Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  “The school book has letters of cold fire,” prompted Thorne.

  “Letters of cold fire,” echoed the thin voice. “They may be read in the dark. Once a day—once a day—a trap opens, and a hand shaggy with dark hairs thrusts in food. I finished—I was in that school for seven years—or a hundred!” He broke off, whimpering. “Who can say how long?”

  “Give me your book,” insisted Thorne. “It is here somewhere.”

  The man who would not be called Cavet Leslie rose on an elbow. It was a mighty effort for his fleshless body. He still held his eyes tight shut, but turned his face to Thorne’s. “How do you know?”

  “It’s my business to know. I say certain spells—and certain voices whisper back. They cannot give me the wisdom I seek, but they say that it is in your book. Give me the book.”

  “Not even to you, Rowley Thorne. You are of the kidney of the Deep School, but the book is only for those who study in buried darkness for years. For years—”

  “The book!” said Thorne sharply. His big hand closed on the bony shoulder, his finger-ends probed knowingly for a nerve center. The man who had been in the Deep School wailed.

  “You hurt me!”

  “I came for the book. I’ll have it.”

  “I’ll call on spirits to protect me—Tobkta—”

  What else he may have said was muddled into a moan as Thorne shifted his hand to clamp over the trembling mouth. He prisoned the skinny jaw as a hostler with a horse, and shoved Cavet Leslie’s head down against the mattress. With his other thumb he pried up an eyelid. Convulsively the tormented one freed his mouth for a moment.

  “Oooooooh!” he whined. “Don’t make me see the light—not after so many years—”

  “The book. If you’ll give it up, hold up a finger.”

  A hand trembled, closed—all but the forefinger. Thorne released his grip.

  “Where?”

  “In the mattress—”

  At once, and with all his strength, Thorne chopped down with the hard edge of his hand, full at the bobbing, trembling throat. It was like an axe on a knotted log. The man who had been Cavet Leslie writhed, gasped, and slackened abruptly. Thorne caught at a meager wrist, his fingers seeking the pulse. He stood silent for a minute, then nodded and smiled to himself.

  “Finished,” he muttered. “That throat-chop is better than a running noose.”

  He tumbled the body from the cot, felt quickly all over the mattress. His hand paused at a lump, tore at the ticking. He drew into view a book, not larger than a school speller. It was bound in some sort of dark untanned hide, on which grew rank, coarse hair, black as soot.

  Thorne thrust it under his coat and went out.

  * * *

  John Thunstone sat alone in his study. It was less of a study than a lounge—no fewer than three chairs were arranged on the floor, soft, well-hollowed chairs within easy reach of bookshelf, smoking stand and coffee table. There was a leather-covered couch as well. For Thunstone considered work of the brain to be as fatiguing as work of the body. He liked physical comfort when writing or researching.

  Just now he sat in the most comfortable of the three chairs, facing a grate in which burned one of the few authentic fires of New York. He was taller than Rowley Thorne and quite as massive, perhaps even harder of body though not as dense. His face, with its broken nose and small, trim mustache, might have been that of a very savage and physical-minded man, except for the height of the well-combed cranium above it. That made his head the head of a thinker. His hands were so large that one looked twice to see that they were fine. His dark eyes could be brilliant, frank, enigmatic, narrow, or laughing as they willed.

  Open on his lap lay a large gray book, with a backing of gilt-lettered red. He pondered a passage on the page open before him:

  Having shuffled and cut the cards as here described, select one at random. Study the device upon it for such time as you count a slow twenty. Then fix your eyes on a point before you, and gaze unwinkingly and without moving until it seems that a closed door is before you, with upon its panel the device of the card you have chosen. Clarify the image in your mind, and keep it there until the door seems to swing open, and you feel that you can enter and see, hear or otherwise experience what may happen beyond that door…

  Similar, pondered John Thunstone, to the Chinese wizard-game of Yi King, as investigated and experimented upon by W. B. Seabrook. He was glad that he, and not someone less fitted for such studies, had happened upon the book and the strange cards in that Brooklyn junk-shop. Perhaps this was an anglicized form of the Yi King book—he said over in his mind the strange, archaic doggerel penned by some unknown hand on the fly-leaf:

  This book is mine, with many more,

  Of evilness and dismal lore.

  That I may of the Devil know

  And school myself to work him woe.

  Such lore Saint Dunstan also read,

  So that the Cross hath firmer stead.

  My path with honor aye hath been—

  No better is than that, I ween.

  Who had written it? What had befallen him, that he sold his strange book in a second-hand store? Perhaps, if the spell would open a spirit-door, Thunstone would know.

  He cut the cards on the stand beside him. The card he saw was stamped with a simple, colored drawing of a grotesque half-human figure, covered with spines, and flaunting bat-wings. Thunstone smiled slightly, sagged down in the chair. His eyes, narrowing, fixed themselves in the heart of the red flame…

  The illusion came sooner than he had thought. At first it was tiny, like the decorated lid of a cigar-box, then grew and grew in size and clarity—shutting out, it seemed, even the firelight into which Thunstone had stared. It seemed green and massive, and the bat-winged figure upon it glowed dully, as if it were a life-size inlay of mother of pearl. He fixed his attention upon it, found his eyes quartering the door surface to seek the knob or latch. Then saw it, something like a massive metal hook. After a moment, the door swung open, as if the weight of his gaze had pushed it inward.

  He remembered what the book then directed: Arise from your body and walk through the door. But he felt no motion, physical or spiritual. For through the open door he saw only his study—the half of his study that was behind his back, reflected as in a mirror. No, for in the mirror left would become right. Here was the rearward part of the room exactly as he knew it.

  And not empty!

  A moving, stealthy blackness was there, flowing or creeping across the rug between a chair and a smoking stand like an octopus on a sea-bottom.

  Thunstone watched. It was not a cloud nor a shadow, but something solid if not clearly shaped. It came into plainer view, closer, at the very threshold of the envisioned door. There it began to rise, a towering lean manifestation of blackness—

  It came to Thunstone’s mind that, if the scene within the doorway was faithfully a reproduction of the room behind him, then he could see to it almost the exact point where his own chair was placed. In other words, if something dark and indistinct and stealthy was uncoiling itself there, the something was directly behind where he sat.

  He did not move, did not even quicken his breath. The shape—it had a shape now, like a leafless tree with a narrow starved stem and moving tendril-like branches—aspired almost to the ceiling of the vision-room. The tendrils swayed as if in a gentle wind, then writhed and drooped. Drooped toward the point where might be the head of a seated man—if such a thing were truly behind him, it was reaching toward his head.

  Thunstone threw himself forward from the chair, straight at the vision-door. As he came well away from where he had sat, he whipped his big body straight and, cat-light despite his wrestler’s bulk, spun around on the balls of his feet. Of the many strange spells and charms he had read in years of strange study, one came to his lips, from the Egyptian Secrets:

  “Stand still, in the name of heaven! Give neither fire nor flame nor punishment!”

  He saw the black shadowy shape, ta
ll behind his chair, its crowning tendrils dangling down in the very space which his body had occupied. The light of the sinking fire made indistinct its details and outlines, but for the instant it was solid. Thunstone knew better than to retreat a step before such a thing, but he was within arm’s reach of a massive old desk. A quick clutch and heave opened a drawer, he thrust in his hand and closed it on a slender stick, no more than a rough-cut billet of whitethorn. Lifting the bit of wood like a dagger, he moved toward the half-blurred intruder. He thrust outward with the pointed end of the whitethorn stick.

  “I command, I compel in the name of—” began Thunstone.

  The entity writhed. Its tendrils spread and hovered, so that it seemed for the moment like a gigantic scrawny arm, spreading its fingers to signal for mercy. Even as Thunstone glared and held out his whitethorn, the black outline lost its clarity, dissolving as ink dissolves in water. The darkness became gray, stirred together and shrank away toward the door. It seemed to filter between panel and jamb. The air grew clearer, and Thunstone wiped his face with the hand that did not hold the whitethorn.

  He stooped and picked up the book that had spilled from his lap. He faced the fire. The door, if it had ever existed otherwise than in Thunstone’s mind, had gone like the tendril-shape. Thunstone took a pipe from his smoking stand and put it in his mouth. His face was deadly pale, but the hand that struck a match was as steady as a bronze bracket.

  Thunstone placed the book carefully on the desk. “Whoever you are who wrote the words,” he said aloud, “and wherever you are at this moment—thank you for helping me to warn myself.”

  He moved around the study, peering at the rug on which that shadow image had reared itself, prodding the pile, even kneeling to sniff. He shook his head.

  “No sign, no trace—yet for a moment it was real and potent enough—only one person I know has the wit and will to attack me like that—”

  He straightened up.

  “Rowley Thorne!”

  Leaving the study, John Thunstone donned hat and coat. He descended through the lobby of his apartment house and stopped a taxi on the street outside.

  “Take me to eighty-eight Musgrave Lane, in Greenwich Village,” he directed the driver.

  * * *

  The little bookshop looked like a dingy cave. To enter it, Thunstone must go down steps from the sidewalk, past an almost obliterated sign that read: BOOKS—ALL KINDS. Below ground the cave-motif was emphasized. It was as though one entered a ragged grotto among most peculiar natural deposits of books—shelves and stands and tables, and heaps of them on the floor like outcroppings. A bright naked bulb hung at the end of a ceiling cord, but it seemed to shed light only in the outer room. No beam, apparently, could penetrate beyond a threshold at the rear; yet Thunstone had, as always, the non-visual sense of a greater book-cave there, wherein perhaps clumps of volumes hung somehow from the ceiling, like stalactites…

  “I thought you’d be here, Mr. Thunstone,” came a genial snarl from a far corner, and the old proprietress stumped forward. She was heavy-set, shabby, white-haired, but had a proud beaked face, and eyes and teeth like a girl of twenty. “Professor Rhine and Joseph Denninger can write the books and give the exhibitions of thought transference. I just sit here and practice it, with people whose minds can tune in to mine—like you, Mr. Thunstone. You came, I daresay, for a book.”

  “Suppose,” said Thunstone, “that I wanted a copy of the Necronomicon?”

  “Suppose,” rejoined the old woman, “that I gave it to you?” She turned to a shelf, pulled several books out, and poked her withered hand into the recess behind. “Nobody else that I know would be able to look into the Necronomicon without getting into trouble. To anyone else the price would be prohibitive. To you, Mr. Thun—”

  “Leave that book where it is!” he bade her sharply. She glanced up with her bright youthful eyes, slid the volumes back into their place, and turned to wait for what he would say.

  “I knew you had it,” said Thunstone. “I wanted to be sure that you still had it. And that you would keep it.”

  “I’ll keep it, unless you ever want it,” promised the old woman.

  “Does Rowley Thorne ever come here?”

  “Thorne? The man like a burly old bald eagle? Not for months—he hasn’t the money to pay the prices I’d ask him for even cheap reprints of Albertus Magnus.”

  “Good-by, Mrs. Harlan,” said Thunstone. “You’re very kind.”

  “So are you kind,” said the old woman. “To me and to countless others. When you die, Mr. Thunstone, and may it be long ever from now, a whole generation will pray your soul into glory. Could I say something?”

  “Please do.” He paused in the act of going.

  “Thorne came here once, to ask me a favor. It was about a poor sick man who lives—if you can call it living—in a tenement across town. His name was Cavet Leslie, and Thorne said he would authorize me to pay any price for a book Cavet Leslie had.”

  “Not the Necronomicon?” prompted Thunstone.

  Her white head shook. “Thorne asked for the Necronomicon the day before, and I said I hadn’t one to sell him—which was the truth. I had it in mind that he thought Cavet Leslie’s book might be a substitute.”

  “The name of Leslie’s book?”

  She crinkled her face until it looked like a wise walnut. “He said it had no name. I was to say to Leslie, ‘your schoolbook.’”

  “Mmmm,” hummed Thunstone, frowning. “What was the address?” She wrote it on a bit of paper. Thunstone took it and smiled down. “Good-by again, Mrs. Harlan. Some books must be kept in existence, I know, despite their danger. My sort of scholarship needs them. But you’re the best and wisest person to keep them.”

  She stared after him for moments following his departure. A black cat came silently forth and rubbed its head against her.

  “If I was really to do magic with these books,” she told the animal, “I’d cut years off my age—and rake John Thunstone clear away from that Countess Monteseco, who will never, never do him justice!”

  * * *

  There was not much to learn at the place where Cavet Leslie had kept his poor lodgings. The landlord could not understand English, and Thunstone had to try two other languages before he learned that Leslie had been ill, had been under treatment by a charity physician, and had died earlier that day, apparently from some sort of throttling spasm. For a dollar, Thunstone gained permission to visit the squalid death-chamber.

  The body was gone, and Thunstone probed into every corner of the room. He found the ripped mattress, pulled away the flap of ticking and studied the rectangular recess among the wads of ancient padding. A book had been there. He touched the place—it had a strange chill. Then he turned quickly, gazing across the room.

  Some sort of shape had been there, a shape that faded as he turned, but which left an impression. Thunstone whistled softly.

  “Mrs. Harlan couldn’t get the book,” he decided. “Thorne came—and succeeded. Now, which way to Thorne?”

  The street outside was dark. Thunstone stood for a moment in front of the dingy tenement, until he achieved again the sense of something watching, approaching. He turned again, and saw or sensed, the shrinking away of a stealthy shadow. He walked in that direction.

  The sense of the presence departed, but he walked on in the same direction, until he had a feeling of aimlessness in the night. Then again he stood, with what unconcern he could make apparent, until there was a whisper in his consciousness of threat. Whirling, he followed it as before. Thus he traveled for several blocks, changing direction once. Whatever was spying upon him or seeking to ambush him, it was retreating toward a definite base of operations… At length he was able to knock upon a certain door in a certain hotel.

  Rowley Thorne opened to him, standing very calm and even triumphant in waistcoat and shirtsleeves.

  “Come in, Thunstone,” he said, in mocking cordiality. “This is more than I had dared hope for.”

  �
�I was able to face and chase your hound-thing, whatever it is,” Thunstone told him, entering. “It led me here.”

  “I knew that,” nodded Thorne, his shaven head gleaming dully in the brown-seeming light of a single small desk lamp. “Won’t you make yourself comfortable? You see,” and he took up a shaggy-covered book from the arm of an easy chair, “I am impelled at last to accept the idea of a writing which, literally, tells one everything he needs to know.”

  “You killed Cavet Leslie for it, didn’t you?” inquired Thunstone, and dropped his hat on the bed.

  Thorne clicked his tongue. “That’s bad luck for somebody, a hat on the bed. Cavet Leslie had outlived everything but a scrap of his physical self. Somewhere he’s outliving that, for I take it that his experiences and studies have unfitted his soul for any conventional hereafter. But he left me a rather amusing legacy.” And he dropped his eyes to the open book.

  “I should be flattered that you concentrated first of all in immobilizing me,” observed Thunstone, leaning his great shoulder against the doorjamb.

  “Flattered? But surely not surprised. After all, you’ve hampered me again and again in reaping a harvest of—”

  “Come off it, Thorne. You’re not even honest as a worshiper of evil. You don’t care whether you establish a cult of Satan or not.”

  Thorne pursued his hard lips. “I venture to say you’re right. I’m not a zealot. Cavet Leslie was. He entered the Deep School—know about it?”

  “I do,” Thunstone told him. “Held in a cellar below a cellar—somewhere on this continent. I’ll find it some day, and put an end to the curriculum.”

  “Leslie entered the Deep School,” Thorne continued, “and finished all the study it had to offer. He finished himself as a being capable of happiness, too. He could not look at the light, or summon the strength to walk, or even sit. Probably death was a relief to him—though, not knowing what befell him after death, we cannot be certain. What I’m summing up to is that he endured that wretched life underground to get the gift of this text book. Now I have it, without undergoing so dreadful an ordeal. Don’t reach out for it, Thunstone. You couldn’t read it, anyway.”