The Book of Iod

by Henry Kuttner

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

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

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

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

  “You’re mad,” Carson said dully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And from beneath the iron disk black horror came surging!

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  “Yes — I dreamed it.”

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

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

  The Black Kiss

  by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner

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

  Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be.

  — Chesterton, “Lepanto”

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

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

  First publication: Weird Tales, June 1937.

  * * *

  1. The Thing in the Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A quality, did you say?”

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

  The doctor glanced again at the paper in his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thanks.”

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

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

  And with that he went out.

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

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

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