The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®

by Lovecraft, H. P.

  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 hours. Then I came back to the apartment and almost immediately Scott spoke 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 almost 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 teeth having horribly mangled Edmond’s throat and severed the carotid artery.

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

  THE SUICIDE IN THE STUDY, by Robert Bloch

  Originally published in Weird Tales, June 1935.

  To see him sitting there in the dim-lit darkness of the study, one would never have suspected him for what he was. Wizards nowadays are not garbed in cabalistic robes of silver and black; instead they wear purple dressing-gowns. It is not required of them that their eyebrows meet, their nails grow long as talons, and their eyes flame like emerald-imprisoned dreams. Nor are they necessarily bent and furtive, and old. This one was not; he was young and slim, almost imperially straightforward.

  He sat beneath the lamplight in the great oak-paneled room; a dark, handsome man of perhaps thirty-five years of age. There was little of cruelty or malice visible in his keen, clean-featured face, and little of madness in his eyes; yet he was a wizard, just as surely as if he lurked over human sacrifices in the skull-strewn darkness of forbidden tombs.

  It was only necessary for one to survey the walls of his study for corroboration. Only a wizard would possess those moldering, maggoty volumes of monstrous and fantastic lore; only a thaumaturgical adept would dare the darker mysteries of the Necronomicon, Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm, the Black Rites of mad Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast, or Comte d’Erlette’s ghastly Cultes des Goules. No one save a sorcerer would have access to the ancient manuscripts bound in Ethiopian skin, or burn such rich and aphrodisiac incense in an enshrined skull. Who else would fill the mercifully cloaking darkness of the room with curious relics, mortuary souvenirs from ravished graves, or worm-demolished scrolls of primal dread?

  Superficially, it was a normal room that night, and its occupant a normal man. But for proof of its inherent strangeness it was not necessary to glance at the skull, the bookcases, or the grim, shadow-shrouded remains, to know its occupant for what he was. For James Allington wrote in his secret diary tonight, and his musings were far from sanity.

  “Tonight I am ready to make the test. I am convinced at last that splitting of the identity can be accomplished by means of therapeutic hypnotism, provided that the mental attitude conducive to such a partition can be induced.

  “Fascinating subject, that. Dual identity—the dream of men from the beginning of time! Two souls in one body…all philosophy is based on comparative logic; good and evil. Why, then, can not such a division exist in the human soul? Stevenson was only partly right when he wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He imagined a chemical metamorphosis varying from one extreme to the other. I believe that both identities are co-existent; that, once they are separated by auto-hypnotic thought, a man can enjoy two existences simultaneously—his good self and his bad.

  “They laughed at my theory in the club. Foster—that pompous old fool!—called me a dreamer. Dreamer? What does he, a petty scientific chemist, know of the basic mysteries of Life and Death? A glimpse into my laboratory would shock his smug soul into insanity. The others, too; mob-catering writers, pedantic fossils who call themselves professors, prim biologists who are shocked at the mention of my experiments in synthetic creation of life—what do such as these understand? They would shudder at the Necronomicon; burn it, too, if they could; burn it as their pious ancestors did three hundred years ago. Witch-baiters, skeptics, materialists all! I’m sick of the whole silly pack of them. It is the fate of the genius to dwell alone. Very well, then, I’ll dwell alone—but soon they will come cringing to my door and beg for mercy!

  ‘If my work tonight only succeeds! If I can succeed in hypnotizing myself into dual personality, physically manifested! Even modern psychology claims it can be done. Spiritualism credits its possibilities. The ancients have furnished me the key to the problem, as they have done before… Alhazred knew many things—it was only the weight of the knowledge th
at drove him mad.

  “Two bodies! Once I can achieve that state at will, I shall hold the key to powers for ever denied to men. Immortality, perhaps; it is only a step further. After that there will be no need of skulking here in secret; no necessity of passing my researches off as a harmless hobby. Dreamer, eh? I’ll show them!

  “I wonder what the other shape will look like? Will it be human? It must, otherwise—but I had better not think of that. It is quite probable that it will be an ugly-looking customer. I do not flatter myself. I know that the evil side of my nature, while concealed, is undoubtedly dominant. There is danger, though—evil is an uncontrollable force in its purest form. It will draw strength from my body, too—energy to manifest itself physically. But that must not deter me. I must make the test. If it succeeds I shall have power—power undreamt of—power to kill, to rend, to destroy! I shall add to my little collection here, and settle a few old scores with my skeptical friends. After that there will be other pleasant things to do.

  “But enough of such musings. I must begin. I shall lock the study doors; the servants have gone for the evening and there will be no one to intrude upon my privacy. I dare not risk using an electrically manipulated machine for fear of some untoward consequences in removing the hypnosis. I shall try to induce a hypnotic trance by concentrating intently on this heavy, polished paper-knife here on my desk. Meanwhile, I shall focus my will on the matter at hand, using the Soul Chant of Sebek as a focal point.

  “I shall set the alarm for twelve o’clock, exactly one hour from now. Its ringing will break the spell. That, I believe, is all I need bother to do. As an added precaution, I shall burn this record. Should anything go wrong, I would hate to have all my little plans disclosed to the world.

  “Nothing shall go wrong, however. I have used auto-hypnosis many times before, and I will be very careful. It will be a marvelous feeling to control two bodies at once. I can hardly control myself—I find my body trembling in eagerness and anticipation of its forthcoming metamorphosis. Power!

  “Very well. After this report is reduced to ashes I shall be ready—ready to undertake the greatest experiment man has ever known.”

  CHAPTER 2

  James Allington sat before the shaded lamp. Before him on the table lay the paper-knife, its polished blade shimmering. Only the slow ticking of a clock broke the sable silence of the locked room.

  The wizard’s eyes were glassy; they shone in the light, immobile as a basilisk’s. The reflection from the surface of the knife stabbed through his retina like the fiery ray of a burning sun, but his betranced gaze never wavered.

  Who knows what strange inversion was occurring in the dreamer’s bewitched brain; what subtle transmutation generated from his purpose? He had fallen into his sleep with the fixed resolve of severing his soul, dividing his personality, bisecting his ego. Who knows? Hypnotism does many strange things.

  What secret Powers did he invoke to aid him in his fight? What black genesis of unholy life lurked within the shadows of his inner consciousness; what demons of leering evil granted him his dark desires?

  For granted they were. Suddenly he awoke, and he could feel that he was no longer alone in that nighted room. He felt the presence of another, there in the darkness on the other side of the table.

  Or was it another? Was it not he, himself? He glanced down at his body, and was unable to suppress a gasp of astonishment. He seemed to have shrunk to less than a quarter of his ordinary size! His body was light, fragile, dwarfed. For a moment he was incapable of thought or movement. His eyes strayed to the corner of the room, trying vainly to see the gloom-obscured movements of a presence that shambled there.

  Then things happened. Out of the darkness nightmare came; stark, staring nightmare—a monstrous, hairy figure; huge, grotesque, simian—a hideous travesty of all things human. It was black madness; slavering, mocking madness with little red eyes of wisdom old and evil; leering snout and yellow fangs of grimacing death. It was like a rotting, living skull upon the body of a black ape. It was grisly and wicked, troglodytic and wise.

  A monstrous thought assailed Allington. Was this his other self—this ghoul-spawned, charnel horror of corpse-accursed dread?

  Too late the wizard realized what had befallen him. His experiment had succeeded, but terribly so. He had not realized how far the evil in his nature had outbalanced the good. This monster—this grisly abomination of darkness—was stronger than he was, and, being solely evil, it was not mentally controlled by his other self. Allington viewed it now with new fear in his eyes. It was like a creature from the Pit. All that was foul and obscene and anti-human in his makeup lay behind that grinning parody of a countenance. The beast-like body hinted of shadows that creep beneath the grave or lurk entombed within the deepest recesses of normal minds. Yet in it Allington recognized a mad, atavistic caricature of himself—all the lust, the greed, the insane ambition, the cruelty, the ignorance; the fiend-spawned secrets of his soul within the body of a gigantic ape!

  As if in answer to his recognition, the creature laughed, and tentacles of terror gripped the wizard’s heart.

  The thing was coming toward him—it meant to destroy him, as evil always does. Allington, his tiny body ludicrously struggling to move quickly while impeded by clothes now ridiculously large for his diminutive frame, raced from his chair and flattened himself against the wall of the study. His voice, curiously treble, shrieked frantic supplication and futile commands to the approaching nemesis.

  His prayers and curses turned to the hoarse gibberings of madness as the huge beast lunged across the table. His experiment was succeeding with a vengeance…vengeance! His glaring eyes watched, fascinated, as one great paw grasped the paper-knife, and fearsome laughter riddled the night. It was laughing…laughing! Somewhere an alarm-clock rang, but the wizard could not hear…

  They found James Allington lying dead upon his study floor. There was a paper-knife imbedded in his breast, and they called it suicide, for no one could possibly have entered that locked and windowless room.

  But that did not explain the fingerprints on the handle of the knife—the terrible fingerprints—like those left by the hand of a gigantic ape.

  MARMOK, Emil Petaja (Poem)

  Sleep that doth harbor a dream of dread,

  Whence come the fingers that beckoned and led

  My dream-stung soul from my canopied bed—

  Whither dost take me, ere I am dead?

  Beyond the skull-grinning mid- March moon

  Over the phosphorous-lit lagoon

  Out past the darkest pits of the night,

  Fast thru the stars in this evil flight;

  Lead thee me out past the rim of space,

  Show me that ravenous, pain- black face,

  Marmok, whose myrmidons ever are questing

  For souls who wander at night, unresting.

  Then shall I know an ultimate bliss

  Tasting the fury of that cosmic kiss,

  Whilst my earth-cloak lies limply on the floor

  To waken and gibber forever-more.

  THE INTRUDER, by Emil Petaja

  It was in San Francisco, on the walk above the sand and surf that pounded like the heart of the Earth. There was wind, the sky and sea blended in a grey mist.

  I was sitting on a stone bench watching a faint hint of distant smoke, wondering what ship it was and from what far port.

  Mine was a pleasant wind—loneliness. So when he came, wrapped in his great overcoat and muffler, hat pulled down, and sat on my bench I was about to rise and leave him. There were other benches, and I was not in the mood for idle gossip about politics and taxes.

  “Don’t go. Please.” His plea was authentic.

  “I must get back to my shop,” I said.

  “Surely you can spare a moment.”

 
I could not even to begin to place the accent in his voice. Low as a whisper, tense. His deep-set eyes held me…his face was pale and had a serenity born of suffering. A placid face, not given to emotional betrayals, yet mystical. I sat down again. Here was someone bewilderingly strange. Someone I wouldn’t soon forget. He moved a hand toward me, as tho to hold me from going, and I saw with mild curiosity that he wore heavy gloves, like mittens.

  “I am not well. I…I must not be out in the damp air,” I said. “But today I just had to go out and walk. I had to.”

  “I can understand.” I warmed to the wave of aloneness that lay in his words. “I too have been ill. I know you, Otis Marlin. I have visited your shop off Market Street. You are not rich, but the feel of the covers on a fine book between your hands suffices. Am I right?”

  I nodded, “But how…”

  “You have tried writing, but have had no success. Alone in the world, your loneliness has much a family man, harassed might envy.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted, wondering if he could be a seer, a fake mystic bent on arousing in me an interest in spiritism favorable to his pocket-book. His next words were a little amused, but he didn’t smile.

  “No, I’m not a psychic—in the ordinary sense, I’ve visited your shop. I was there only yesterday,” he said. And I remembered him. In returning from my lunch I had met him coming out of my humble place of business. One glimpse into those brooding eyes was not a thing to soon forget, and I recalled pausing to watch his stiff-legged progress down the street and around the corner.