Mysteries of the Worm

by Robert Bloch

  “In five days? Marvelous!”

  “Isn’t it? Except for our bargain—whenever I succeed, my rival gains power with me. That will make the shadow stronger. How, I don’t know. I’m waiting. And I can’t find rest.”

  “I’ll find it for you. Just lie down and wait—I’ll be back.”

  I left him hastily—left him sitting at his desk, all alone. Not quite alone. The shadow was there, too.

  Before I went I had the funniest temptation. I wanted to run my hand along the wall, through that shadow. And yet I didn’t. It was too black, too solid. What if my hand should actually encounter something?

  So I just left.

  I was back in half an hour. I grabbed Gulther’s arm, bared it, plunged the needle home.

  “Morphine,” I whispered. “You’ll sleep now.”

  He did, resting on the leather sofa. I sat at his side, watching the shadow that didn’t sleep.

  It stood there towering above him unnaturally. I tried to ignore it, but it was a third party in the room. Once, when I turned my back, it moved. It began to pace up and down. I opened my mouth, trying to hold back a scream.

  The phone buzzed. I answered mechanically, my eyes never leaving the black outline on the wall that swayed over Gulther’s recumbent form.

  “Yews? No—he’s not in right now. This is Mr. Gulther’s secretary speaking. Your message? Yes, I’ll tell him. I certainly will. Thank you.”

  It had been a woman’s voice—a deep, rich voice. Her message was to tell Mr. Gulther she’d changed her mind. She’d be happy to meet him that evening at dinner.

  Another conquest for Fritz Gulther!

  Conquest—two conquests in a row. That meant conquests for the shadows, too. But how?

  I turned to the shadow on the wall, and got a shock. It was lighter! Grayer, thinner, wavering a little!

  What was wrong?

  I glanced down at Gulther’s sleeping face. Then I got another shock. Gulther’s face was dark. Not tanned, but dark. Blackish. Sooty. Shadowy.

  Then I did scream, a little.

  Gulther awoke.

  I just pointed to his face and indicated the wall-mirror. He almost fainted. “It’s combining with me,” he whispered.

  His skin was slate-colored. I turned my back because I couldn’t look at him.

  “We must do something,” he mumbled. “Fast.”

  “Perhaps if you were to use—that book again, you could make another bargain.”

  It was a fantastic idea, but it popped out. I faced Gulther and saw him smile.

  “That’s it! If you could get the materials now—you know what I need—go to the drug-store—but hurry up because—”

  I shook my head. Gulther was nebulous, shimmery. I saw him through a mist.

  Then I heard him yell.

  “You damned fool! Look at me. That’s my shadow you’re staring at!”

  I ran out of the room, and in less than ten minutes I was trying to fill a vial with belladonna with fingers that trembled like lumps of jelly.

  — 5 —

  I must have looked like a fool, carrying that armful of packages through the outer office. Candles, chalk, phosphorus, aconite, belladonna, and—blame it on my hysteria—the dead body of an alley-cat I decoyed behind the store.

  Certainly I felt like a fool when Fritz Gulther met me at the door of his sanctum.

  “Come on in,” he snapped.

  Yes, snapped.

  It took only a glance to convince me that Gulther was himself again. Whatever the black change that frightened us so had been, he’d shook it off while I was gone.

  Once again the trumpet-voice held authority. Once again the sneering smile replaced the apologetic crease in the mouth.

  Gulther’s skin was white, normal. His movements were brisk and no longer frightened. He didn’t need any wild spells—or had he ever, really?

  Suddenly I felt as though I’d been a victim of my own imagination. After all, men don’t make bargains with demons, they don’t change places with their shadows.

  The moment Gulther closed the door his words corroborated my mood.

  “Well, I’ve snapped out of it. Foolish nonsense, wasn’t it?” He smiled easily. “Guess we won’t need that junk after all. Right when you left I began to feel better. Here, sit down and take it easy.”

  I sat. Gulther rested on the desk nonchalantly swinging his legs.

  “All that nervousness, that strain, has disappeared. But before I forget it, I’d like to apologize for telling you that crazy story about sorcery and my obsession. Matter of fact, I’d feel better about the whole thing in the future if you just forget that all this ever happened.”

  I nodded.

  Gulther smiled again.

  “That’s right. Now we’re ready to get down to business. I tell you, it’s a real relief to realize the progress we’re going to make. I’m head research director already, and if I play my cards right I think I’ll be running this place in another three months. Some of the things Newsohm told me today tipped me off. So just play ball with me and we’ll go a long way. A long way. And I can promise you one thing—I’ll never have any of these crazy spells again.”

  There was nothing wrong with what Gulther said here. Nothing wrong with any of it. There was nothing wrong with the way Gulther lolled and smiled at me, either.

  Then why did I suddenly get that old crawling sensation along my spine?

  For a moment I couldn’t place it—and then I realized.

  Fritz Gulther sat on his desk, before the wall but now he cast no shadow.

  No shadow. No shadow at all. A shadow had tried to enter the body of Fritz Gulther when I left. Now there was no shadow.

  Where had it gone?

  There was only one place for it to go. And if it had gone there, then—where was Fritz Gulther?

  He read it in my eyes.

  I read it in his swift gesture.

  Gulther’s hand dipped into his pocket and re-emerged. As it rose, I rose, and sprang across the room.

  I gripped the revolver, pressed it back and away, and stared into his convulsed countenance, into his eyes. Behind the glasses, behind the human pupils, there was only a blackness. The cold, grinning blackness of a shadow.

  Then he snarled, arms clawing up as he tried wrest the weapon free, aim it. His body was cold curiously weightless, but filled with a slithering strength. I felt myself go limp under those icy, scrabbling talons, but as I gazed into those two dark pools of hate that were his eyes, fear and desperation lent me aid.

  A single gesture, and I turned the muzzle in. The gun exploded, and Gulther slumped to the floor.

  They crowded in then; they stood and stared down, too. We all stood and stared down at the body lying on the floor.

  Body? There was Fritz Gulther’s shoes, his shirt, his tie, his expensive blue pinstripe suit. The toes of the shoes pointed up, the shirt and tie and suit were creased and filled out to support a body beneath.

  But there was no body on the floor. There was only a shadow—a deep, black shadow, encased in Fritz Gulther’s clothes.

  Nobody said a word for a long minute. Then one of the girls whispered, “Look—it’s just a shadow.”

  I bent down quickly and shook the clothes. As I did so, the shadow seemed to move beneath my fingers, to move and to melt.

  In an instant it slithered free from the garments. There was a flash—or a final retinal impression of blackness, and the shadow was gone. The clothing sagged down into an empty, huddled heap on the floor.

  I rose and faced them. I couldn’t say it loud, but I could say it gratefully, very gratefully.

  “No,” I said. “You’re mistaken. There’s no shadow there. There’s nothing at all—absolutely nothing at all.”

  The Unspeakable Betrothal

  Bloch has said, “I don’t recall my original title for what was to become {by editorial fiat} ‘The Unspeakable Betrothal’; along with some of the misnomers attached to my mystery yarns in the 40’s
and Howard Browne’s execrable ‘Let’s Do It For Love’, I regard it as an abomination.” (Interview with Randall Larson, The Robert Bloch Companion, p. 146.) Yet Bloch is equally quick to count the story among the canon of his Cthulhu Mythos tales, “those which have some direct affiliation with HPL’s cosmology beyond mere use of nomenclature.” (Interview with Graeme Flanagan, (Ibid., p. 38.)

  The connections with or parallels to Lovecraftian themes and even particular Lovecraftian works are evident. Compare the story, for instance, to the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet XVI, “The Window.” The link with “The Whisperer in Darkness” is explicit, with the promise of the earthling’s being borne aloft, though transmogrified, to the stars by those from Yuggoth. These entities seem here to partake equally of the cone race of Yith and the teasing Night-Gaunts. And the leaving behind of a disembodied face—we cannot help but think of poor Henry Akeley.

  The Unspeakable Betrothal

  by Robert Bloch

  Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from the other . . . the sleep induced by datura, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of belladonna, of opium, of valerian; flowers whose petals remain shut until the day when the predestined visitor shall come and, touching them, bid them open, and for long hours inhale the aroma of their peculiar dreams into a marveling and bewildered being.

  —Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.

  Avis knew she wasn’t really as sick as Doctor Clegg had said. She was merely bored with living. The death impulse perhaps; then again, it might have been nothing more than her distaste for clever young men who persisted in addressing her as “O rara Avis”.

  She felt better now, though. The fever had settled until it was no more than one of the white blankets which covered her—something she could toss aside with a gesture, if it weren’t so pleasant just to burrow into it, to snuggle deeply within its confining warmth.

  Avis smiled as she realized the truth; monotony was the one thing that didn’t bore her. The sterility of excitement was the really jading routine, after all. This quiet, uneventful feeling of restfulness seemed rich and fertile by comparison. Rich and fertile—creative—womb.

  The words linked. Back to the womb. Dark room, warm bed, lying doubled up in the restful, nourishing lethargy of fever . . .

  It wasn’t the womb, exactly; she hadn’t gone back that far, she knew. But it did remind her of the days when she was a little girl. Just a little girl with big round eyes, mirroring the curiosity that lay behind them. Just a little girl, living all alone in a huge old house, like a fairy princess in an enchanted castle.

  Of course her aunt and uncle had lived here too, and it wasn’t a really truly castle, and nobody else knew that she was a princess. Except Marvin Mason, that is.

  Marvin had lived next door and sometimes he’d come over and play with her. They would come up to her room and look out of the high window—the little round window that bordered on the sky.

  Marvin knew that she was a sure-enough princess, and he knew that her room was an ivory tower. The window was an enchanted window, and when they stood on a chair and peeked out they could see the world behind the sky.

  Sometimes she wasn’t quite sure if Marvin Mason honest and truly saw the world beyond the window; maybe he just said he did because he was fond of her.

  But he listened very quietly when she told him stories about that world. Sometimes she told him stories she had read in books, and other times she made them up out of her very own head. It was only later that the dreams came, and she told him those stories, too.

  That is, she always started to, but somehow the words would go wrong. She didn’t always know the words for what she saw in those dreams. They were very special dreams; they came only on those nights when Aunt May left the window open, and there was no moon. She would lie in the bed, all curled up in a little ball, and wait for the wind to come through the high, round window. It came quietly, and she would feel it on her forehead and neck, like fingers stroking. Cool, soft fingers, stroking her face; soothing fingers that made her uncurl and stretch out so that the shadows could cover her body.

  Even then she slept in the big bed, and the shadows would pour down from the window in a path. She wasn’t asleep when the shadows came, so she knew they were real. They came on the breeze, from the window, and covered her up. Maybe it was the shadows that were cool and not the wind; maybe the shadows stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

  But she would sleep then, and the dreams always came. They followed the same path as the wind and the shadows; they poured down from the sky, through the window. There were voices she heard but could not understand; colors she saw but could not name; shapes she glimpsed but which never seemed to resemble any figures she found in picture books.

  Sometimes the same voices and colors and shapes came again and again, until she learned to recognize them, in a way. There was the deep, buzzing voice that seemed to come from right inside her own head, although she knew it really issued from the black, shiny pyramid thing that had the arms with eyes in it. It didn’t look slimy or nasty, and there was nothing to be afraid of—Avis could never understand why Marvin Mason made her shut up when she started telling about those dreams.

  But he was only a little boy, and he got scared and ran to his Mommy. Avis didn’t have any Mommy, only Aunt May; but she would never tell Aunt May such things. Besides, why should she? The dreams didn’t frighten her, and they were so very real and interesting. Sometimes, on grey, rainy days when there was nothing to do but play with dolls or cut out pictures to paste in her album, she wished that night would hurry up and come; then she could dream and make everything real again.

  She got so she liked to stay in bed, and would pretend to have a cold so she didn’t have to go to school. Avis would look up at the window and wait for the dreams to come—but they never came in the daytime; only at night.

  Often she wondered what it was like up there.

  The dreams must come from the sky; she knew that. The voices and shapes lived way up, somewhere beyond the window. Aunt May said that dreams came from tummyaches, but she knew that wasn’t so.

  Aunt May was always worried about tummyaches, and she scolded Avis for not going outside to play; she said she was getting pale and puny.

  But Avis felt fine, and she had her secret to think of. Now she scarcely ever saw Marvin Mason any more, and she didn’t bother to read. It wasn’t much fun to pretend she was a princess, either. Because the dreams were ever so much more real, and she could talk to the voices and ask them to take her with them when they went away.

  She got so she could almost understand what they were saying. The shiny thing that just hung through the window now—the one that looked like it had so much more to it she couldn’t see—it made music inside her head that she recognized. Not a real tune; more like words in a rhyme. In her dreams she asked it to take her away. She would crawl up on its back and let it fly with her up over the stars. That was funny, asking it to fly; but she knew that the part beyond the window had wings. Wings as big as the world.

  She begged and pleaded, but the voices made her understand that they couldn’t take little girls back with them. That is, not entirely. Because it was too cold and too far, and something would change her.

  She said she didn’t care how she changed; she wanted to go. She would let them do anything they wanted if only they would take her. It would be nice to be able to talk to them all the time and feel that cool softness; to dream forever.

  One night they came to her and there were more things than she had ever seen before. They hung through the window and in the air all over the room—they were so funny, some of them; you could see through them and sometimes one was partly inside another. She knew she giggled in her sleep, but she couldn’t help it. Then she was quiet and listening to them.

  They told her it was all right. They would carry her away. Only she mustn’t tell anyone and she mustn’t be frightened;
they would come for her soon. They couldn’t take her as she was, and she must be willing to change.

  Avis said yes, and they all hummed a sort of music together and went away.

  The next morning Avis was really and truly sick and didn’t want to get up. She could hardly breathe, she was so warm—and when Aunt May brought in a tray she wouldn’t eat a bite.

  That night she didn’t dream. Her head ached, and she tossed all night long. But there was a moon out, so the dreams couldn’t get through anyway She knew they would come back when the moon was gone again, so she waited. Besides, she hurt so that she really didn’t care. She had to feel better before she was ready to go anywhere.

  The next day Doctor Clegg came to see her. Doctor Clegg was a good friend of Aunt May’s and he was always visiting her because he was her guardian.

  Doctor Clegg held her hand and asked her what seemed to be the matter with his young lady today.

  Avis was too smart to say anything, and besides, there was a shiny thing in her mouth. Doctor Clegg took it out and looked at it and shook his head. After a while he went away and then Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe came in. They made her swallow some medicine that tasted just awful.

  By that time it was getting dark and there was a storm coming outside. Avis wasn’t able to talk much, and when they shut the round window she couldn’t ask them to please leave it open tonight because there was no moon and they were coming for her.

  But everything kept going round and round, and when Aunt May walked past the bed she seemed to flatten out like a shadow, or one of the things, only she made a loud noise which was really the thunder outside and now she was sleeping really and truly even though she heard the thunder but the thunder wasn’t real nothing was real except the things, that was it nothing was real any more but the things.

  And they came through the window; it wasn’t closed after all because she opened it and she was crawling out high up there where she had never crawled before but it was easy without a body and soon she would have a new body they wanted the old one because they carried it but she didn’t care because she didn’t need it and now they would carry her ulnagr Yuggoth Farnomi ilyaa . . .