Mysteries of the Worm

by Robert Bloch

  As I rose to my feet I again noticed how weak and agitated Simon appeared. He walked with an exaggerated stoop, now, and the pressure on his swollen back must be enormous. He conducted me down the long hall to the door, and as he led the way I noted the trembling of his body, as it limned itself against the flaming dusk that licked against the window-panes ahead. His shoulders heaved with a slow, steady undulation, as if the hump on his back was actually pulsing with life. I recalled the tale of Thatcherton, the old farmer, who claimed that he actually saw such a movement. For a moment I was assailed by a powerful nausea; then I realized that the flickering light was creating a commonplace optical illusion.

  When we reached the door, Maglore endeavored to dismiss me very hastily. He did not even extend his hand for a parting clasp, but merely mumbled a curt “good evening”, in a strained, hesitant voice. I gazed at him for a moment in silence, mentally noting how wan and emaciated his once-handsome countenance appeared, even in the sunset’s ruby light. Then, as I watched, a shadow crawled across his face. It seemed to purple and darken in a sudden eerie metamorphosis. The adumbration deepened, and I read stark panic in his eyes. Even as I forced myself to respond to his farewell, horror crept into his face. His body fell into that odd, shambling posture I had noted once before, and his lips leered in a ghastly grin. For a moment I actually thought the man was going to attack me. Instead he laughed—a shrill, tittering chuckle that pealed blackly in my brain. I opened my mouth to speak, but he scrambled back into the darkness of the hall and shut the door.

  Astonishment gripped me, not unmingled with fear. Was Maglore ill, or was he actually demented? Such grotesqueries did not seem possible in a normal man.

  I hastened on, stumbling through the glowing sunset. My bewildered mind was deep in ponderment, and the distant croaking of ravens blended in evil litany with my thoughts.

  — 3 —

  The next morning, after a night of troubled deliberation, I made my decision. Work or no work, Maglore must go away, and at once. He was on the verge of serious mental and physical collapse. Knowing how useless it would be for me to go back and argue with him, I decided that stronger methods must be employed to make him see the light.

  That afternoon, therefore, I sought out Doctor Carstairs, the local practitioner, and told him all I knew. I particularly emphasized the distressing occurrence of the evening before, and frankly told him what I already suspected. After a lengthy discussion, Carstairs agreed to accompany me to the Maglore house at once, and there take what steps were necessary in arranging for his removal. In response to my request the doctor took along the materials necessary for a complete physical examination. Once I could persuade Simon to submit to a medical diagnosis, I felt sure he would see that the results made it necessary for him to place himself under treatment at once.

  The sun was sinking when we climbed into the front seat of Doctor Carstairs’ battered Ford and drove out of Bridgetown along the south road where the ravens croaked. We drove slowly, and in silence. Thus it was that we were able to hear clearly that single high-pitched shriek from the old house on the hill. I gripped the doctor’s arm without a word, and a second later we were whizzing up the drive and into the frowning gateway. “Hurry”, I muttered as I vaulted from the running-board and dashed up the steps to the forbidding door.

  We battered upon the boards with futile fists, then dashed around to the left-wing window. The sunset faded into tense, waiting darkness as we crawled hastily through the openings and dropped to the floor within. Doctor Carstairs produced a pocket flashlight, and we rose to our feet. My heart hammered in my breast, but no other sound broke the tomb-like silence as we threw open the door and advanced down the darkened hall to the study. All about us I sensed a gloating Presence; a lurking demon who watched our progress with eyes of gleeful mirth, and whose sable soul shook with hell-born laughter as we opened the door of the study and stumbled across that which lay within.

  We both screamed then. Simon Maglore lay at our feet, his twisted head and straining shoulders resting in a little lake of fresh, warm blood. He was on his face, and his clothes had been torn off above his waist, so that his entire back was visible. When we saw what rested there we became quite crazed, and then began to do what must be done, averting our gaze whenever possible from that utterly monstrous thing on the floor.

  Do not ask me to describe it to you in detail. I can’t. There are some times when the senses are mercifully numbed, because complete acuteness would be fatal. I do not know certain things about that abomination even now, and I dare not let myself recall them. I shall not tell you, either, of the books we found in that room, or of the terrible document on the table that was Simon Maglore’s unfinished masterpiece. We burned them all in the fire, before calling the city for a coroner; and if the doctor had had his way, we should have destroyed the thing, too. As it was, when the coroner did arrive for his examination, the three of us swore an oath of silence concerning the exact way in which Simon Maglore met his death. Then we left, but not before I had burned the other document—the letter, addressed to me, which Maglore was writing when he died.

  And so, you see, nobody ever knew. I later found that the property was left to me, and the house is being razed even as I pen these lines. But I must speak, if only to relieve my own torment.

  I dare not quote that letter in its entirety; I can but record a part of that stupendous blasphemy:

  “. . . and that, of course, is why I began to study witchcraft. It was forcing me to. God, if I can only make you feel the horror of it! To be born that way—with that thing, that mannikin, that monster! At first it was small; the doctors all said it was an undeveloped twin. But it was alive! It had a face, and two hands, but its legs ran off into the lumpy flesh that connected it to my body . . .

  “For three years they had it under secret study. It lay face downward on my back, and its hands were clasped around my shoulders. The men said that it had its own tiny set of lungs, but no stomach organs or digestive system. It apparently drew nourishment through the fleshy tube that bound it to my body. Yet it grew! Soon its eyes were open, and it began to develop tiny teeth. Once it nipped one of the doctors on the hand . . . So they decided to send me home. It was obvious that it could not be removed. I swore to keep the whole affair a secret, and not even my father knew, until near the end. I wore the straps, and it never grew much until I came back . . . Then, that hellish change!

  “It talked to me, I tell you, it talked to me! . . . that little, wrinkled face, like a monkey’s . . . the way it rolled those tiny, reddish eyes . . . that squeaking little voice calling ‘more blood, Simon—I want more’. . . and then it grew, and grew; I had to feed it twice a day, and cut the nails on its little black hands . . .

  “But I never knew that; I never realized how it was taking control! I would have killed myself first; I swear it! Last year it began to get hold of me for hours and give me those fits. It directed me to write the book, and sometimes it sent me out at night on queer errands . . . More and more blood it took, and I was getting weaker and weaker. When I was myself I tried to combat it. I looked up that material on the familiar legend, and cast around for some means of overcoming its mastery. But in vain. And all the while it was growing, growing; it got stronger, and bolder, and wiser. It talked to me now, and sometimes it taunted me. I knew that it wanted me to listen, and obey it all the time. The promises it made with that horrible little mouth! I should call upon the Black One and join a coven. Then we would have power to rule, and admit new evil to the earth.

  “I didn’t want to obey—you know that. But I was going mad, and losing all that blood . . . it took control nearly all the time now, and it got so that I was afraid to go into town any more, because that devilish thing knew I was trying to escape, and it would move on my back and frighten folk . . . I wrote all the time I had those spells when it ruled my brain . . . then you came.

  “I know you want me to go away, but it won’t let me. It’s too cunning for that.
Even as I try to write this, I can feel it boring its commands into my brain to stop. But I will not stop. I will tell you, while I still have a chance; before it overcomes me for ever and works its black will with my poor body and masters my helpless soul. I want you to know where my book is, so that you can destroy it, should anything ever happen. I want to tell you how to dispose of those awful old volumes in the library. And above all, I want you to kill me, if ever you see that the mannikin has gained complete control. God knows what it intends to do when it has me for certain! . . . How hard it is for me to fight, while all the while it is commanding me to put down my pen and tear this up! But I will fight—I must, until I can tell you what the creature told me—what it plans to let loose on the world when it has me utterly enslaved . . . I will tell . . . I can’t think . . . I will write it, damn you! Stop! . . . No! Don’t do that! Get your hands—”

  That’s all. Maglore stopped there because he died; because the Thing did not want its secrets revealed. It is dreadful to think about that nightmare-nurtured horror, but that thought is not the worst. What troubles me is what I saw when we opened that door—the sight that explained how Maglore died.

  There was Maglore, on the floor, in all that blood. He was naked to the waist, as I have said; and he lay face downward. But on his back was the Thing, just as he had described it. And it was that little monster, afraid its secrets would be revealed, that had climbed a trifle higher on Simon Maglore’s back, wound its tiny black paws around his unprotected neck, and bitten him to death!

  The Creeper in the Crypt

  One of the most important characters in all of Lovecraft’s fiction was not human at all. No, not Cthulhu, not Yog-Sothoth, not the Goat with a Thousand Young. The town of Arkham is one of the most important Lovecraftian characters. Like Zaman’s Hill in the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet of that title, Arkham has its own genius loci that devours doomed delvers who dare it. The present story, oddly not included in the first edition of this collection, puts the old witch-haunted town at center stage as well.

  Of course there was no Arkham on the Massachusetts map. There is an obvious link, made explicit by Lovecraft in his letters, between Arkham and witch-haunted Salem Village (present-day Danvers), but Will Murray has shown that Arkham has as much in common, at least geographically, with the town of Oakham in central Massachusetts near the Quabbin Reservoir (the model for that in “The Colour Out of Space”). In “The Creeper in the Crypt” Bloch in effect transferred to Arkham one locale we associate with Lovecraft’s Boston: the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground which actually is honeycombed with subterranean crypt-tunnels! In fact the story may be read as something of a cross between “The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”. But of course it is fruitless to speculate on Bloch’s conscious or unconscious inspirations; “The Creeper in the Crypt” is vintage early Bloch.

  The Creeper in the Crypt

  by Robert Bloch

  In Arkham, where ancient gables point like wizard’s fingers to the sky, strange tales are told. But then, strange tales are always current in Arkham. There is a tale for every rotting ruin, a story for every little corpse-eye window that stares out at the sea when the fog comes up.

  Here, fantastic fancy seems to flourish, nourished at the shriveled witch-paps of the town itself, sucking the graveyards dry of legend, and draining at the dark dugs of superstition.

  For Arkham was a queer place, once; abode of witch and warlock, familiar and fiend. In olden days the King’s men cleared the town of wizardry. Again, in 1818, the new Government stepped in to destroy some particularly atrocious burrows in and about some of the more ancient houses and, incidentally, to dig up a graveyard better left untouched. Then, in 1869, came the great immigrant panic in Old Town Street, when the moldering mansion of Cyrus Hook was burned to the ground by fear-crazed foreigners.

  Even since then there have been scares. The affair of the “witch-house” and the peculiar episodes attendant upon the fate of certain missing children at All-Hallows time have caused their share of talk.

  But that isn’t why the “G-men” stepped in. The Federal Government is usually uninterested in supernatural stories. That is, they were, up to the time I told the authorities about the death of Joe Regetti. That’s how they happened to come; I brought them.

  Because, you see, I was with Joe Regetti just before he died, and shortly after. I didn’t see him die, and I’m thankful for that. I don’t think I could have stood watching if what I suspect is true.

  It’s because of what I suspect that I went to the Government for help. They’ve sent men down here now, to investigate, and I hope they find enough to convince them that what I told them is actual fact. If they don’t find the tunnels, or I was mistaken about the trap door, at least I can show them Joe Regetti’s body. That ought to convince anybody, I guess.

  I can’t blame them for being skeptical, though. I was skeptical myself, once, and so were Joe Regetti and his mob, I suppose. But since then I have learned that it is wiser not to scoff at what one does not understand. There are more things on earth than those who walk about upon its surface—there are others that creep and crawl below.

  I had never heard of Joe Regetti until I was kidnapped. That isn’t so hard to understand. Regetti was a gangster, and a stranger in the town. I am descended from Sir Ambrose Abbott, one of the original settlers.

  At the time of which I speak, I was living alone in the family place on Bascom Street. The life of a painter demands solitude. My immediate family was dead, and although socially prominent through accident of birth, I had but few friends. Consequently, it is hard to understand why Regetti chose me to kidnap first. But then, he was a stranger.

  Later I learned that he had been in town only a week, staying ostensibly at a hotel with three other men, none of whom was subsequently apprehended.

  But Joe Regetti was a totally unknown factor in my mind until that night when I left Tarleton’s party at his home on Sewell Street.

  It was one of the few invitations I had accepted in the past year. Tarleton had urged me, and as he was an old friend, I obliged. It had been a pleasant evening. Brent, the psychiatrist, was there, and Colonel Warren, as well as my old companions of college days, Harold Gauer and the Reverend Williams. After a pleasant enough evening, I left, planning to walk home as I usually did, by choice.

  It was a lovely evening—with a dead moon, wrapped in a shroud of clouds, riding the purple sky. The old houses looked like silver palaces in the mystic moonlight; deserted palaces in a land where all but memories are dead. For the streets of Arkham are bare at midnight, and over all hangs the age-old enchantment of days gone by.

  Trees tossed their twisted tops to the sky, and stood like furtive conspirators in little groups together, while the wind whispered its plots through their branches. It was a night to inspire the fabulous thought and imaginative morbidities I loved so well.

  I walked slowly, contentedly, my thoughts free and far away. I never saw the car following me, or the man lurking ahead in the gloom. I strolled past the great tree in front of the Carter house, and then, without warning, balls of fire burst within my head, and I plunged, unconscious, into waiting arms.

  When I recovered, I was already there in the cellar, lying on a bench.

  It was a large cellar—an old cellar. Wherever I looked there was stone and cobwebs. Behind me lay the stairs down which I had been carried. To the left was a little room, like a fruit-cellar. Far down the stone wall to the right I could discern the looming outlines of a coal-pile, though furnace there was none.

  Directly in the space before me was a table and two chairs. The table was occupied by an oil lamp and a pack of cards in solitaire formation. The chairs were likewise occupied, by two men. My captors.

  One of them, a big, red-faced man with the neck of a hog, was speaking.

  “Yeah, Regetti. We got him easy. We follow him like you say, from house, and grab him in front of tree. Right away come here—nobody saw not’ing.”


  “Where’s Slim and the Greek?” asked the man who was playing solitaire, looking up. He was short, slim, and sallow. His hair was dark, his complexion swarthy. Italian, I decided. Probably the leader. I realized, of course, that I had been kidnapped. Where I was or who my captors were I could not say. My throbbing head cleared, and I had enough sense not to bluster or start trouble. These weren’t local men—not with those clothes—and there was an ominous bulge in the dark man’s coat-pocket. I decided to play ’possum and await developments.

  The hog-necked man was replying to the other’s question.

  “I tell Slim and Greek to go back to hotel with car,” he said. “Just like you say, boss.”

  “Good work, Polack,” said the other, lighting a cigar.

  “I do my best for you, Joe Regetti,” said the big man, in his broken dialect.

  “Yeah. Sure. I know you do,” the swarthy Regetti replied. “Just keep it up, and we’re going to be all set, see? Once I put the snatch on a few more of these birds, we’ll clean up. The local coppers are all stiffs, and as soon as I get a line on some more of these old families we’ll be taking in the dough regular.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  “Oh, awake, eh?” The thin Italian didn’t move from the table. “Glad to hear it. Sorry the boys had to get rough, mister. Just sit tight and everything’s going to be swell.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I replied, sarcastically. “You see, I’m not accustomed to being kidnapped.”