The Book of Iod

by Henry Kuttner

  * * *

  He did what was necessary. When he came to the hospital the next day Edmond was shocked by the bloodless pallor of his friend, and the little crawling lights of madness that shone in his eyes. The pupils were unnaturally dilated, and Ludwig spoke that day in disjointed whispers which Edmond found hard to follow. The notes suffered. It is only clear that Ludwig declared he had freed Scott from the grip of the Hydra, and that over and over again the youth kept muttering something about the terrible gray slime that had smeared the blade of his carving-knife. He said his task was not yet ended.

  Undoubtedly it was the drug-poisoned mind of Robert Ludwig speakking when he told how he had left Scott, or at least the living part of him, in a plane of space which was not inimical to human life, and which was not subject to entirely natural laws and processes. Scott wanted to return to earth. He could return now, Ludwig told Edmond, but the strange vitality that maintained life in what was left of Scott would dissipate immediately on earth. Only in certain planes and dimensions was it possible for Scott to exist at all, and the alien force that kept him alive was gradually departing now that he was no longer drawing sustenance from the Hydra. Ludwig said that quick action was necessary.

  There was a certain spot Outside where Scott could achieve his desire. In that place thought was obscurely linked to energy and matter, because of an insane shrill piping (Ludwig said) that eternally filtered from beyond a veil of flickering colors. It was very near the Center, the Center of Chaos, where dwells Azathoth, the Lord of All Things. All that exists was created by the thoughts of Azathoth, and only in the Center of Ultimate Chaos could Scott find means to live again on earth in human form. There is an erasure in Edmond’s notes at this point, and it is only possible to make out the fragment: “…of thought made real.”

  White-faced, hollow-cheeked, Ludwig said that he must complete his task. He must take Scott to the Center, although he confessed to a horrible fear that made him hesitate. There were dangers in the way, and pitfalls where one might easily be trapped. Worst of all, the veil shielding Azathoth was thin, and even the slightest glimpse of the Lord of All Things would mean utter and complete destruction to the beholder. Scott had spoken of that, Ludwig said, and had also mentioned the dreadful lure that would drag the young student’s eyes to the fatal spot unless he fought strongly against it.

  Biting his lips nervously, Robert Ludwig left the hospital, and we assume met with foul play on his way to Edmnd’s apartment. For Edmond never saw his friend again on earth.

  * * *

  The police were still seaching for the missing head of Kenneth Scott. Edmond gathered that from the newspapers. He waited impatiently the next day for Ludwig to appear, and after several hours had passed without result, he telephoned his apartment and got no response. Eventually, worried and almost sick with anxiety, he spent a turbulent ten minutes with his doctor and another with the superintendent. Finally he achieved his purpose and went by taxu to his apartment, having overruled the objection of hospital officials.

  Ludwig was gone. He had vanished without a trace. Edmond considered summoning the police, but speedily dismissed the thought. He paced about the apartment nervously, seldom turning his gaze from the crystalline object that still rested in the brazier.

  His diary gives little clue to what happened that night. One can conjecture that he prepared another dose of the narcotic drug, or that the toxic effects of the fumes Edmond had inhaled several days before had finally worked such disintegration within his brain that he could no longer distinguish between the false and the real. An entry in the diary dated the following morning begins abruptly, “I’ve heard him. Just as Bob said, he spoke through the crystal thing. He’s desperate, and tells me that Bob failed. He didn’t get Scott to the Center, or S. could have materialized again on earth and rescued Bob. Something — I’m not sure what — caught Bob, God help him. May God help all of us… . Scott says I must begin where Bob left off and finish the job.”

  There is a soul laid bare on the last pages of that record, and it is not a pleasant sight. Somehow the most frightful of the unearthly horrors the diary describes seem not quite as dreadful as the last conflict that took place in that apartment above Hollywood, when a man wrestled with his fear and realized his weakness. It is probably just as well that the pamphlet was destroyed, for such a brain-wrecking drug as was described in it must surely have originated in some hell as terrible as any which Edmond portrays. The last pages of the diary show a mind crumbling into ruin.

  “I went through. Bob has made it easier; I can begin where he left off, as Scott says. And I went up through the Cold Flame and the Whirling Vortices until I reached the place where Scott is. Where he was, rather, for I picked him up and carried him through several planes before I had to return. Bob didn’t mention the suction one has to keep fighting against. But it doesn’t get very strong until I’ve got quite a distance in.”

  The next entry is dated a day later. It is scarcely legible.

  “Couldn’t stand it. Had to get out. Walked around Griffith Park for hour. Then I came back to the apartment and almost immediately Scott talked to me. I’m afraid. I think he senses that, and is frightened too, and angry.

  “He says we can’t waste any more time. His vitality is almosy gone, and he’s got to reach the Center quick and get back to earth. I saw Bob. Just a glimpse, and I wouldn’t have known it was he if Scott hadn’t told me. He was all-awry, and horrible somehow. Scott said the atoms of his body had adapted themselves to another dimension when he let himself get caught. I’ve got to be careful. We’re nearly at the Center.”

  The last entry.

  “Once more will do it. God, I’m afraid, horribly afraid. I heard the piping. It turned my brain into ice. Scott was shouting at me, urging me on, and I think trying to drown that — other sound, but of course he couldn’t do it. There was a very faint violet glow in the distance, and a flickering of colored lights. Beyond, Scott told me, was Azathoth.

  “I can’t do it. I don’t dare — not with that piping, and those Shapes I saw moving far down. If I look in that direction when I’m at the Veil it will mean — but Scott is insanely angry with me. He says I was the cause of it all. I had an almost uncontrollable impulse to let the suction draw me back, and then to smash the Gateway — the crystal thing. Maybe if I find myself unable to keep looking away from the Veil when next I go through I’ll do just that. I told Scott if he let me come back to earth for one more breathing-space I’d finish the job this next time. He agreed, but said to hurry. His vitality is going fast. He said if I didn’t come through the Gateway in ten minutes he’d come after me. He won’t, though. The life that keeps him going Outside wouldn’t be any use on earth, except for a second or two.

  “My ten minutes is up. Scott is calling from the Gateway. I’m not going! I can’t face it — not the last horror Outside, with those things moving behind the Veil and that awful piping screaming out—

  “I won’t go, I tell you! No, Scott — I can’t face it! You can’t come out — like that. You’d die — I tell you I won’t go! You can’t force me — I’ll smash the Gateway first!… what? No! No, you can’t… you can’t do it!… Scott! Don’t, don’t… God, he’s coming out—”

  That was the last entry in the diary, which police found open on Edmond’s desk. A hideous screaming and subsequently a stream of red liquid seeping out sluggishly from beneath the door of Edmond’s apartment had resulted in the arrival of two radio patrol officers.

  The body of Paul Edmond was found near the door, the head and shoulders lying in a widening crimson pool.

  Near by was an overturned brass brazier, and a flaky white substance, granular in nature, was scattered over the carpet. Edmond’s stiff fingers still tightly gripped the object which has since been the cause of so much discussion.

  This object was in an incredible state of preservation, in view of its nature. Part of it was coated with a peculiar grayish slime, and its jaws were clamped tightly, the t
eeth having horribly mangled Edmond’s throat and sevred the carotid artery.

  There was no need to search further for the missing head of Kenneth Scott.

  Bells of Horror

  by Henry Kuttner

  This story was originally titled “Horror at San Xavier", for so Lovecraft refers to it in an April 16, 1936 letter to Kuttner, expressing eagerness to see it. HPL refers to it as a “recent yam”, so Kuttner must have mentioned “Horror at San Xavier* as the title of a finished story, not the working title of a draft. Thus we can safely guess that the title “Bells of Horror” was a typical ham-handed editorial usurpation. (If I felt like doing a bit of editorial tampering with Kuttner’s work, I’d have called it "Death Toll.”)

  In general structure “Bells of Horror” has a nagging resemblance to Bertram Russell's “The Scourge of B‘moth” (Weird Tales, May 1929), and it is interesting to speculate whether it might have influenced him here. At any rate, it is noteworthy that Kuttner has taken Lovecraft’s advice about the circumstances of the chance act leading to the unleashing of the cataclysmic horror. Even at that, the story is one more version of the “King Tut’s Curse” scenario of which horror writers have still not grown tired.

  First publication: Strange Stories, April 1939.

  * * *

  A great deal of curiosity has been aroused by the strange affair of the lost bells of Mission San Xavier. Many have wondered why, when the bells were discovered after remaining hidden for over a hundred and fifty years, they were almost immediately smashed and the fragments buried secretly. In view of the legends of the remarkable tone and quality of the bells, a number of musicians have written angry letters asking why, at least, they were not rung before their destruction and a permanent record made of their music.

  As a matter of fact, the bells were rung, and the cataclysmic thing that happened at that time was the direct reason for their destruction. And when those evil bells were shrieking out their mad summons in the unprecedented blackness that shrouded San Xavier, it was only the quick action of one man that saved the world — yes, I do not hesitate to say it — from chaos and doom.

  As secretary of the California Historical Society, I was in a position to witness the entire affair almost from its inception. I was not present, of course, when the bells were unearthed, but Arthur Todd, the president of the society, telephoned me at my home in Los Angeles soon after that ill-fated discovery.

  He was almost too excited to speak coherently. “We’ve found them!” he kept shouting. “The bells, Ross! Found them last night, back in the Pinos Range. It’s the most remarkable discovery since — since the Rosetta Stone!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, groping in a fog of drowsiness. The call had brought me from my warm bed.

  “The San Xavier bells, of course,” he explained jubilantly. “I’ve seen them myself. Just where Junipero Serra buried them in 1775. A hiker found a cave in the Pinos, and explored it — and there was a rotting wooden cross at the end, with carving on it. I brought—”

  “What did the carving say?” I broke in.

  “Eh? Oh — just a minute, I have it here. Listen: ‘Let no man hang the evil bells of the Mutsunes which lie buried here, lest the terror of the night rise again in Nueva California.’ The Mutsunes, you know, were supposed to have had a hand in casting the bells.”

  “I know,” I said into the transmitter. “Their shamans were supposed to have put a magic spell on them.”

  “I’m — I’m wondering about that,” Todd said. “There have been some very unusual things happening up here. I’ve only got two of the bells out of the cave. There’s another, you know, but the Mexicans won’t go in the cave any more. They say — well, they’re afraid of something. But I’ll get that bell if I have to dig it up myself.”

  “Want me to come up there?”

  “If you will,” Todd said eagerly. “I’m phoning from a cabin in Coyote Canyon. I left Denton — my assistant — in charge. Suppose I send a boy down to San Xavier to guide you to the cave?”

  “All right,” I assented. “Send him to the Xavier Hotel. I’ll be there in a few hours.”

  * * *

  San Xavier is perhaps a hundred miles from Los Angeles. I raced along the coast and within two hours I had reached the little mission town, hemmed in by the Pinos Range, drowsing sleepily on the edge of the Pacific. I found my guide at the hotel, but he was oddly reluctant to return to Todd’s camp.

  “I can tell you how to go, Señor. You will not get lost.” The boy’s dark face was unnaturally pale beneath its heavy tan, and there was a lurking disquiet in his brown eyes. “I don’t want to go back—”

  I jingled some coins. “It’s not as bad as all that, is it?” I asked. “Afraid of the dark?”

  He flinched. “Sí, the — the dark — it’s very dark in that cave, Señor.”

  The upshot was that I had to go alone, trusting to his directions and my own ability in the open.

  Dawn was breaking as I started up the canyon trail, but it was a strangely dark dawn. The sky was not overcast, but it held a curious gloom. I have seen such oppressively dark days during dust storms, but the air seemed clear enough. And it was very cold, although even from my height I could see no fog on the Pacific.

  I kept on climbing. Presently I found myself threading the gloomy, chill recesses of Coyote Canyon. I shievered with cold. The sky was a dull, leaden color, and I found myself breathing heavily. In good physical condition, the climb had tired me unduly.

  Yet I was not physically tired — it was rather an aching, oppressive lethargy of mind. My eyes were watering, and I found myself shutting them occasionally to relieve the strain. I wished the sun would come over the top of the mountain.

  Then I saw something extraordinary — and horrible. It was a toad — gray, fat, ugly. It was squatting beside the a rock at the side of the trail, rubbing itself against the rough stone. One eye was turned toward me — or, rather, the place where the eye should have been. There was no eye — there was only a slimy little hollow.

  The toad moved its ungainly body back and forth, sawing its head against the rock. It kept uttering harsh little croaks of pain — and in a moment it had withdrawn from the stone and was dragging itself across the trail at my feet.

  I stood looking at the stone, nauseated. The gray surface of rock was bedaubed with whitish streaks of fetor, and the shredded bits of the toad’s eye. Apparently the toad had deliberately ground out its protruding eyes against the rock.

  It crept out of sight beneath a bush, leaving a track of slime in the dust of the trail. I involuntarily shut my eyes and rubbed them — and suddenly jerked down my hands, startled at the roughness with which my fists had been digging into my eye-sockets. Lancing pain shot through my temples. Remembering the itching, burning sensation in my eyes, I shuddered a little. Had the same sort of torture caused the toad deliberately to blind itself? My God!

  * * *

  I ran on up the trail. Presently I passed a cabin — probably the one from which Todd had telephoned, for I saw wires running from the roof to a tall pine. I knocked at the door. No answer, I continued my ascent.

  Suddenly there came an agonized scream, knife-edged and shrill, and the rapid thudding of footsteps. I stopped, listening. Someone was running down the trail toward me — and behind him I could hear others racing, shouting as they ran. Around a bend in the trail a man came plunging.

  He was a Mexican, and his black-stubbled face was set in lines of terror and agony. His mouth was open in a square of agony, and insane screams burst from his throat. But it wasn’t that that sent me staggering back out of his path, cold sweat bursting out on my body.

  His eyes had been gouged out, and twin trickles of blood dripped down his face from black, gaping hollows.

  As it happened, there was no need for me to halt the blinded man’s frantic rush. At the curve of the trail he smashed into a tree with frightful force, and momentarily stood upright against the trunk. Then very slowl
y he sagged down and collapsed in a limp huddle. There was a great splotch of blood on the rough bark. I went over to him quickly.

  Four men came running toward me. I recognized Arthur Todd and Denton, his assistant. The other two were obviously laborers. Todd jerked to a halt.

  “Ross! Good God — is he dead?”

  Swiftly he bent over to examine the unconscious man. Denton and I stared at each other. Denton was a tall, strongly-built man, with a shock of black hair and a broad mouth that was generally expanded in a grin. Now his face bore a look of horrified disbelief.

  “God, Ross — he did it right before our eyes,” Denton said through pale lips. “He just let out a scream, threw up his hands and tore his eyes out of their sockets.” He shut his own eyes at the memory.

  Todd got up slowly. Unlike Denton, he was small, wiry, nervously energetic, with a lean, brown face and amazingly alert eyes. “Dead,” he said.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “What’s wrong, Todd? Was the man insane?”

  And all the while I had a picture of that fat toad tearing out its eyes against a rock.

  Todd shook his ehad, his brows drawn together in a frown. “I don’t know. Ross, do your eyes feel — odd?”

  A shiver ran through me. “Damned odd. Burning and itching. I’ve been rubbing them continually on the way up.”

  “So have the men,” Denton told me. “So have we. See?” He pointed to his eyes, and I saw that they were red-rimmed and inflamed.