The Book of Iod

by Henry Kuttner

  He caught himself, stared at Doyle almost suspiciously. A gentle hissing began to come from the censer. Benson got up hastily to inspect the six lamps. They were still burning, although a curious blueness now tinged their flames.

  “As long as they burn we’re quite safe,” he said. “As long as the pentagram is not broken.”

  Doyle could not repress an irritable frown. Benson was mad, of course, but nevertheless Doyle was becoming nervous, and no wonder. Even a man not keyed up to high tension might well be shaken by these fantastic preparations, Benson’s insane hints of monstrous—what was the term—“ultra-human entities?” Doyle determined to end the grotesque comedy swiftly, and his finger caressed the trigger of the gun.

  “It’s one of these beings that I am summoning,” Benson went on. "You must not allow yourself to be frightened, no matter what happens, for you’re quite safe within the circle. I am calling up an entity which mankind worshiped eons ago as—Iod. Iod, the Hunter.”

  Silently Doyle listened as his cousin spoke of the secret and forgotten lore hidden in the ancient tomes and manuscripts he had studied. He had learned strange, well-nigh incredible things, Benson related. And perhaps strangest of all was the legend of Iod, the Hunter of Souls.

  Man had worshiped Iod in older days, under other names. He was one of the oldest gods, and he had come to Earth, the tale went, in pre-human eons when the old gods soared between the stars, and earth was a stopping place for incredible voyagers. The Greeks knew him as Torphonios; the Etruscans made nameless sacrifices diurnally to Vediovis, the Dweller beyond Phlegethon, the River of Flame.

  This ancient god did not dwell on Earth, and a certain apt phrase the Egyptians had coined for him meant, rendered into English, the Dimension Prowler. The evilly famous De Vermis Mysteriis spoke of Iod as the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds—which, Prinn hinted, meant other dimensions of space.

  For the soul has no spatial limitations, and it was the human soul, the Flemish magician wrote, which the ancient god hunted. It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit; but if an adept took the necessary precautions, he could safely summon Iod, and the god would serve him in certain curious but desirable ways. Yet not even in the suppressed De Vermis Mysteriis could the incantation be found which would summon the Dimension Prowler from his secret dwelling place.

  Only by diligent searching through certain half-fabulous cryptograms—the monstrous Ishakshar and the fabled Elder Key—had Benson been able to piece together the incantation which would summon the god to Earth.

  No man could say, moreover, what shape Iod would assume; it was whispered that he did not always retain the same form. In Rajgir, the cradle of Buddhism, the ancient Dravidians wrote with a peculiar horror of the god. Reincarnation is a vital factor in the religions of India, and to the mind of an Indian the only true type of death is that of the soul.

  * * *

  The body may perish, crumble to dust, but the soul will live again in other bodies—unless it falls victim to the dreadful hunting of Iod. For Iod pursues always, Benson whispered; the soul has power to flee through the hidden worlds from the Shining Pursuer, but it has no power to escape. And for a human being to see the shape of Iod in all its frightful completeness, unprotected by the necessary precautions, meant swift and certain doom.

  “There’s a parallel in science,” Benson concluded. “Known science, I mean. The synapse gives the clue. The nerve gap over which thought impulses travel. If a barrier is erected in this gap, blocking the impulses, the result is—”

  "Paralysis?”

  “Rather, catalepsy. Iod extracts the vital forces of being, leaving only—consciousness. The brain lives, but the body dies. What the Egyptians called life-in-death. They—wait!”

  Doyle glanced up quickly. Benson was staring beyond the pentagram at a shadowy corner of the room.

  "Do you feel any change yet?” he asked.

  Doyle shook his head, and then hesitated. “It’s—cold, isn’t it?” he said, frowningly.

  Benson stood up. “Yes, that’s it. Now listen, Al, stay just as you are. Don’t move if you can help it. Whatever you do, don’t leave the pentagram until I’ve dismissed the—the thing that I’m calling up. And don’t interrupt me.”

  Benson’s eyes were blazing in his white face. He made a curious gesture with his left hand, and in a low, toneless voice began to chant in Latin.

  “Veni diabole, discalceame… recede, miser…”

  The temperature of the room had changed. It was suddenly very cold. Doyle shuddered and stood up. Benson, his back turned, paid no heed. The incantation had become a rhymed gibberish which was in no language Doyle knew.

  Bagabi laca bachabe

  Lamac cahi achababe

  Karrelyos…

  Doyle took a stubby black automatic from his pocket, aimed it with painstaking care, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  The explosion was not loud. Benson’s body jerked convulsively, and he turned to stare at his cousin with astonished eyes.

  Doyle thrust the gun back in his pocket and stepped back. There must be no bloodstains on his clothing. He watched Benson intently.

  The dying man fell forward, and his body made an ugly thudding noise as it hit the floor. The arms and legs moved feebly, as though in monstrous imitation of a swimmer. Doyle hesitated, half drew the automatic. A sound from nearby made him wheel, gun lifted.

  From the darkness outside the pentagram came a faint whisper, a curious stirring in the dark air. It was as though a little breeze had sprung up suddenly within the silent room. Momentarily the darkness in the corner seemed to crawl with movement; then the whisper died. There was a tight smile on Doyle’s face as he lowered the weapon, listening intently. No further sound came until a metallic clatter brought Doyle’s gaze down to the floor.

  Benson lay sprawled, his arms outflung. Just beyond his fingers one of the silver lamps lay overturned, its flame extinguished. In Benson’s glazing eyes there was mirrored a look of malevolent amusement, and as Doyle watched, it changed and grew until the white face was all alight with a sort of triumphant, unholy merriment. The expression remained fixed, and presently Doyle realized that Benson was dead.

  He stepped outside the pentagram, not without an involuntary shrinking, and hurriedly touched the electric switch. Then, methodically, he began to ransack the room. He had carefully refrained from leaving possible fingerprints, but now, to make doubly sure, he drew on a pair of rubber gloves. There was nothing much of value—a set of silver-backed brushes, a little jewelry, perhaps a hundred dollars in cash.

  Doyle stripped a sheet from the bed and made a bundle of the loot. Then he let his gaze travel over the room. It would not do now to blunder through carelessness. He nodded, switched off the light, and left the cabin. Then he found a stick and broke a window, fumbled with the latch. It opened easily.

  The moon was rising, and a pale shaft of radiance streamed in through the open window, made Doyle’s shadow a black, misshapen blotch on the floor. He moved aside quickly, and the light fell on the white face of the dead man. Doyle stared through the window for a long moment before turning away.

  One thing remained undone. Half an hour later that too was accomplished, and the loot was at the bottom of a stagnant, marshy lake a dozen miles from the cabin. There was nothing now to prove that Benson had not died at the hands of a burglar. As Doyle headed his roadster toward the city he was conscious of a feeling of tremendous relief, as though his taut nerves were at last relaxing.

  There was an unexpected reaction, however. Doyle began to feel very sleepy. The lethargic drowsiness that was creeping over him could not be dispelled, although he let down the windshield to allow the cool night breeze to strike his face.

  Twice he just avoided going off the road. At last, realizing that he dared drive no further, he drew up off the shoulder of the highway, drew a rug over his legs and relaxed. When he
awoke it would take only a few hours to reach home.

  He fumbled uneasily with the rug. The night had become very cold. Icy stars seemed to watch him intently from a sky ablaze with chill brilliance. Just as he went to sleep he imagined he heard someone laughing—

  Sleep that was haunted with strange, grotesque images—a feeling of dropping through giddy abysses—a horrible vertigo that passed and left him spent and helpless to the dreams that came—

  In his dream he was back in Benson’s house. The sable hangings still swathed the walls, the pentagram still glowed faintly on the floor, but the silver lamps were no longer alight. All around were darkness and silence, and a chill wind was blowing.

  With the odd inconsequence of dreams, Doyle realized without any particular feeling of surprise that the room was roofless. Cold stars blazed in a jet sky. Without warning an irregular patch of blackness sprang into existence overhead. Something, invisible save as a shapeless silhouette against the stars, was hovering over the roofless room.

  Looking down, Doyle saw Benson’s body lying where it had fallen. The glazed eyes seemed to shine with a shocking semblance of internal light. They were not looking at him; they were staring upward, and the light that was emanating from those ghastly hollows was actually beating back the darkness of the room.

  And now, Doyle saw that something like a thick, knotted rope was descending from above. It paused above the dead man’s face, coiling and wriggling with a slow, worm-like motion. Following the rope with his eyes, Doyle saw that it disappeared in the black patch of shadow far above, and he was oddly glad that his eyes could not pierce the gloom that shrouded the hovering thing.

  Very slowly the lids of Benson’s eyes began to close. There was no other movement in the still white face, save for the almost imperceptible shutting of the eyelids. At last they were completely closed. Doyle saw the black rope move, twisting and coiling restlessly across the room toward him, and slowly a dim radiance began to glow overhead. It waxed and grew until the stars were dim ghosts against its splendor, and then it began to drop silently through the air, slanting toward Doyle as it sank.

  Stark horror gripped the man. He tried to fling himself back and found that he could not move; some strange dream-paralysis held him rigid and helpless. And in the pale radiance above him he caught a glimpse of a vague, amorphous shape that swam slowly into view.

  * * *

  The rope-like thing came on. Doyle made a sudden frightful effort to move, to break the invisible bonds that fettered him. And this time he was successful.

  The paralysis fled away; he whirled to escape and saw before him—emptiness. A gulf of blackness seemed to open abruptly at his feet, and he felt himself toppling forward. There was a jarring shock, a wrenching jolt that utterly confused all his faculties at once. For a second Doyle felt himself plummeting down into a gulf of utter abandon, and then gray light enveloped him. The roofless room was gone. Both Benson and the floating horror had vanished.

  He was in another world. Another dream-world!

  This weird feeling of unreality! Doyle stared about him, discovering that he was bathed in a gray, shadowless light that came from no visible source, while overhead the air thickened into a misty, opaque haze. Curious little crystal formations speckled the flat plain about him, a conglomeration of glinting, flashing light. Extraordinary balloon-like creatures, as large as his head, swung ceaselessly in the air all around him, drifting gently with the air currents. They were perfectly round, covered with flashing reptilian scales.

  One of them burst as he watched, and a cloud of tiny, glowing motes floated slowly down. When they touched the ground a strange crystalline growth began to form as the motes were metamorphosed into the little crystals that stretched into the hazy distance about him.

  Above the man a dim glow began to wax: a pale, lambent radiance that Doyle watched apprehensively for a few moments before realizing its significance. He recognized it finally as he began to make out vaguely disquieting formations in the brightness. And without warning a black coil dropped down purposefully—questing for him!

  Doyle felt a cold shock of dreadful fear. Would this dream never end? The strange paralysis held him again. He tried to cry out, but no sound came from his stiff lips; and just before the worm-like tip of the tentacle touched him, he remembered his former escape and made a frantic effort to break his intangible bonds. And again the black abyss widened at his feet; again came the wrenching jar as he plummeted down—and again the dark veil was withdrawn to disclose a fantastic, alien scene.

  * * *

  All about him was a tangled forest of luxuriant vegetation. The bark of the trees, as well as the leaves, the thick masses of vines, even the grass underfoot was an angry brilliant crimson. Nor was that the worst. The things were alive!

  The vines writhed and swung on the trees, and the trees themselves swayed restlessly, their branches twisting in the hot, stagnant air. Even the long, fleshy grass at Doyle’s feet made nauseating little worm motions.

  There was no sun—merely an empty blue sky, incongruously peaceful above the writhing horrors. Doyle saw a crimson, snakelike vine as thick as his arm dart out toward him, and he made again that desperate effort to move. At the same moment he saw the nucleus of a familiar glow pulsing through the air above him. Then the blackness overwhelmed him briefly, and it passed to reveal still another world.

  He was in a vast, towering amphitheater, vaguely reminiscent of the Coliseum, but far larger. Tiers of seats rose into the distance, and filling the rows was a surging multitude. There was a square of space separating him from the first row of seats, and on this space four creatures stood facing him.

  They were monsters, inhuman and terrible. Set atop fat, puffy, dark-skinned bags were shapeless globes, dead black, save for peculiar whitish markings which followed no particular pattern. From a gaping hole in each globe dangled a string of pale, ribbonlike appendages, and just above this orifice was a pale, glossy disk, with an intensely black center.

  The bodies, Doyle saw, were clothed in some black substance, so that only their general anthropoid contour was revealed. He caught a glimpse of unfamiliar appendages protruding through the clothing, but their various purposes were obscure.

  One long proboscis resembled the miniature trunk of an elephant, and it hung from where the navel should have been. Another short, dangling flap had an ovoid swelling on it. The worst revelation of all, however, occurred when one of the things lifted up an arm, and from the gaping cavity that was revealed a pinkish tongue lolled forth lazily.

  About Doyle a murmuring grew and swelled into a roar. The throngs in the distant seats were cavorting, dancing. The four nearby were waving their repulsive appendages and coming closer.

  Above Doyle a spot of light appeared, grew larger. As he watched it began to glow with that strange bright flame he had come to dread. The four nearby scurried ignominiously to a safe distance. But this time Doyle was ready. His flesh crawling at the sight of the horror materializing within the light, he tensed—it was not such an effort this time, somehow—and again he was plummeting into blackness.

  From the colorless void he emerged into the glaring blaze of a vast field of frozen white, with not an object visible in its limitless expanse, and a black, starless sky overhead. Abysmal cold seared Doyle to the bone, the utter chill of airless space. He did not wait for the coming of the pursuer to make the effort of his will that sent him into yet another world.

  Then he was standing on a black, gelatinous substance that heaved restlessly underfoot, as though it were the hide of some cyclopean monster. The ebony, heaving skin seemed to stretch for miles around. Presently the warning light was fused in the air above Doyle. Shuddering, he fled through the shielding darkness.

  Next was a field of hard, frozen brown earth, with a phenomenally beautiful night sky overhead, studded with unfamiliar constellations, with a great comet blazing in its white glory among the stars. And from that world Doyle fled to a strange place where he sto
od on a surface of ice or glass. Looking down he could see, far below, vague and indistinct figures that were apparently frozen or buried there, colossal shapes that seemed entirely inhuman, as far as he could make out through the cloudy crystalline substance.

  The next vision was by far the worst. From the swift plunge into blackness Doyle emerged to find about him a great city, towering upward to a black sky in which blazed two angry scarlet moons, whose flight he could almost follow with his eyes. It was a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and fortresses which seemed to follow some abnormal and anomalous system of geometry. It was in its entirety an indescribable conglomeration of stone horrors, and its architectural insanity sent sharp pains darting through Doyle’s eyes as he tried to follow the impossible planes and angles.

  Then Doyle caught a flashing glimpse of the amorphous, nightmare inhabitants that teemed loathsomely in that gigantic city, and a dreadful horror racked him. He flung himself desperately into the black gulf that once more awaited him.

  He seemed to fall for endless eons through the limitless abyss. Then suddenly he found himself, gasping and sweating, in his roadster, while the shadowy darkness before the dawn made silhouettes of nearby trees.

  Trembling, Doyle groped for the dashboard compartment. His throat was dry, and he had a piercing headache. He needed a drink. His hand closed on the bottle. Then he paused.

  An inexplicable light was shining down on him!

  Doyle dropped back upon the cushions, his eyes dilated with unbelieving terror. And slowly, from empty air that pulsed with the straining of cosmic forces, a monstrous entity began to emerge. Gradually it swam into view from a blaze of blinding light, until Doyle saw hovering above him the star-spawn of an alien and forgotten dimension—Iod, the Hunter of Souls!

  It was not a homogeneous entity, this unholy specter, but it partook hideously of incongruous elements. Strange mineral and crystal formations sent their fierce glow through squamous, semitransparent flesh, and the whole was bathed in a viscid, crawling light that pulsed monstrously about the horror. A thin slime dripped from membranous flesh to the car’s hood; and as this slime floated down, hideous, plant-like appendages writhed blindly in the air, making hungry little sucking noises.