Mysteries of the Worm

by Robert Bloch

  There was a terrible allegory in these figures which Cartaret knew only too well. The blind apes were Destiny personified; a hulking, mindless Destiny whose sightless, stupid gropings trampled on the dreams of men and altered their lives by aimless flailings of purposeless paws. Thus did they control reality.

  These were the Blind Apes of Truth, according to the ancient legend; the symbols of the old gods worshipped by Nephren-Ka.

  Cartaret thought of the myths once more, and trembled. If tales were true, Nephren-Ka had offered up that final mighty sacrifice upon the obscene laps of these evil idols; offered them up to Nyarlathotep, and buried the dead in the mummy-cases set here in the niches. Then he had gone on to his own sepulcher within.

  The guide proceeded stolidly past the looming figures. Cartaret, dissembling his dismay, started to follow. For a moment his feet refused to cross that gruesomely guarded threshold into the room beyond. He stared upward to the eyeless, ogreish faces that leered down from dizzying heights, with the feeling that he walked in realms of sheer nightmare. But the huge arms beckoned him on; the unseeing faces were convulsed in a smile of mocking invitation.

  The legends were true. The tomb existed. Would it not be better to turn back now, seek some aid, and return again to this spot? Besides, what unguessed terror might not lair in the realms beyond; what horror spawn in the sable shadows of Nephren-Ka’s inner, secret sepulcher? All reason urged him to call out to the strange priest and retreat to safety.

  But the voice of reason was but a hushed and awe-stricken whisper here in the brooding burrows of the past. This was a realm of ancient shadow, where antique evil ruled. Here the incredible was real, and there was a potent fascination in fear itself.

  Cartaret knew that he must go on; curiosity, cupidity, the lust for concealed knowledge—all impelled him. And the Blind Apes grinned their challenge, or command.

  The priest entered the third chamber, and Cartaret followed. Crossing the threshold, he plunged into an abyss of unreality.

  The room was lighted by braziers set in a thousand stations; their glow bathed the enormous burrow with fiery luminance. Captain Cartaret, his head reeling from the heat and mephitic miasma of the place, was thus able to see the entire extent of this incredible cavern.

  Seemingly endless, a vast corridor stretched on a downward slant into the earth beyond—a vast corridor, utterly barren, save for the winking red braziers along the walls. Their flaming reflections cast grotesque shadows that glimmered with unnatural life. Cartaret felt as though he were gazing on the entrance to Karneter—the mythical underworld of Egyptian lore.

  “Here we are,” said his guide, softly.

  The unexpected sound of a human voice was startling. For some reason, it frightened Cartaret more than he cared to admit; he had fallen into a vague acceptance of these scenes as being part of a fantastic dream. Now, the concrete clarity of a spoken word only confirmed an eerie reality.

  Yes, here they were, in the spot of legend, the place known to Alhazred, Prinn, and all the dark delvers into unhallowed history. The tale of Nephren-Ka was true, and if so, what about the rest of the strange priest’s statements? What about the Walls of Truth, on which the Black Pharaoh had recorded the future, had foretold Cartaret’s own advent on the secret spot?

  As if in answer to these inner whispers, the guide smiled.

  “Come, Captain Cartaret; do you not wish to examine the walls more closely?”

  The captain did not wish to examine the walls; desperately, he did not. For they, if in existence, would confirm the ghastly horror that gave them being. If they existed, it meant that the whole evil legend was real; that Nephren-Ka, Black Pharaoh of Egypt, had indeed sacrificed to the dread dark gods, and that they had answered his prayer. Captain Cartaret did not greatly wish to believe in such utterly blasphemous abominations as Nyarlathotep.

  He sparred for time.

  “Where is the tomb of Nephren-Ka himself?” he asked. “Where are the treasure and the ancient books?”

  The guide extended a lean forefinger.

  “At the end of this hall,” he exclaimed.

  Peering down the infinity of lighted walls, Cartaret indeed fancied that his eyes could detect a dark blur of objects in the dim distance.

  “Let us go there,” he said.

  The guide shrugged. He turned, and his feet moved over the velvet dust.

  Cartaret followed, as if drugged.

  “The walls,” he thought. “I must not look at the walls. The Walls of Truth. The Black Pharaoh sold his soul to Nyarlathotep and received the gift of prophecy. Before he died here he wrote the future of Egypt on the walls. I must not look, lest I believe. I must not know.”

  Red lights glittered on either side. Step after step, light after light. Glare, gloom, glare, gloom, glare.

  The lights beckoned, enticed, attracted. “Look at us,” they commanded. “See, dare to see all.”

  Cartaret followed his silent conductor.

  “Look!” flashed the lights.

  Cartaret’s eyes grew glassy. His head throbbed. The gleaming of the lights was mesmeric; they hypnotized with their allure.

  “Look!”

  Would this great hall never end? No; there were thousands of feet to go.

  “Look!” challenged the leaping lights.

  Red serpent eyes in the underground dark; eyes of tempters, bringers of black knowledge.

  “Look! Wisdom! Know!” winked the lights.

  They flamed in Cartaret’s brain. Why not look—it was so easy? Why fear?

  Why? his dazed mind repeated the question. Each following flare of fire weakened the question.

  At last, Cartaret looked.

  — 5 —

  Mad minutes passed before he was able to speak. Then he mumbled in a voice audible only to himself.

  “True,” he whispered. “All true.”

  He stared at the towering wall to his left, limned in red radiance. It was an interminable Bayeux tapestry carved in stone. The drawing was crude, in black and white, but it frightened. This was no ordinary Egyptian picture-writing; it was not the fantastic, symbolical style of ordinary hieroglyphics. That was the terrible part: Nephren-Ka was a realist. His men looked like men, his buildings were buildings. There was nothing here but a representation of stark reality, and it was dreadful to see.

  For at the point where Cartaret first summoned courage to gaze he stared at an unmistakable tableau involving Crusaders and Saracens.

  Crusaders of the thirteenth century—yet Nephren-Ka had then been dust for nearly two thousand years!

  The pictures were small, yet vivid and distinct; they seemed to flow along quite effortlessly on the wall, one scene blending into another as though they had been drawn in unbroken continuity. It was as thought the artist had not stopped once during his work; as though he had untiringly proceeded to cover this gigantic hall in a single supernatural effort.

  That was it—a single supernatural effort!

  Cartaret could not doubt. Rationalize all he would, it was impossible to believe that these drawings were trumped up by any group of artists. It was one man’s work. And the unerring horrid consistency of it; the calculated picturization of the most vital and important phases of Egyptian history could have been set down in such accurate order only by a historical authority or a prophet. Nephren-Ka had been given the gift of prophecy. And so . . .

  As he ruminated in growing dread, Cartaret and his guide proceeded. Now that he had looked, a Medusian fascination held the man’s eyes to the wall. He walked with history tonight; history and red nightmare. Flaming figures leered from every side.

  He saw the rise of the Mameluke Empire, looked on the despots and the tyrants of the East. Not all of what he saw was familiar to Cartaret, for history has its forgotten pages. Besides, the scenes changed and varied at almost every step, and it was quite confusing. There was one picture interspersed with an Alexandrian court motif which depicted a catacomb evidently in some vaults beneath the city.
Here were gathered a number of men in robes which bore a curious similarity to those of Cartaret’s present guide. They were conversing with a tall, white-bearded man whose crudely drawn figure seemed to exude an uncanny aura of black and baleful power.

  “Ludvig Prinn,” said the guide, softly, noting Cartaret’s stare. “He mingled with our priests, you know.”

  For some reason the depiction of this almost legendary seer stirred Cartaret more deeply than any hitherto revealed terror. The casual inclusion of the infamous sorcerer in the procession of actual history hinted at dire things; it was as though Cartaret had read a prosaic biography of Satan in Who’s Who.

  Nevertheless, with a sort of heartsick craving his eyes continued to search the walls as they walked onward to the still indeterminate end of the long red-illumed chamber in which Nephren-Ka was interred. The guide—priest, now, for Cartaret no longer doubted—proceeded softly, but stole covert glances at the white man as he led the way.

  Captain Cartaret walked through a dream. Only the walls were real now: the Walls of Truth. He saw the Ottomans rise and flourish, looked on forgotten battles and unremembered kings. Often there recurred in the sequence a scene depicting the priests of Nephren-Ka’s own furtive cult. They were shown amidst the disquieting surroundings of catacombs and tombs, engaged in unsavory occupations and revolting pleasures. The camera-film of time rolled on; Captain Cartaret and his companion walked on.

  Still the walls told their story.

  There was one small division of the wall which portrayed the priests conducting a man in Elizabethan costume through what seemed to be a pyramid. It was eerie to see the gallant in his finery pictured amidst the ruins of ancient Egypt, and it was very dreadful indeed to almost watch, like an unseen observer, when a stealthy priest knifed the Englishman in the back as he bent over a mummy-case.

  What now impressed Cartaret was the infinitude of detail in each pictured fragment. The features of all the men were almost photographically exact; the drawing, while crude, was life-like and realistic. Even the furniture and background of every scene were correct. There was no doubting the authenticity of it all, and no doubting the veracity thereby implied. But—what was worse—there was no doubting that this work could not have been done by any normal artist, however learned, unless he had seen it all.

  Nephren-Ka had seen it all in prophetic vision, after his sacrifice to Nyarlathotep.

  Cartaret was looking at truths inspired by a demon . . .

  On and on, to the flaming fane of worship and death at the end of the hall. History progressed as he walked. Now he was looking at a period of Egyptian lore that was almost contemporary. The figure of Napoleon appeared.

  The battle of Aboukir . . . the massacre of the pyramids . . . the downfall of the Mameluke horsemen . . . the entrance to Cairo . . .

  Once again, a catacomb with priests. And three figures, white men, in French military regalia of the period. The priests were leading them into a red room. The Frenchmen were surprised, overcome, slaughtered.

  It was vaguely familiar. Cartaret was recalling what he knew of Napoleon’s commission; he had appointed savants and scientists to investigate the tombs and pyramids of the land. The Rosetta stone had been discovered, and other things. Quite likely the three men shown had blundered onto a mystery the priests of Nephren-Ka had not wanted to have unveiled. Hence they had been lured to death as the walls showed. It was quite familiar—but there was another familiarity which Cartaret could not place.

  They moved on, and the years rushed by in panorama. The Turks, the English, Gordon, the plundering of the pyramids, the World War. And ever so often, a picture of the priests of Nephren-Ka and a strange white man in some catacomb or vault. Always the white man died. It was all familiar.

  Cartaret looked up, and saw that he and the priest were very near to the blackness at the end of the great fiery hall. Only a hundred steps or so, in fact. The priest, face hidden in his burnoose, was beckoning him on.

  Cartaret looked at the wall. The pictures were almost ended. But no—just ahead was a great curtain of crimson velvet on a ceiling-rack which ran off into the blackness and reappeared from shadows on the opposite side of the room to cover that wall.

  “The future,” explained his guide. And Captain Cartaret remembered that the priest had told how each day he drew back the curtain a bit so that the future was always revealed just one day ahead. He remembered something else, and hastily glanced at the last visible section of the Wall of Truth next to the curtain. He gasped.

  It was true! Almost as though gazing into a miniature mirror he found himself staring into his own face!

  Line for line, feature for feature, posture for posture, he and the priest of Nephren-Ka were shown standing together in this red chamber just as they were now.

  The red chamber . . . familiarity. The Elizabethan man with the priests of Nephren-Ka were in a catacomb when the man was murdered. The French scientists were in a red chamber when they died. Other later Egyptologists had been shown in a red chamber with the priests, and they too had been slain. The red chamber! Not familiarity but similarity! They had been in this chamber! And now he stood here, with a priest of Nephren-Ka. The others had died because they had known too much. Too much about what—Nephren-Ka?

  A terrible suspicion began to formulate into hideous reality. The priests of Nephren-Ka protected their own. This tomb of their dead leaders was also their fane, their temple. When intruders stumbled onto the secret, they lured them down here and killed them lest others learn too much.

  Had not he come in the same way?

  The priest stood silent as he gazed at the Wall of Truth.

  “Midnight,” he said softly. “I must draw back the curtain to reveal yet another day before we go on. You expressed a wish, Captain Cartaret, to see what the future holds in store for you. Now that wish shall be granted.”

  With a sweeping gesture, he flung the curtain back along the wall for a foot. Then he moved, swiftly.

  One hand leapt from the burnoose. A gleaming knife flashed through the air, drawing red fire from the lamps, then sank into Cartaret’s back, drawing redder blood.

  With a single groan, the white man fell. In his eyes there was a look of supreme horror, not born of death alone. For as he fell, Captain Cartaret read his future on the Walls of Truth, and it confirmed a madness that could not be.

  As Captain Cartaret died he looked at the picture of his next hours of existence and saw himself being knifed by the priest of Nephren-Ka.

  The priest vanished from the silent tomb, just as the last flicker of dying eyes showed to Cartaret the picture of a still white body—his body—lying in death before the Wall of Truth.

  The Eyes of the Mummy

  Here we have the direct sequel to “The Secret of Sebek”. Admittedly, the Cthulhu Mythos allusions are few and equivocal, but “the initiated may read them as they choose”, eh? In some ways, this story resembles Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” with its theme of mind transference into a rotted corpse, as well as “Out of the Aeons” where life continues to flicker inside an ancient mummy. But the themes are broad enough not to require explanation by direct borrowing. Similarly, it may be said of Bloch’s Egyptian tales as a whole that, though they are redolent of countless other stories and movies on the “King Tut’s Curse” theme, every one of them is fresh. A theme need not become hackneyed simply because it is often used. If a rich enough vein has been tapped, productive mining may continue for a long, long time. Today’s amazing revival of the vampire theme, once thought irreversibly moribund, is another case in point. And so for the Jamesian ghost tale, as an issue of Ghosts & Scholars will reveal. And then there’s the Cthulhu Mythos. In the right hands, it, too, can be continually fresh.

  The Eyes of the Mummy

  by Robert Bloch

  Egypt has always fascinated me; Egypt, land of antique and mysterious secrets. I had read of pyramids and kings; dreamed of fast, shadowy empires now dead as the empty eyes of
the Sphinx. It was of Egypt that I wrote in later years, for me its weird faiths and cults mad the land an avatar of all strangeness.

  Not that I believed in the grotesque legends of olden times. I did not credit the faith in anthropomorphic gods with the heads and attributes of beasts. Still, I sensed behind the myths of Bast, Anubis, Set, and Thoth the allegorical implications of forgotten truths. Tales of beast-men are known the world over, in the racial lore of all climes. The werewolf legend is universal and unchanged since the furtive hintings of Pliny’s days. Therefore to me, with my interest in the supernatural, Egypt provided a key to ancient knowledge.

  But I did not believe in the actual existence of such beings or creatures in the days of Egypt’s glory. The most I would admit to myself was that perhaps the legends of those days had come down from much remoter times when primal earth could hold such monstrosities due to evolutionary mutations.

  Then, one evening in carnival New Orleans, I encountered a fearful substantiation of my theories. At the home of the eccentric Henticus Vanning I participated in a queer ceremony over the body of a priest of Sebek, the crocodile-headed god. Weildan, the archeologist, had smuggled it into this country, and we examined the mummy despite curse and warning. I was not myself at the time, and to this day I am not sure what occurred, exactly. There was a stranger present, wearing a crocodile mask, and events were precipitated in nightmare-fashion. When I rushed from that house into the streets, Vanning was dead by the priest’s hand—or fangs set in the masks (if mask it was).

  I cannot clarify the statement of the above facts; dare not; I told the story once, then determined to abandon writing of Egypt and its ancient ways for ever.

  This resolve I have adhered to, until tonight’s dreadful experience has caused me to reveal what I feel must be told.

  Hence this narrative. The preliminary facts are simple; yet they all seem to imply that I am linked to some awful chain of interlocking experiences, fashioned by a grim Egyptian god of Fate. It is as though the Old Ones are jealous of my pryings into their ways, and are luring me onward to a final horror.