on the skies. For the answer which Professor Arlin Sterns gave in a shuddering whisper to my question about the identity of our mysterious Guest is forever burned into my brain. As we plunged through the nighted woods, he gasped to me,

“It came to my door one night . . . It was black and as plastic as jelly . . . It sent a message into my mind telling me what I had to do tonight . . . telling me It would go with me . . . I got it to form into a piece about the shape of a man, and put those clothes on It to disguise It . . . It told me in my mind that It had come from the star Betelgeuze, 200 light years away with Its Brothers to combat the Great Old Ones!”

And as we ran toward the car and the safety of civilization, there came back to me half-forgotten passages from the abhorred Necronomicon which caused me to tremble in a new ecstasy of fear and agony of remembrance, even though the Earth had been saved for a time. . . .

Ubbo-Sathla is that unforgotten source whence came the Great Old Ones Who dare oppose the Elder Gods being the Ones Who are of a black fluid shape. And Those Ones who came in the shape of Towers of Fire hurled the Old Ones into banishment . . . but they shall return; Those Who Wait shall be satisfied . . . And together shall take possession of Earth and all things that lived upon it and shall prepare to do battle with the Elder Gods . . .

WHEN THE LORD OF THE GREAT ABYSS IS APPRIS’D OF THEIR RETURNING, HE SHALL COME WITH HIS BROTHERS AS TOWERS OF FIRE AND DISPERSE THE EVIL!

The Keeper of Dark Point

John Glasby

The strange disappearance of Stephen Delmore Ashton during the summer of 1936 evoked little interest either in the local or national press. Almost certainly this was due to his earlier unannounced, and often unexpected, trips to various parts of the world. Indeed, it may truthfully be said that since the age of eighteen he had resided at the ancestral home, Trewallen Manor, for less than a total of three years.

On this occasion, however, there was a solitary witness to the bizarre events which led up to his disappearance; one able to testify that Stephen Ashton will never be seen on Earth again.

While it is against my better judgment to make these facts widely known, and knowing there is little chance of such wildly monstrous and controversial evidence being accepted except by those few, like Ashton and myself, who understand something of the true nature of mankind’s existence in the universe, it is vital that some warning should be given of that which lies just beyond the rim of our present knowledge.

Those in authority will doubtless maintain that while it is an undisputed fact that Ashton’s family, on his maternal side, can trace their lineage back almost two thousand years in an unbroken line, the grotesque myths and legends surrounding them are nothing more than idle gossip and hearsay. The incredibly ancient book we found will be dismissed as a comparatively modern fake and the note inserted between the pages nothing more than the ramblings of an unsound mind.

Even the utter destruction of Dark Point Light, standing on its rocky promontory off the Cornish coast will be put down to the violence of that unprecedented storm shattering an already decaying structure which had lain untenanted and unmaintained for more than fifty years.

In the end I must rely upon those who can correlate the facts as I relate them and see that they point in a different, and far more terrible, direction from the more commonplace and rational theories.

When I first met Ashton, during my years at university, his passion for obscure folklore had immediately drawn me to him. His intense fascination with strange myth-cycles which pointed to some underlying race memory of a far-distant past parallelled my own. We would spend hours discussing the possibility of remote, pre-human civilizations stretching back to the very youth of this planet; of strange, alien ruins buried in remote places, built by unhuman hands long before the coming of mankind. Even after gaining our degrees and going our separate ways, we kept up a close correspondence. Whereas I remained in England earning my living as a writer of books on ancient and medieval history, he took himself off on numerous trips to weird and exotic places, searching at first-hand for the origin of these myths.

On no occasion did he announce the date of his return, and his unexpected appearance on my doorsteps that summer evening came as no little surprise. I had recently taken a small cottage on the outskirts of Riveton, a picturesque little village near the Yorkshire moors, requiring the peace and solitude to complete my volume on medieval witchcraft. Nevertheless, his arrival was welcome since it provided me with an excuse to cease my literary labours for a while.

I must admit, however, that his general appearance and demeanour shocked me more than a little. He had always been an inordinately tall individual, thin almost to the point of gauntness. But now he seemed thinner than I remembered him and the only part of his features which appeared really alive were his eyes, black and oddly piercing.

After letting him in, I showed him into the front parlour where he deliberately seated himself near the window where he could see clearly along the lane running through the village. Offering him a drink, I sat down at the table and waited for him to explain his visit, wondering how he had managed to find me since my last letter had been written from London.

Apologizing for his unheralded arrival, he continued, “I’ve come to ask a favour of you, Martin.” He gestured towards the typewriter and papers on the table. “I can see you’re in the middle of another of your books and you probably have a deadline to meet, but I need your help desperately.”

“Go on,” I said.

“There’s a certain book I must find and once I lay my hands on it, I’ll need your help in deciphering it.”

“You seem quite certain you’ll find it,” I remarked. Knowing his predilection for visiting strange and distant places, I inwardly hoped he did not intend to drag me on some journey halfway across the world.

He did not reply for a few moments, staring down at his drink, and I noticed that his hands were trembling visibly. Watching him closely, I could scarcely believe this was the same person I had known at university. Then, he had always been so sure of himself, brimming with self-confidence. I also took note of the furtive way he kept glancing out of the window as if expecting to see someone—or something—lurking outside.

Finally, he fixed his piercing gaze on me and when he spoke there was a curious intensity in his voice which made me shiver.

“If it still exists, I know exactly where to find it. Unfortunately, these ancient writings are of such a nature I daren’t show them to anyone else. Not only for fear of being ridiculed but because I believe the knowledge this book contains could be highly dangerous in the wrong hands.”

“I see. But why come to me?”

“Because I understand you can read archaic English and I know you don’t dismiss the old myths and legends out of hand like so many so-called scientists who’re only prepared to believe what they can see and measure with their instruments. I need someone like yourself who isn’t afraid to delve into such things.”

“And where is this book supposed to be?” I asked, speaking a little more sharply than I had intended.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at the moment, except that it’s in Cornwall.”

Seeing my hesitation, he immediately launched into a rambling monologue of what had happened to him since our university days and it soon became abundantly clear his researches had taken a far different path from mine in his search for the truth behind the age-old stories that dated from the pre-dawn of mankind. His vague circumlocution touched upon highly controversial things of which I had no previous knowledge.

In low, hushed tones he spoke of certain ancient tomes which were reputed to have been in his family’s possession for centuries, volumes which were kept securely hidden from the outside world. If such books ever existed and had come to the notice of the authorities centuries ago, there seemed little doubt his ancestors would have been burned at the stake as witches and warlocks.

It was evident he was in a highly emotional state and yet there was a note of utter sincerity in his manner which intrigued me to the point where I finally, albeit reluctantly, agreed to accompany him to Cornwall, offering to put him up for the night so that we might travel down early the next day.

During the long train journey, I learned more of Ashton’s family history. Now that I was an accomplice in his investigations, he was more open and forthright although most of what he told me was fantastic in the extreme. It was only on his mother’s side of the family, the Trewallens, that there were these vague hints of horror, spoken of in weird tales going back almost two thousand years. How he had succeeded in tracing his lineage back so far in time, he didn’t divulge, yet it seemed strange that such a long record could exist unbroken. That his investigations had been extremely thorough, I could not doubt. His recent visit to America, he said, he had undertaken with the express purpose of seeking out old records concerning a branch of the family which had emigrated to New England in the seventeenth century where there were certain references to the witchcraft trials held in Old Salem and other towns along the eastern seaboard.

This, however, proved to be only a small, divergent stream of the main family line. The Trewallens had, in the main, settled in Cornwall in the face of the advancing Roman armies where they had remained until the deaths of his parents a few years previously.

I listened to this account with a growing sense of apprehension and disbelief for there was something in his words which filled me with a nameless foreboding so that, at times, I doubted his sanity. What strange and terrible events had shaped the destiny of his maternal forebears I could only guess at for it was clear that the hints he gave concealed something more sinister and frightening. I must admit there were moments during our journey when I wished I hadn’t submitted to his urgent entreaties and had remained in the sane vales of Yorkshire.

It was still light when we arrived in Penzance where we found Ashton’s car still parked outside the railway station where he had left it the previous day. The sun had set almost half an hour earlier but it was still sufficiently light for me to make out details of the surrounding countryside as we drove along narrow, twisting roads beside the rugged coast. After leaving the town I had expected the general aspect of the country to be similar to that of my more northern county. Yet, scanning the low, humped hills and wild moorland on the one side and the sheer drop of the cliffs on the other, I sensed a subtle difference.

Taken individually, the moorland, hills and ocean seemed normal enough. Yet it was the way in which the three combined in the fading colors of the sunset which disturbed me in some odd way. There seemed to be a curious disharmony about the amalgamation which grated on my nerves. The hills on the skyline crowded too closely together as if striving to conceal dark secrets from some far-distant past.

From what he had told me earlier, I had expected Ashton to live in some large, isolated manor, well away from any other human habitation. But just as it was growing dark, we drove through a small, picturesque village where he stopped the car outside a two-storey house at the end of a narrow lane leading off the main road. As I took my case from the back seat and followed my host along the garden path, I noticed that his furtive manner was now even more pronounced. In particular, his gaze kept flicking towards some point on the horizon which clearly evoked some queer restlessness in him. I was on the point of mentioning it but forbore to do so, some instinct warning me that this might affect him further. That he was afraid of something out there in the deepening twilight was obvious. Yet I could see nothing out of the ordinary to account for his odd behaviour.

Unlocking the door, he ushered me inside, closing the door quickly behind him and turning the key in the lock. Switching on the light in the front room, he motioned me to a chair and while he busied himself lighting a fire in the wide, stone hearth, I surveyed the room, noticing in particular the long bookshelf along one wall. Most of the titles I could make out were clearly related to Ashton’s interests as a historian and antiquarian. Indeed, many of them reposed on my own shelves. But there were others which were either completely unknown to me or of whose existence I had heard only vague and frightening rumours.

Once the fire was going to his satisfaction, Ashton seated himself in the chair opposite me, his features peculiarly flushed but whether from the heat of the fire or from some inner excitement, it was impossible to tell.

“I see you’re admiring my collection,” he said. “Believe me, it’s taken years and a lot of travelling and searching to acquire some of those volumes.”

I got up and perused the books more closely, aware all the time of his intense gaze on my back, watching my every move. Here and there, I came across volumes which, if they were originals, were incredibly rare and ancient. Many were written in faded Latin or Greek, others in Arabic, on yellowed parchment so brittle I was afraid to turn the pages for fear they might disintegrate into dust beneath my fingers. Yet, oddly, I could find none written in archaic English.

When I pointed this out to my companion, he gave a quick, jerky nod. “As I said, the book in question isn’t here.”

“Then where is it?” I asked, returning to my chair.

Ashton made an odd motion with his left hand, then pointed towards the window. “It’s out there, hidden where no one else can find it. Tomorrow, I’ll take you there.”

For a moment, sitting there, I experienced a sharp surge of anger. Clearly, he desperately needed my help but although he had told me much on the train, I had the feeling he was hiding far more and once again, I was beginning to regret I had acquiesced to his request to accompany him.

As he rose to his feet, I said abruptly, “Perhaps you’d better explain yourself, Stephen. So far, I’ve heard little more than odd rumours concerning your family history. None of which appear to have any bearing on the reason you asked me to come here. Indeed, much of what you’ve told me makes very little sense.”

“Please don’t misunderstand or misjudge me, Martin.” The expression on his gaunt features was one I couldn’t analyze. Fear, perhaps, or some strange inner excitement. He leaned forward, fingers gripping the back of his chair tightly. “I can assure you that my hesitation in acquainting you with all the facts is simply that there is so much to explain and I find it extremely difficult to put these matters into words which even you might understand.”

With a sudden abruptness, he changed the subject. “We’re both hungry. I’ll prepare something to eat and then we can talk.”

Refusing my offer of help, he busied himself in the kitchen and we ate our meal in a strained silence. Inwardly, I felt concerned about his mental condition and more than a little disturbed by the fact that no one knew I was in this house, hundreds of miles from Yorkshire.

Not until the table had been cleared did my host continue with his explanations. He still appeared tense and nervous but evidently he had regained some of his composure and had himself under tight control as he seated himself in front of the blazing fire.

“Much of what I’m going to tell you may seem like the ravings of a madman but I must assure you that everything is true. The spectral tales concerning my maternal ancestors are a matter of record although initially I put them down to exaggeration and the writings of superstitious men down the ages. Now, however, I’m quite certain they are nothing more or less than the literal truth.”

“I’m quite prepared to accept that such records were made, especially during the Middle Ages,” I told him. “And that those who wrote them believed them to be true. But it seems to me you’re talking about something more than mere superstition.”

“I am.” He leaned forward, a vibrant intensity in his voice. He waved a hand towards the bookshelf. “I’ve gone far beyond these comparatively recent writings, back for more centuries and millennia than you can possibly imagine. We talk glibly of the first great civilizations of Egypt and Sumer as if there was nothing before them. Good God, Martin, this planet has been capable of sustaining intelligent life a thousand times longer than the period between now and the First Dynasty of Egypt. Mankind isn’t the first race to have inhabited the Earth—we’re simply the latest in a long line!”

“There’s no proof of that whatsoever,” I told him firmly.

“I believe there is. That’s what I want to tell you so that you, too, can understand all I’ve discovered.”

I listened to him for the next hour, immersed in a growing sense of disbelief. Yet in spite of my natural skepticism, and doubt as to his sanity, there was an odd conviction in his tone which held me entranced.

Much of his discourse was curiously disjointed and interspersed by long periods of contemplative silence as if he was unsure how to put his beliefs into words. At times, he seemed mortally afraid, while at others his mood was one of elated anticipation, like a man on the verge of some tremendous discovery.

Most of his narrative concerned periods of time so incredibly remote that my mind had difficulty in accepting them fully. He spoke in low, measured tones of ages before mankind’s existence, of races which had populated the Earth long before the first Ice Age that had covered much of the northern hemisphere; of other beings which came to Earth from outer gulfs of space, leaving behind few tangible records of their presence.

There were, he averred solemnly, certain stone fragments which bore symbols having no counterpart among any languages now known, indecipherable remnants of aeon-old writings whose existence was known only to a few. Gradually, during the course of his seemingly irrational outpourings, he brought in the Trewallen family and its part in such cosmic matters. Throughout the ages, he maintained, certain sects, scattered around the world, continued the worship of the Old Gods, claiming these beings never died but lived on in unbroken slumber in out-of-the-way places until the time was right for them to rise again, sweeping away the newer gods that had replaced them with the emergence of mankind.

Almost whispering now, as if afraid of being overheard, Ashton spoke of how the Trewallen family had been the custodians of secret, arcane knowledge from pre-Celtic times. Shuddering visibly, he told of how they had been persecuted by the Druids in those far-off days, for even these people who carried out human sacrifices and the most hideous rites amid circles of standing stones older than memory had revolted against the secret ceremonies enacted in the name of gods more ancient and fearful than their own.

That these rites had continued, virtually to the present day, seemed clear from the hints which Ashton dropped. There had always been animosity against his family from the local populace and this had culminated, ten years earlier, in a shrieking mob from the village, roused by a small number of hot-headed individuals, advancing on the manor one November night and putting the ancient building to the torch. Both of his parents, together with three servants, had perished in the holocaust.

Throughout this extraordinary tale, my feeling grew that over the years Ashton had become obsessed with this monstrous superstition and that his mind was in grave danger of becoming unhinged. Certainly from what I had heard he seemed scarcely capable of rational thought. Something of my feelings must have shown in my face for he stopped abruptly and forced himself to sit back more calmly in his chair before continuing in a marked change of tone. “I’m afraid all of this must strike you as the ravings of a lunatic, Martin. And you must be wondering what I’ve brought you into. All I ask is that you bear with me until tomorrow. Then, I’m sure, you’ll have all the proof you need that I’m as sane as you are.”

After that he said no more on the subject for by now the hour had grown late and we were both tired by the long journey. Inwardly, I was glad when he showed me to my room and had retired to his own. Some instinct prompted me to lock my door before going across to the window, taking off my jacket and placing it across the back of the chair beside the bed.

It was a warm, sultry night and I opened the window slightly to let some air into the room. Outside, it was still not completely dark although it was past midnight. Capella lay low towards the north where a pale blue glow lit the horizon. The room was situated at the rear of the house, overlooking a wild stretch of moorland and in the distance I could just make out the ocean. Physically, I felt drained and exhausted, yet my mind was curiously alert, filled with the odd things which Ashton had revealed.

How much truth could be contained in those strange ramblings? That his family had been involved in certain queer rites down the centuries I could accept. The old pagan religion had maintained its insidious grip on this part of England long after the coming of Christianity, persisting down the years well into the Middle Ages.

But all that fantastic talk of pre-human civilizations, of Old Gods from outside the Earth still living on in remote and inaccessible places, waiting to rise again, communing with their adherents by means of dreams and age-old ceremonies. All of that was nothing more than the result of an over-active imagination. Yet why had the inhabitants of this area suddenly descended in a frenzied mob upon the old manor and deliberately set it ablaze, knowing that five people were inside with literally no hope of escape? I tried to recall any mention of it in the newspapers of that time but nothing came to mind. If it had actually happened as Ashton had described, either I had missed any reference to it—or the authorities here had hushed it up so that no news of the deed had reached beyond the confines of this tiny region.

I was on the point of turning away from the window when something caught and held my attention. Over to my right, a bright light flicked on and off, long and short flashes following each other in a rapid, and seemingly random, sequence. Puzzled, I stood rigid, trying to ascertain its origin and nature. My first impression was that someone was signalling across the moors. But I dismissed this almost at once when the realization came that the source of the light must have been at least four miles away for it clearly originated from somewhere beyond the rim of the cliffs where the land fell precipitously towards the sea.

Swiftly, however, logic and common sense asserted themselves. Possibly colored by what I had heard, my mind had insisted on seeing something sinister behind those flashes whereas there was, of course, a logical explanation. Out there, that stretch of coast was almost certainly marked by hidden shoals and rocks and what I was seeing was nothing more than the warning light sent out by a lighthouse, acting as a beacon for vessels in the vicinity.

At breakfast the next morning, I casually mentioned what I had seen. While Ashton affirmed that there was, indeed, an old lighthouse on a rocky promontory four miles distant, he insisted it had not been in operation for more years than he could remember. He argued that it could not have been a beam from the old lighthouse I had seen, if I had seen anything at all, and it must have been from some vessel passing along that stretch of coast. There was clearly no point in pursuing this subject any further in his present state of mind and when he suggested I accompany him to the ruins of the manor I readily agreed.

The weather was again warm and sunny as we left the house and struck off across the moors towards a dense copse of trees perhaps two miles away. There had once been a number of tracks across the moors but most were now overgrown with thick strands of briar which virtually obliterated them in places. By the time we reached the trees we were both perspiring freely and, looking about me, I saw that the wood was more dense and overpopulated than I had imagined from a distance. Enormous oaks grew so close together it seemed impossible that anyone could squeeze between them. As we paused to get our breath back, I noticed Ashton had turned and was surveying the ground behind us. He appeared oddly ill at ease and I glanced back along the path we had travelled to see what was troubling him. Certainly there was no one in sight on the moors and there were no places where anyone might conceal themselves. But then, sweeping my gaze along the horizon, I glimpsed an odd structure which could only have been the lighthouse. Its outlines were indistinct, partially obscured by a haze which lay over the sea. Yet even from that shadowy glimpse, I realized there was something peculiar about that sky-rearing shape. It rose, squat and ugly, from its rocky base, unlike the slender towers of most other similar structures I had seen, and the lamp room at the top was of a curiously bulbous configuration.

Ashton continued to stare at it as though mesmerized, totally oblivious of his surroundings for several moments. Then, with an effort, he pulled himself together and without a word led the way into the trees. Here, out of sight of the sun, for the grotesquely thick, gnarled branches shut out all view of the outside world, the brooding trunks crowded in on us from every side. Utter silence hung thick and heavy in the unmoving air and the thick layer of dead and decaying vegetation deadened the sound of our footsteps.

How Ashton managed to orientate himself and gauge his direction, I could not guess, for he thrust his way through the dense undergrowth without once deviating from his path. Then, suddenly, we came out into a wide clearing. Here, the ground was devoid of all vegetation while in the center stood the fire-blackened ruins of Trewallen Manor.

It was immediately obvious that the fire had done its work well. Gaunt stone walls rose desolately towards the heavens. Twisted, splintered beams hung lopsidedly within the interior where the piles of debris lay in mouldering heaps open to the sky. Glassless windows leered at us like hungry eyes watching our approach with a loathsome malevolence that sent a shiver through me in spite of the warmth of the day.

Ashton paused while still a little distance away and stared at the ruins with the same expression on his face as that which I had noticed on the outskirts of the wood.

Coming alongside him, I said softly, “Surely you don’t expect to find anything still intact in there?”

For a few seconds it was as if he had not heard me, then he turned his head quickly in my direction. “I’ll find it,” he muttered thickly. “I must. Otherwise everything may be lost. Make no mistake about that.”

Clutching me by the arm, he hustled me towards the ruins. A thick layer of grey dust and ash lay over everything so that we were forced to tread carefully. Broken and cracked slabs lay concealed beneath the ash and the twisted remnants of scorched wooden beams criss-crossed the floor. Even a cursory glance was sufficient to tell me that nothing could possibly have survived the inferno which had destroyed this place.

I made to point this out to my companion but he had moved away to a far corner of what had once been a large banqueting hall. There, the remains of a wide stairway thrust up towards the shell of the upper floors.

Ashton went down on one knee beside the unsupported stairs and peered intently at the stone floor, scraping away the ash and debris with his hands. I inched my way past the tattered shreds of once-rich tapestries which had once adorned the walls.

“It has to be here somewhere,” Ashton muttered and I had the impression he was speaking more to reassure himself than to me. “I seem to remember—” He broke off abruptly as his questing fingers found what he was seeking. Beneath the stairs, flat against the floor, was a large iron ring which he grasped firmly in both hands. Straightening up, he pulled with all his strength. The heavy trapdoor lifted slowly and I bent forward to help him. The next second we were both reeling and gasping in the blast of noxious air that swept up from the gaping hole in the floor. With a sudden surge of frantic strength, Ashton hurled the door back on its hinges and staggered away from the opening, covering his mouth and nostrils with his hands.

After a few minutes we were both sufficiently recovered to peer down into the abyssal blackness using a powerful torch which Ashton had brought with him. Shining the beam downward, my companion illuminated the narrow steps which led into unknown depths beneath the ruins. If whatever he was seeking still existed, and he clearly expected to find it somewhere in the cellar, there was undeniably a possibility it had escaped the effects of the flames and smoke which had destroyed the rest of the manor. The thick stone floor would have afforded a great deal of protection, even from the tremendous heat.

Yet in spite of the importance he attached to finding this book, Ashton seemed oddly reluctant to descend those steps.

“What are you hoping to find in this book if it’s down there?” I asked, wincing a little at the way my voice echoed eerily from the shattered walls.

“The key to all I’ve been searching for all these years,” he replied in a hoarse whisper. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been told of the duty laid on the Trewallens. I learned certain things from my mother and perhaps she foresaw there might come a time when the villagers would take things into their own hands for there was no doubt they both hated and feared us. She always said that if anything did happen, I was to search down here.”

“Then we’d better go down and take a look.”

Still hesitant, Ashton finally nodded and lowered himself gingerly into the aperture, directing the torchlight between his feet so that he might see where he was going. I stood quite still, watching his slow descent, the wavering beam sending his shadow dancing grotesquely over the ancient stone walls.

The steps led far deeper into the foundations than I had anticipated and it was a full five minutes before I heard his voice calling on me to follow. In the same instant, he directed the torchlight up the shaft in order to delineate the stone steps for me.

Cautiously, I eased my way over the edge and commenced feeling my way down the steps, steadying myself against the confining walls which gradually became more slippery and slimy under my fingers. By the time I reached the bottom, my hands were smeared with a ghastly green mold and there was a queer musty smell in my nostrils, a stench compounded of decay and certain chemical odours which I couldn’t place.

I straightened up slowly, expecting my head to touch the ceiling but instead, I found we were standing in a lofty passage which stretched away in both directions and with no visible end either way.

My companion shone his torch around the dripping walls as we edged away from the steps, the light picking out details of the rough surface. At intervals, metal brackets had been affixed to the stone and in one we found the burnt remains of a rushlight, adding further evidence to the antiquity of the place for these lights had obviously been placed there to provide illumination of a sort in bygone ages. I had no means of knowing how old this building was but from what I saw in that vast cellar, I reckoned it must have dated back not less than four or five centuries. Indeed, I suspected the manor had been erected on an even earlier site and this subterrene passage had been carved from the solid rock more than two thousand years before.

At one point we encountered a narrow passage leading off to our right but although we probed it with the light of the torch we could see no end to it and it seemed too incredibly narrow for a normal passage. Whatever purpose it had once served, it was clearly not intended for men to walk along.

Some thirty yards further on, the tunnel widened abruptly, leading into a huge chamber whose furthermost limits were only just touched by the torchlight as Ashton swung the beam around.

Scattered across the stone floor were several crumbling wooden cases. Some had been bound with iron straps and for the most part these metal bindings were all that was left of them, the wood having totally disintegrated over the years.

Ashton gave these only a cursory examination. Evidently what he sought was not to be found there. Then I heard him utter a sharp exclamation as the wavering torchlight touched upon something against the far wall. The next moment, he was rushing forward, kicking aside the rotting boxes in his haste. I followed as quickly as I dared.

Jutting from the wall was a thick stone shelf about three feet in width and on it stood a large metal chest whose lid bore a number of hideous ideoglyphs moulded in low relief. Thrusting the torch at me, Ashton directed me to shine the light upon the chest, pulling hard on the lid only to find it securely locked.

“See if you can find anything with which to prise this open,” he commanded tersely.

Casting about, I spied a short metal bar on the floor which had obviously been used at one time to open the long wooden cases. Seizing it from me, he thrust the end savagely under the lid, forcing it up with all his strength. There was a harsh rending screech of metal and the lid flew open with an explosive crack, slamming hard against the wall. Dropping the bar, Ashton thrust his hands inside and withdrew a voluminous tome which he held up to the light, his features oddly elated. He uttered a sudden cry that echoed through the chamber.

“Is that it?” I asked. My voice trembled slightly, not from the excitement of this discovery, but because in that same instant, a strange aura seemed to have pervaded the chamber. The silent walls seemed to ooze menace and I had the unshakable impression there had been a sound somewhere along the wide passage we had recently traversed; a sound which had come in answer to Ashton’s sudden cry. The noise was extremely faint, it is true, yet it was one which sent a shiver of nameless dread through me and I felt an irresistible impulse to turn and flee from that subterrene chamber with its age-old secrets.

Ashton must have heard the sound too, for he lifted his head from his perusal of the tome and stared at me with an ashen face, his dark eyes glinting strangely in the torchlight.

I could only nod mutely in affirmation. Whether his interpretation of the noise was similar to mine, I could not say. To me, the impression I had was one of something huge and monstrous slithering across the stone floor; a dragging, nauseous sound which had faded swiftly into the distance.

In the utter silence of that cellar, it had seemed unnaturally sharp and alien. Had it come towards us, instead of receding into the distance, both of us would have been trapped with no way of escape. Standing there, staring wildly at each other, we were both frantically seeking some natural explanation, some logical explanation of that shocking echo, straining our ears for any repetition. Finally, Ashton laid a shaking hand on my arm and motioned towards the passage leading back to the outside world.

Clutching the ancient book under one arm, he hurried beside me as I used the torch to light our way back. The thought of being trapped in that underground tunnel impelled us to hurry in spite of the treacherous, slippery unevenness of the rocky floor. Not until we reached the nitre-covered steps leading up through the foundations of the manor did we pause. Here, where the tunnel continued in the opposite direction, I shone the torchlight along it, striving to pick out anything which might account for what we had heard, certain that whatever it had been, the originator of that sound had moved away in that direction.

In a low, shaky whisper, I asked, “Do you know where that tunnel leads?”

“Out under the moors, I suppose.” Ashton’s voice was pitched equally low. “But as to where it emerges, I’ve no idea. And I’m not inclined to find out.” He cast a quick, apprehensive glance along the passage where the beam of the torch picked out nothing more substantial than shadows. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve got what I came for.”

One after the other, we clambered up the slimy steps, finally pulling ourselves through the exit, dropping the heavy trapdoor back into place.

Hastening from the blackened ruins, we thrust our way through the surrounding trees, back over the moorland track to the village.

In the bright noon sunlight streaming through the windows, we examined Ashton’s find. It was impossible to put any date on the book although the condition of the yellowed pages pointed to great antiquity. The writing, in places faded almost into illegibility, was in a spidery script, undoubtedly old English as Ashton had intimated two days earlier.

But it was as my companion turned the brittle pages that something else fell onto the floor at our feet. Picking it up, Ashton turned it over in his hands before laying it flat on the table. It was something far more modern than the tome—an ordinary sheet of common paper, folded carelessly as if the message it bore had been hurriedly scribbled and thrust between the pages. Staring down over Ashton’s shoulder, I read through it with a growing sense of perplexity and horror.

My Dearest Son,

If you ever read this letter, it will mean that both your father and myself no longer exist in this world. By now, you know a little of your dark heritage; that bondage which was forged countless centuries ago and has continued, unbroken, throughout the ages. Yet now the signs are ominous. Too many events are conspiring against us and those around us are mortally afraid of that which they cannot understand and I fear they now intend to bring about the end of the Trewallen line.

Whatever happens, I urge you to heed my instructions and follow them to the letter. Believe me when I say it was no wish of mine to bring this doom upon your father and yourself. Yet my own fate is more terrible still and my final peace rests in your hands alone. The Old Ones cannot be denied. They demand their sacrifices in return for that which we receive. We, the Keepers of Dark Point Light, are among the foremost of their minions on Earth while They sleep through the eternal cycles until the time of Their coming again.

Unless you wish my fate to fall upon you, heed my words well. The book gives you the two formulae; that for the zenith which is the opener of the way for Those outside—and the other for the nadir. It is the second you must use but only at midnight when Capella lies directly beneath the star of the boreal pole. Above all, fear not that which lies beneath the manor.

Your loving mother.

What were we to make of that? The letter seemed full of vague portents and hints of doom and disaster and yet the instructions given made little, if any, sense. The reference to the Old Ones evidently alluded to those ancient beings mentioned by Ashton the previous day. But what were we to take from that final, enigmatic sentence? To what was she referring when she intimated that her son had no need to fear what lay beneath the manor?

During the long afternoon, Ashton and I pondered long over the puzzling contents of the letter. Certain points seemed clear and unambiguous. Dark Point Light clearly referred to that ancient lighthouse out on the distant promontory and Ashton readily agreed that the Old Ones were those aeon-old gods whose worship dated back far beyond Christianity or any other religion and which was still carried on to this day in various parts of the world.

As he spoke, he grew more and more agitated and behind all that he said was the urgency for me to help him by translating the archaic English in the book. This, he insisted, was essential for otherwise the consequences could be utterly catastrophic. There was no doubt that the contents of that letter had shocked and disturbed him and from the manner in which he continually paced the floor and glanced through the window, I wondered if he suspected the inhabitants of the village were coming to burn down the house as they had the manor.

As his talk grew progressively wilder and more fantastic, I realized that if I was to be of any help to him, I needed answers to the riot of questions which plagued me. By degrees, I succeeded in calming him down, forcing him to take his time in answering me.

It was not easy to piece together a complete and coherent picture since Ashton kept jumping from one subject, or from one period of history, to another. Yet from what he told me, I gathered that it was his firm belief that among those secret cults which existed in many countries to continue the worship of the Old Ones, the Trewallens were among the oldest. They knew many of the secrets which had been handed down from time immemorial, knew the locations of hidden places that lay close to those outside realms where only madness and terror lurked.

Ashton accepted as a matter of faith that Dark Point Light was one of these locations, believing it possibly from tales handed down from generation to generation by his forebears. Though when, and in what manner, the members of his maternal family became Keepers of the tower, he did not know. Certainly, he was puzzled by his mother’s reference to something under the manor and could only surmise that this was the dread knowledge contained in the ancient tome which now reposed on the table in front of us.

Although we had not eaten since breakfast, neither of us had any thought for food. Ashton’s initial agitation had now become a mood of desperate urgency. Checking his almanac, we determined that, as near as we could estimate, Capella would lie directly beneath Polaris at midnight three days hence. Now, the one thought uppermost in his mind was to decipher as much as possible of the archaic English and, in particular, to determine the two formulae mentioned in his mother’s letter.

The book was voluminous and the script was, in many places, scarcely legible as we pored over it in the growing darkness. Although it was the normal script of an early Saxon age and one which I had encountered on several previous occasions, there was something in those archaic symbols which made me shudder inwardly as I painfully transcribed them, reading aloud while Ashton wrote down every word.

From the shape of the pointed characters, I dated the book to around the third or fourth century A.D., at a time when any Christian influence was extremely tenuous and more ancient beliefs still seethed and simmered strongly beneath a thin veneer of civilization.

The story which unfolded from our reading of the tome confirmed many of the things which Ashton had spoken of. But whereas he had merely scratched the surface of the lurking horror which had infested this tiny region of Cornwall, this account embellished it with hideous detail, revealing seemingly endless vistas of alien time and space that our minds refused to accept completely.

There were references to long aeons of time before the first cities of men were raised from the clay; of monstrous beings that stalked the black, matterless spaces between the stars; of cataclysmic battles which resulted in certain of the Old Ones being imprisoned on young, newly-formed planets of which Earth was but one. Moreover, the unknown author claimed such imprisonment did not imply death. Even with the passing of millions of years, during which many races inhabited the Earth, only one of which was human, they remained in a sorcerous slumber in hidden and inaccessible places, awaiting the time when they might rise again.

Furthermore, in addition to these beings, there was mention of others, nameless entities which dwelt outside of normal space-time continua but which could enter the known universe through a number of secret portals provided the correct incantations and rituals were performed.

Towards the end of the book, there was an abrupt change in the writing where some unknown, and more modern, hand had penned what appeared to be an addendum. While the individual letters were a more recent form of English, the words themselves were in the style of a period of at least two hundred years earlier. These few pages detailed the erection of Dark Point Light which had evidently replaced a much older stone tower on the same site. Whether the structure was ever intended as a conventional lighthouse was unclear although from the narrative we were reluctantly forced to the conclusion that its primary purpose was something far more alien and sinister. There were peculiar alignments drawn into its design and location which suggested that the building stood at the focal point of one of the portals mentioned in the earlier text. For centuries, it seemed, the Trewallens had been guardians of the ancient knowledge and, in more modern times, Keepers of Dark Point Light. Just what that entailed was far from clear for the writer assumed that any reader of the manuscript would be familiar with the details of this post.

By the time we had finished, it was almost dawn. We had worked on the tome throughout the entire night, unaware of the passage of time, totally enmeshed in a growing web of horror and bafflement. We had read of things almost beyond human belief, of secret pacts between the Trewallens and both the Old Ones and those other beings who dwelt outside the time and space of the normal universe. Small wonder that the frightened inhabitants of the village had stormed the manor that November night ten years before and burned everything and everyone in it.

How it had survived the Middle Ages when hatred against witches and warlocks was at its height, I could not imagine. Yet there still remained one mystery. Even though we had gone through the transcription meticulously, we had found no reference to the two formulae mentioned in that hastily scrawled letter. Certainly there were long passages so faded or stained as to be virtually unreadable, yet this did not appear to be the reason for this strange omission. Had Ashton’s mother been mistaken? Somehow, we doubted that. She had given sufficient detail to insinuate their importance in averting some terrible catastrophe and it was unlikely she would have stressed where they were to be found if she had not been absolutely certain.

Yet what other explanation was there? At my companion’s urgent insistence, I went through the volume slowly once more, page by page, in the event that the one in question had been deliberately removed.

Then, almost halfway through the volume, I came across a page which seemed slightly thicker than the others. Running my finger carefully along the edge I found, as I was beginning to suspect, that two pages had been stuck together. Separating them required extreme care owing to the general brittleness of the parchment and it was the work of several minutes to gently prise the two sheets apart with the edge of a sharp knife.

I think we were both expecting to find what was written there to be in the same hand and archaic English as the rest of the main text. In this, we were frustratingly disappointed. The symbols on each of these pages bore no resemblance to English. The odd cursive script was unknown to me. The minuscules were boldly delineated, clearly formed, as if the writer intended there should be absolutely no dubiety as to the symbols he had written. Yet, in spite of the alienness of the characters, Ashton declared shudderingly that there was something familiar about them, something he had seen before.

Clearly, although time was now desperately short, there was little to be gained by attempting to solve these cryptic formulae just then. We were both at the point of utter exhaustion and knew that to go on without rest would inevitably lead to fatal errors. It now being after eight-thirty, Ashton made something to eat and we both retired.

When I woke, some six hours later, it was to find Ashton already up, searching diligently through the volumes on his bookshelves. He glanced up quickly as I entered. There were dark circles under his eyes and it was evident he had had very little sleep. There was now only one thing driving him on, pushing him relentlessly to the utmost limits of his physical and mental resources.

“It has to be here somewhere,” he said hoarsely, indicating the rows of books with a sweep of his arm. “It must be. I’m sure I’m not mistaken.”

“Then let’s go at this problem logically and methodically,” I told him. “We still have two days left to find the answer.”

We were able to disregard most of the volumes since those in his collection written in Latin, Arabic and Greek were clearly of no concern. Then, late that morning, my companion uttered a sharp exclamation and, glancing up from my own searching, I saw he had a slim, tattered volume in his hands and was riffling through it in a frenzy of excitement, flicking the pages in rapid succession. There was a strange expression on his drawn features as he leaned across the table to compare the writing with that of the volume we had brought from the cellar beneath the manor.

Glancing over his shoulder I saw there was, indeed, a very close resemblance between the two sets of characters.

“This is it,” he declared elatedly. “I knew I’d seen that script before.”

I forbore to inquire the title of the book. From its condition, I knew it to be one of the oldest in his collection.

“Can you translate these formulae into some kind of phonetic rendering?” I asked tensely.

Ashton hesitated, then nodded. “I think so. It won’t be easy. Evidently they’re similar to the Naacal language but there appear to be subtle differences and, whatever happens, I have to make absolutely sure. If I’m to carry out my mother’s instructions, everything has to be exact. The smallest error and—” He broke off in mid-sentence but I could guess at the meaning behind his words.

Leaving him to the task of deciphering the strange formulae, I made myself something to eat, then asked if I might take the car since there seemed little I could do to help him at the moment. After only a momentary hesitation, he agreed and handed me the keys.

Outside, the air was still warm and the mid-afternoon was bright and sunny. I had taken the precaution of bringing a map of the local area with me and before switching on the ignition, I studied it carefully, having already made up my mind where I wanted to go. I had not mentioned my intended destination to Ashton for fear that he might refuse the car and do his utmost to dissuade me.

Putting the car into gear, I drove slowly out of the village and took the narrow track which the map indicated led towards the coast, terminating at a point only a short distance north of the promontory on which Dark Point Light stood. There were few people about although those I passed gave me strange looks.

The track I was following was undeveloped and full of potholes, evidently seldom used. Around me, the terrain grew perceptibly wilder as I neared the cliffs, the richer vegetation giving way to sparse tufts of grass and stunted bushes. Topping a low rise, I made out the curiously shaped lighthouse clearly for the first time and even that initial glimpse was enough to tell me that I had not been mistaken the previous day when I had noted its odd silhouette. Yet, on that occasion, distance and the haze had obscured most of the abnormalities associated with its shape. In addition to the peculiar nature of the lamproom at the top, I noticed several bizarre bulbous projections around the sides which seemed to serve no ordinary purpose that I could determine. All in all, it held an air of indefinable mystery that grew more pronounced as I manoeuvered the car down a steep, rocky incline towards the beach.

Presently I was forced to stop the car where the track petered out completely. In front of me was bare shingle, still wet from the now receding tide. The long, rocky tongue which thrust out from the shore stood out several feet above the water although judging by the long strands of seaweed which festooned its length, I reckoned it would lie completely submerged at high tide.

Even as I walked cautiously towards it, picking my way carefully over the slippery rocks, I could see that the stone tower was in a state of great decrepitude. Parts of the upper structure had decayed over the years and fallen. Desolation and decay hung over it like a dark cloud in stark contrast to those other similar buildings I had sometimes seen around the English coast. At the top, the brilliant sunlight glinted off the glass which, unlike the stonework, appeared to be intact. I had expected to see a massive door on the side facing the land but the curved stone wall continued in an unbroken line as far as I could see.

Not until I had approached to within a few yards of the base did I see there was a narrow raised platform which clearly ran around the entire circumference with a short flight of steps leading up to it. There had once been a metal rail there but it had long since vanished, whether by the action of the pounding waves or vandalism it was impossible to tell. Now only a few rusted iron stumps projected from the stonework.

Clambering up the steps, I worked my way around the tower before encountering a large, iron-banded door on the far side looking out over the ocean. In spite of the sinister aura which surrounded the tower and the odd tales I had heard concerning it, I pushed open the door on its creaking hinges and peered inside. Piles of debris and fallen blocks of stone met my gaze in the dimness. Stepping inside, I examined the immediate area minutely, aware of the curious atmosphere which pervaded the place. It was not simply the musty smell which comes of long years of emptiness and neglect although there was certainly a surfeit of greyish dust in places and a forest of cobwebs around the walls. Rather it was an odd electric tension which tingled unpleasantly along my nerves as if every inch of the building held an intense electrostatic charge.

There was also a further odd fact which I noticed at once. The floor and lower steps were covered with the same species of seaweed I had seen on the promontory outside. Yet how those strands had got there was beyond me, for they were still damp. The massive door looked capable of withstanding the incessant pounding of the ocean and there was no other means of ingress.

Bracing myself mentally, I crossed the smooth floor, edging around the fallen blocks, and approached the stairs. Curiously, there was no furniture, nor any sign there had ever been any as I would have expected if the lighthouse had been used in the past. Yet there were odd markings on the floor but in the dim light it was almost impossible to make them out. Only when I had climbed a dozen stairs and looked down from that height was I able to discern anything of the overall design with any clarity.

Even then, I found it difficult to take it in for there were curiously curved lines in faded red which intersected and crossed at abnormal angles and at various points around the design were other geometrical symbols in black. While my mind persisted in suggesting significant mathematical relationships in these cryptograms, I also noticed that in several places they had been almost completely obliterated. Not, I felt certain, by some natural ageing process but by some deliberate effacement.

The ascent to the top of the tower took me several minutes for the stairs wound spirally around the inner circumference and, in one or two places, were so broken I feared it might prove impossible to attain the top. As I ascended, I became aware of a further strange thing. While the bottommost steps and much of the floor were literally covered with debris and seaweed, the rest of the way was clear as if someone, in the very recent past, had swept the stairs completely free of dust and dirt.

Finally, I came to a stout wooden door which opened creakingly at my touch and stepping through I stared about me in bewildered amazement. The sunlight shone fiercely through the glass, highlighting every detail in the room. In the center was the lamp, set on its axis, and beside it stood a number of levers whose purpose I could not, at first, determine for they appeared to be connected internally with the lamp mechanism.

It was not until I glanced up at the curved dome over my head that a glimmer of understanding came. I had expected the roof to be of solid metal. Instead, there were two iron shutters which were clearly capable of being opened for they rested on a set of well-oiled runners. Just why they took my attention I could not tell but something about them evoked a sudden thought in my mind. The implications of this strange set-up were now clear. Experimentally, I pulled hard on the nearest lever. For several seconds, nothing happened although the lever moved easily under my hand. Then, with a noiseless movement, the twin shutters slid aside revealing a section of sky directly above the lamp. I had thought the aperture would lie open to the atmosphere but instead, I saw the shutters had concealed a clear crystal lens, perhaps three feet in diameter. As I watched, a cloud drifted slowly across the scene, its outlines oddly magnified and distorted by the lens.

What engineer had constructed this mechanism I could not even guess. It seemed scarcely credible that it had been installed when this tower had been erected for it was immediately apparent that exceptionally specialized knowledge and equipment would have been necessary for its manufacture and installation. Yet what was its purpose? To send a highly focussed beam of light directly into the heavens? That seemed absurd, yet on looking closer at the internal mechanism of the lamp, I saw that it could be aligned to do exactly this, possibly by manipulation of the other, smaller levers.

What in God’s name was this place? Ashton had claimed it had been abandoned for many years and yet everything pointed to it having been used during recent times. The smooth sheen of oil on the shutter bearings; the undoubted intricacy of the lamp mechanism; the cleanliness of the upper stairs and the incredible mechanical engineering which had gone into its design and construction, all suggested some very modern origin. If it was so closely associated with the hated Trewallens, I felt sure none of the villagers would venture out here and, apart from my companion, the last of his line had perished in flames ten years before.

The longer I stood there, staring around me, the more my imagination worked until I began to fancy strange things. I seemed to sense some alien, formless presence close by, watching me with a fearsome intentness. I felt entwined with something—something which was not of this world—but which encircled me with an alien malevolence.

Swiftly, almost of its own volition, my hand moved and thrust the lever back into its former position and it was as the shutters slid shut over my head that I heard a soft, muffled sound from far below me. The thought that something was making its way stealthily up the stairs, trapping me in that curious lamproom, held me petrified. Then, all at once, the spell was broken. Thrusting my way through the door, I plunged down the stone stairs, slipping and sliding precariously where they had all but crumbled away. Somehow, I reached the bottom, my breath harsh and raw in my throat. The furtive, slithering sound which had so panicked me was still audible. But it was fainter now and with a further shock of superstitious horror I realized it came from still further below me, from beneath the foundations of the tower, deep within the solid rock.

Somehow, I managed to push myself through the heavy door, running headlong over the slippery rocks towards the waiting car. Reversing it quickly, heedless of spinning the wheels into the muddy shingle, I drove as rapidly as I dared back along the narrow track towards the comparative safety of the village.

By now, my chaotic thoughts had shaped themselves into some kind of order. Approaching the village, I had been turning over in my mind what to tell Ashton of my visit to Dark Point Light. By the time I drew up outside the house I had already reached the decision, rightly or wrongly, to say nothing of it. After all, what had really happened? I had seen nothing which did not admit to a reasonable explanation. I had certainly heard that oddly frightening sound far below the rocks. Yet it had been almost identical to that which we had both heard in the cellar of the manor and could, quite readily, be attributed to the ingress of the sea along subterranean tunnels.

As for the odd mechanism in the lamproom, there had been nothing supernatural about it. Certainly it had appeared extraordinarily complex. Yet it was a well-established fact that the Victorians had produced similar machinery, such as the camera obscura, in their scientific heyday.

I discovered Ashton in a highly elated mood, having almost completed his phonetic rendering of the twin formulae. Much of his former apprehension seemed to have evaporated although I noticed he still glanced occasionally through the window as if to assure himself he was not being kept under surveillance.

“I must confess I thought it might be beyond me,” he admitted excitedly, waving the piece of paper in his hand. “Until I discovered these characters are simply a variant of Naacal which was used by certain cults of antiquity.”

“And you’re absolutely certain you have everything right?”

“I’ll have to check it again, of course. But now it’s simply a matter of ascertaining the exact pronunciation. Anyway, I’m confident I’ll be able to use the correct formula when the time comes.”

With that, I had to be content. But during the next two days, I watched him intently, troubled a little by his attitude and general appearance. His face appeared more drawn than before and there was a haunted, frightened look in his eyes which suggested he knew more than he was telling me of what he had to do in order to carry out his dead mother’s implicit instructions.

Then, shortly before eleven o’ clock on the second night we made our final arrangements. In addition to the phonetic rendering of the Nadir Formula, Ashton carried a powerful torch and, against my better judgement, a revolver. Not knowing what to expect, I took along a pair of binoculars.

Even at that hour, the sky was not fully dark. To the north was a pale blue glow where Capella gleamed yellowly above the horizon, a spectral beacon slightly to the west of north.

Starting the car, Ashton drove slowly out of the village, the headlight beams rising and falling as we bumped over the numerous potholes. Neither of us spoke during the journey for there was something about the utter stillness of the countryside which militated against conversation.

About half a mile from the coast, my companion stopped the car and switched off the lights. Even in the darkness, it was possible to make out the spectral tower of Dark Point Light with an amazing clarity but several seconds passed before I recognized the reason. The ocean that frothed around the lighthouse possessed a peculiar luminescence; a greenish, phosphorescent glow which highlighted the watery background. I pointed this out to Ashton but he merely put it down to the presence of certain algae which he maintained were known to produce this effect.

Whether he believed this or not, there was no way of telling but I had the impression he had given this explanation simply to allay my natural fears.

Taking my arm, he gestured towards the lighthouse, then swung his gaze back to where Capella shone unwinkingly towards the north.

“Come,” he said curtly. “There’s very little time left. I want to take a look inside that lighthouse before I use the formula.”

“Is that wise?” I asked, recalling what I had seen on my previous visit.

“There’s something I have to know.” His tone was now one of oddly heightened fascination. “If you’re afraid, you can remain here in the car.”

I shook my head, got out, and fell into step beside him. The narrow track down to the beach seemed longer than I remembered but finally we stood on the long tongue of rock which jutted out into the sea. This time, the tide was coming in and near the tower the water was already lapping over the rocks. Splashing ankle-deep through the foam we worked our way cautiously to the great door on the seaward side where Ashton produced his torch before thrusting it open and going inside.

Somehow, recalling the sound I had heard on the previous occasion, I half expected to find something changed but at first sight I could see nothing to indicate that anyone had been there since my exploratory search.

I thought my companion intended to mount the stairs but instead, he walked forward towards the middle of the room, sweeping the torchlight across the floor, ignoring the strands of seaweed which littered the place. It was then I saw something which sent a shudder of loathsome horror through me. Previously, the floor had been virtually covered by that thick layer of greyish-white dust. Now, in the torchlight, I saw that this had been swept clear in a long, wide swathe from a point near the center of the weird, cabalistic design daubed on the floor!

And in the very center was revealed a large trapdoor with an iron ring which had earlier been concealed. Someone—or something—had entered the tower from below since my departure and my whirling mind instantly connected it with that frightening slithering, bumping sound I had faintly heard beneath the foundations.

Shaken by what I saw and its gruesome implications, I started forward as Ashton bent towards the iron ring, hooking his fingers around it. Before I could stop him, however, he had heaved the trapdoor up and was shining the torchlight directly downward into the yawning aperture. A mephitic stench rose from the gaping hole and we both reeled back, hands over our mouths and nostrils.

I had expected to see a flight of steps leading down into the Stygian blackness but the light picked out smooth stone walls that went straight down as far as the beam could reach. Unwilling to imagine how anything could possibly have climbed that shaft without visible hand or footholds, I pulled Ashton away.

We were both trembling uncontrollably now for, in spite of the unscalable nature of that tunnel, it was abundantly clear that something had come up from those unplumbed depths and I saw, on my companion’s ashen face, that he had guessed the same thing as I. This opening had another exit, one which we had seen for ourselves, deep beneath the fire-blackened ruins of Trewallen Manor!

What monstrous creature inhabited that four-mile-long tunnel beneath the moors which connected these two places, I had no wish to know. Yet in that instant, there came a flash of memory. Did that enigmatic sentence in Ashton’s mother’s letter refer to something alive which haunted those night-ridden depths? And if that was what it signified, why had she maintained he had no cause to fear it?

For a moment I think we both felt an uncontrollable urge to flee that eldrich tower with its strange, hidden secrets. Indeed, I would have done so had not Ashton seized my arm, pointing towards the stairs. Moving ahead of me, he continually flashed his light around our feet as we climbed, helping me over the places where the stairs had crumbled, until we eventually reached the door at the top. Whether my companion had any prior knowledge of what lay beyond, I could not tell, nor did I ask him for scarcely had we paused before the door than a sound reached us from just beyond that entrance into the lamproom.

It was a diabolical sound; a low keening moan that undulated up and down a saw-edged scale. To call it a wail like that of a soul in torment would be to ignore the quintessence of loathsome nauseousness it possessed. Yet, faint as it was, it almost masked the other sound which accompanied it; a squelching, sucking noise, as if something huge and ponderous was moving around inside the room.

Whatever else Ashton may have lacked, it was certainly not courage. Perhaps he believed that, armed with the knowledge of the Nadir Formula, he was protected against anything he might encounter. Whatever the reason, he reached out and twisted the handle of the door, throwing all of his weight against it as it refused to budge. I tried to hold him back, for I sensed, with some strange instinct, that whatever lay behind the door was something not of this Earth. For an instant, the door gave slightly under his frenzied push and a horrible fishy odour swept out. Only for a second did the torchlight show something scaly and of a hideous green color filling the entire aperture.

Then Ashton staggered back, thrusting at me to get away. Somehow, we made it safely down the treacherous steps to the bottom. Here, Ashton halted and even though I urged him to leave that terror-haunted tower, he shook his head in adamant refusal.

“You must go—quickly,” he commanded harshly. “It’s almost midnight and the Nadir Formula must be recited at the focal point if this portal is to be destroyed for ever. Have no worry on my account. Now go!”

In the face of his perverse obduracy, there was no other course open to me. Leaving him alone in that lower chamber, I splashed through the knee-high tide, slipping and sliding on the treacherous rocks until I reached the top of the cliffs where I stopped, staring back at the lighthouse.

Acting on a sudden impulse, I lifted the powerful binoculars to my eyes and swiftly focussed them on the top of the tower. Through the glass which surrounded the lamproom, I could make out very little. A great, shapeless mass obscured much of the interior but the outlines continually blurred and wavered so that no definite shape emerged before my eyes.

Then, even across that distance, I heard Ashton’s voice and knew he was beginning the chant, mouthing archaic syllables which were not meant for human speech. The words boomed and echoed from within the lighthouse as if the walls were an amplifier, reaching out across the shingle, evoking strange antiphonal reverberations that shivered in the still air.

Even as the first dread syllables rang out, my eyes were suddenly seared by a brilliant light which sprang into being at the top of the tower. In that split second, I saw everything. Not only the nature of that thing which lurked inside that unholy room but the hideous truth behind the long, pagan centuries during which the Trewallens had been Keepers of Dark Point Light, the meaning behind that cryptic letter, and the identity of that burrower beneath the moors.

A chill wind sprang up almost in the same instant from the sea, swiftly increasing in ferocity, whipping at my coat. With an effort, I tore my gaze from the tower as something prompted me to look upward. There, near the zenith, directly above Dark Point Light, was a swirling of blackness, obscuring the stars.

At the same time, the air trembled with a vibration which added to the berserk fury of the wind. The great spreading blur of midnight blackness swooped down from the stars and the next moment a vicious lightning stroke speared downward, striking the bulbous lamproom atop the tower.

Across the intervening distance I heard Ashton’s voice uttering the final word of the incantation, and scarcely had the booming echoes died away than a beam of bluish light soared upward from the top of the tower toward the inky, formless nebulosity. I had a fragmentary glimpse of something else which shot skyward, trapped within that cyanic glow; two dark shapes that writhed and twisted and spiralled towards infinite distances. The impression which seared into my brain in that horror-filled moment was of a gigantic octopoid body with tentacle-like appendages that threshed helplessly in the few seconds before it vanished utterly, followed by a more human form which I knew to be Stephen Delmore Ashton.

In the ensuing darkness and silence I was only just aware that the howling gale had died away completely. When I could see clearly again, it was to find that the lightning bolt had riven the rearing tower in twain and all that remained of it was a pile of tumbled, shattered stone at the end of the promontory, the incoming tide washing over it.

By his invocation, his reciting of the Nadir Formula, Ashton had indeed closed that aeon-old portal into those outer realms beyond normal space and time. Yet the crowning horror of that night was not the fact that he had been somehow drawn into it, vanishing utterly from the Earth—but what I had witnessed through the binoculars during that brief moment when the lamp in the tower had abruptly illuminated that huge room with its bizarre machinery designed, as I now knew, for sending that beam upward towards unguessable regions beyond all human imagination.

The monstrous shape of the last Keeper of Dark Point Light, its grotesque bulk filling the room with a horrid plasticity. Everything about that frightful outline had been oddly indistinct with but one exception. The head perched distortedly on that bloated body had been that of a woman and I knew, with a loathsome certainty, it had been that of Ashton’s mother!