“That which I have awaked and borne away with me, I may not part with again. So it is written in the Book of Hidden Things. That which I have willed to be has twined its dreadful shape around me, and—if I live not to do its bidding—around those children born and unborn who shall come after me, until the bidding be done. Strange may be their joinings, and awful the aid they may summon till the end be reached. Into lands unknown and dim must the seeking go, and a house must be built for the outer guardians.
“This is the key to that lock which was given me in the dreadful, eon-old and forbidden city of Yian-Ho; the lock which I or mine must place upon the vestibule of That Which is to be found. And may the Lords of Yaddith succor me—or him—who must set that lock in place or turn the key thereof.”
Such was the message—a message which, once I had read it, I seemed to have known before. Now, as I write these words, the key is before me. I gaze on it with mixed dread and longing, and cannot find words to describe its aspect. It is of the same unknown, subtly greenish frosted metal as the lock; a metal best compared to brass tarnished with verdigris. Its design is alien and fantastic, and the coffin-shaped end of the ponderous bulk leaves no doubt of the lock it was meant to fit. The handle roughly forms a strange, nonhuman image, whose exact outlines and identity cannot now be traced. Upon holding it for any length of time I seem to feel an alien, anomalous life in the cold metal—a quickening or pulsing too feeble for ordinary recognition.
Below the eidolon is graven a faint, eon-worn legend in those blasphemous, Chinese-like hieroglyphs I have come to know so well. I can only make out the beginning—the words: “My vengeance lurks…”—before the text fades to insistinctness. There is some fatality in this timely finding of the key—for tomorrow night comes the hellish Sabbat. But strangely enough, amidst all this hideous expectancy, that question of the Sleght name bothers me more and more. Why should I dread to find it linked with the van der Heyls?
Walpurgis-Eve—April 30
The time has come. I waked last night to see the key glowing with a lurid greenish radiance—that same morbid green which I have seen in the eyes and skin of certain portraits here, on the shocking lock and key, on the monstrous menhirs of the hill, and in a thousand other recesses of my consciousness. There were strident whispers in the air—sibilant whisperings like those of the wind around that dreadful cromlech. Something spoke to me out of the frore [?] aether of space, and it said, “The hour falls.” It is an omen, and I laugh at my own fears. Have I not the dread words and the Seven Lost Signs of Terror—the power coercive of any Dweller in the cosmos or in the unknown darkened spaces? I will no longer hesistate.
The heavens are very dark, as if a terrific storm were coming on—a storm even greater than that of the night when I reached here, nearly a fortnight ago. From the village, less than a mile away, I hear a queer and unwonted babbling. It is as I thought—these poor degraded idiots are within the secret, and keep the awful Sabbat on the hill.
Here in the house the shadows gather densely. In the darkness the sky before me almost glows with a greenish light of its own. I have no yet been to the cellar. It is better that I wait, lest the sound of that muttering and padding—those slitherings and muffled reverberations—unnerve me before I can unlock the fateful door.
Of what I shall encounter, and what I must do, I have only the most general idea. Shall I find my task in the vault itself, or must I burrow deeper into the nighted heart of our planet? There are things I do not yet understand—or at least, prefer not to understand—despite a dreadful, increasing and inexplicable sense of bygone familiarity with this fearsome house. That chute, for instance, leading down from the little locked room. But I think I know why the wing with the vault extends toward the hill.
6 P.M.
Looking out the north windows, I can see a group of villagers on the hill. They seem unaware of the lowering sky, and are digging near the great central menhir. It occurs to me that they are working on that stone-rimmed hollow place which looks like a long-choked tunnel entrance. What is to come? How much of the olden Sabbat rites have these people retained? That key glows horribly—it is not imagination. Dare I use it as it must be used? Another matter has greatly disturbed me. Glancing nervously through a book in the library I came upon an ampler form of the name that has teased my memory so sorely: “Trintje, wife of Adriaen Sleght.” The Adriaen leads me to the very brink of recollection.
Midnight
Horror is unleashed, but I must not weaken. The storm has broken with pandemoniac fury, and lightning has struck the hill three times, yet the hybrid, malformed villagers are gathering within the cromlech. I can see them in the almost constant flashes. The great standing stones loom up shockingly, and have a dull green luminosity that reveals them even when the lightning is not there. The peals of thunder are deafening, and every one seems to be horribly answered from some indeterminate direction. As I write, the creatures on the hill have begun to chant and howl and scream in a degraded, half-simian version of the ancient ritual. Rain pours down like a flood, yet they leap and emit sounds in a kind of diabolic ecstacy.
“Iä Shub-Niggurath! The Goat With a Thousand Young!”
But the worst thing is within the house. Even at this height, I have begun to hear sounds from the cellar. It is the padding and muttering and slithering and muffled reverberations within the vault.…
Memories come and go. That name Adriaen Sleght pounds oddly at my consciousness. Dirck van der Heyl’s son-in-law…his child old Dirck’s granddaughter and Abaddon Corey’s greatgranddaughter.…
Later
Merciful God! At last I know where I saw that name. I know, and am transfixed with horror. All is lost…
The key has begun to fell warm as my left hand nervously clutches it. At times that vague quickening or pulsing is so distinct that I can almost feel the living metal move. It came from Yian-Ho for a terrible purpose, and to me—who all too late know the thing stream of van der Heyl blood that trickles down through the Sleghts into my own lineage—has descended the hideous task of fulfilling that purpose.…
My courage and curiousity wane. I know the horror that lies beyond that iron door. What if Claes van der Heyl was my ancestor—need I expiate his nameless sin? I will not—I swear I will not!… (the writing here grows indistinct) …too late—cannot help self—black paws materialize—am dragged away toward the cellar.…
HYDRA, by Henry Kuttner
Originally published in Weird Tales, April 1939.
“There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”
—Arthur Machen.
*
Two men died; possibly three. So much is known. The tabloids ran flaming headlines telling of the mysterious mutilation and death of Kenneth Scott, noted Baltimore author and occultist, and later, they capitalized similarly on the disappearance of Robert Ludwig, whose correspondence with Scott was well known in literary circles. The equally strange and even more ghastly death of Paul Edmond, while separated from the scene of the Scott horror by the width of a continent, was clearly connected with it. This was shown by the presence of a certain much-discussed object which was found clutched in Edmond’s rigid hands—and which the credulous claim caused his death. While this solution is improbable, it is nevertheless true that Paul Edmond bled to death because his carotid artery was severed, and it is also true that there are features about the case difficult to explain in the light of present-day science.
The tabloids made a great deal of Edmond’s diary, and even conventional papers found it difficult to handle that unusual document in a fashion that would not lay them open to the charge of yellow journalism. The Holly
wood Citizen-News solved the problem for its contemporaries by quoting the least fantastic portions of the diary, and hinting plainly that Edmond had been a fiction writer, and that the man’s notes had never been intended as a truthful summary of events. The privately printed pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul, which played so important a part in the diary, seems to be of purely fictional origin. None of the local booksellers has heard of it, and Mr. Russell Hodgkins, California’s most noted bibliophile, declares that the title and the volume must have originated in the mind of the ill-fated Paul Edmond.
Yet, according to Edmond’s diary and certain other papers and letters discovered in his desk, it was this pamphlet which caused Ludwig and Edmond to undertake the disastrous experiment. Ludwig had decided to visit his California correspondent, making a leisurely voyage from New York by way of the Panama Canal. The Carnatic docked on August 15th, and Ludwig spent several hours wandering-through San Pedro. It was there, in a musty “swap shop,” that he bought the pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul. When the young man arrived at Edmond’s Hollywood apartment he had the booklet with him.
Both Ludwig and Edmond were deeply interested in the occult. They had dabbled in witchcraft and demonology, as a result of their acquaintance with Scott, who possessed one of the best occult libraries in America.
Scott was a strange man. Slender, sharp-eyed, and taciturn, he spent most of his time in an old brownstone house in Baltimore. His knowledge of esoteric matters was little short of phenomenal; he had read the Chhaya Ritual, and in his letters to Ludwig and Edmond had hinted at the real meanings behind the veiled hints and warnings in that half-legendary manuscript. In his great library were such names as Sinistrari, Zancherius, and the ill-famed Gougenot des Mousseau; and in his library safe he had, it was rumored, an immense scrapbook filled with excerpts copied from such fantastic sources as the Book of Karnak, the monstrous Sixtystone, and the blasphemous Elder Key, of which only two copies are reputed to exist on earth.
It was little wonder, therefore, that the two students were anxious to tear aside the veil and view the astounding mysteries of which Scott hinted so cautiously. In his diary Edmond confessed that his own curiosity was the direct cause of the tragedy.
Yet it was Ludwig who bought the booklet and pored over it with Edmond in the latter’s apartment. Certainly Edmond described the pamphlet plainly enough, and it is strange, therefore, that no bibliophile could identify it. According to the diary, it was quite small, about four by five inches, bound in coarse brown paper, and yellowed and crumbling with age. The printing—in Eighteenth Century type with the long s—was crudely done, and there was neither a date-line nor a publisher’s imprint. There were eight pages; seven of them filled with what Edmond called the usual banal sophisms of mysticism, and on the last page were the specific directions for what would nowadays be known as “projecting one’s astral.”
The general process was familiar to both students. Their researches had informed them that the soul—or in modern occult language, “astral body”—is supposed to be an ethereal double or ghost, capable of projection to a distance. But the specific directions—finding these was unusual. Nor did they seem difficult to follow. Edmond has purposely been vague about these preparations, but one gathers that the two students visited several chemists before obtaining the ingredients needed. Where they secured the cannabis indica later discovered on the scene of the tragedy is a mystery, but not, of course, one impossible of solution.
On August 15th Ludwig, apparently without Edmond’s knowledge, wrote to Scott by air-mail, describing the pamphlet and its contents, and asking for advice.
On the night of August 18th, approximately half an hour after Kenneth Scott received Ludwig’s letter, the two young occultists undertook their disastrous experiment.
CHAPTER 2
Later, Edmond blamed himself. In the diary he mentions Ludwig’s uneasiness, as though the latter sensed some hidden danger. Ludwig suggested postponing the trial for a few days, but Edmond laughed at his fears. It ended with the two placing the required ingredients in a brazier and kindling the mixture.
There were other preparations, too, but Edmond is quite vague. He makes one or two furtive references to “the seven lamps” and “the infra color,” but nothing can be made of these terms. The two had decided to attempt projection of their astral bodies across the continent; they would attempt communication with Kenneth Scott. One can detect a tinge of youthful vanity in this.
Cannabis indica formed one of the ingredients of the mixture in the brazier; that has been ascertained by analysis. It was the presence of this Indian drug which led so many to believe that the later entries in Edmond’s diary were evolved from nothing more tangible than the fantasies of an opium or hashish dream, directed along the curious channels they took merely because of the students’ preoccupation with those things at the time. Edmond dreamed he saw Scott’s house in Baltimore. But it must be remembered that he had been staring at a photograph of that house which he had placed on the table before him; and he was consciously willing to go there. Nothing is more logical therefore, than that Edmond simply dreamed what he wanted to dream.
But Ludwig had the identical vision, or, at least, so he stated afterward—unless Edmond, in that entry, lied. It is the opinion of Professor Perry L. Lewis, a recognized expert on dream-phenomena, that Edmond, during his hashish vision, spoke of his illusions aloud, with no conscious intention of so doing, nor any later memory of it—and that Ludwig, as in a hypnotic trance, simply saw the phantasms Edmond’s words conjured up in his mind.
Edmond states in his diary that after watching the burning contents of the brazier for some minutes, he fell into a state of somnolent trance, in which he saw his surroundings clearly, but with certain curious alterations which can only be attributed to the action of the drug. The marijuana smoker may see a tiny hall bedroom metamorphose itself into a huge vaulted chamber; similarly, Edmond stated that the room in which he sat seemed to enlarge. Oddly, however, the growth was of a strangely abnormal type; the geometry of the room gradually became all wrong. Edmond stresses this point without attempting to explain it. Just when the shifting became noticeable he does not mention, but presently he found himself in the midst of a chamber which, although recognizably his own, had changed until it centered at a certain point.
The notes are almost incoherent here. Edmond obviously found it difficult to describe what he saw in his vision. All the lines and curves of the room, he insists with odd emphasis, seemed to point at one specific spot, the brazier where the mixture of drugs and chemicals was smoldering.
Very faintly a persistent ringing came to his ears, but this dwindled and at last died away altogether. At the time Edmond thought the sound due to the effects of the drug. It was not until later that he learned of Scott’s frantic efforts to reach him by means of long-distance telephone. The shrill ringing grew fainter and faded into silence.
Edmond was of an experimental turn of mind. He tried to shift his gaze to specific objects he remembered, a vase, a lamp, a table. But the room seemed to possess an indescribable viscid fluidity, so that he found his stare inevitably slipping along warped lines and curves until he was again watching the brazier. And it was then that he became conscious of something unusual taking place at that spot.
The mixture no longer smoldered. Instead, a strange crystal formation was building itself up within the brazier. This object Edmond found impossible to describe; he could only say that it seemed a continuation of the warped lines of the room, carrying them beyond the point where they centered. Apparently unconscious of the insanity of such a concept, he goes on to say that his eyes began to ache as he watched the crystalline object, but he could not turn away his gaze.
The crystal drew him. He felt an abrupt and agonizing suction; there was a high-pitched thrumming in the air, and suddenly he was drifting with increasing velocity toward the
thing in the brazier. It sucked him in—such is Edmond’s inexplicable phrase; he felt a moment of incredible cold, and then a new vision rose up before him.
Gray fog, and instability. Edmond stressed this curious feeling of flux, which he declared existed within himself. He felt, he says oddly, like a cloud of smoke, wavering and drifting aimlessly. But when he glanced down he saw his own body, fully clothed and apparently quite substantial.
Now a dreadful feeling of uneasiness began to oppress his mind. The fog thickened and whirled; the nightmare, causeless fear familiar to the opium-taker clutched him in its grip. Something, he felt, was approaching, something utterly horrible and frightful in its potent menace. Then, quite suddenly, the fog was gone.
Far beneath him he saw what at first he took to be the sea. He was hanging unsupported in empty air, and a surging grayness shimmered and crawled from horizon to horizon. The fluctuating leaden surface was dotted and speckled with round dark blobs, these were innumerable. Without conscious volition he felt himself drawn down vertically, and as he approached the mysterious grayness he saw it more clearly.
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® Page 33
