The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®

by Lovecraft, H. P.

I changed the subject.

  Chapter IV

  We arrived at our Uncle’s house by late afternoon, after driving through what was left of the old town. Rows of dingy housing inhabited by whiskered, surly men and slatternly women and squalling brats…storefronts shut and mouldering into decay…dirt streets cut with ruts, with scrub grass growing in many of them. And beyond the rotting wharfs of the harbor, where only a small boat or two gave evidence of fishermen, loomed the abandoned warehouses and the crumbling canneries. It was hard to believe that this disintegrating ghost town had been a vigorous community in Brian’s boyhood, only a dozen or fifteen years ago. It looked contaminated—poisoned, in some uncanny way—and slumping almost visibly into ruin.

  “I’m certainly not surprised you’ve stayed away all of these years,” I murmured. “The wonder is, Uncle Hiram kept on, with all his money: I’d of moved to San Francisco or somewhere—anywhere but Durnham Beach!”

  Brian grunted assent. “Still, the house is grand,” he mused, looking it over. And I had to admit that it was. A two-story, rambling stucco structure in the Spanish Hacienda style, with red tile roofs and chimneys, ringed about with desolate gardens gone to seed and fishponds long dry, scummed with filth and rotting leaves.

  “Doesn’t look like he kept the place up in recent years,” I remarked.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said. Then he pointed to a stretch of empty field bordering the property, beyond a row of dilapidated and dying palms. “Maybe he couldn’t,” he added thoughtfully.

  “What does that mean?”

  He nodded to the empty fields: raw red clay, cut into ditches and hollows and gullies, stretched beyond the row of palms.

  “Neighborhood sort of went to pot,” he said sourly. “That is Hubble’s Field…”

  After a couple of tries, we opened the big front door with the keys from Uncle Hiram’s lawyer, and entered a dim, cool front hall. Suits of rusty armor stood beneath tattered banners and faded tapestries; a grand spiral staircase wound through the dimness into the upper reaches of the house. Dust lay thick and scummy on heavy, carved, antique furniture, and gusts of rain from some broken window upstairs had turned the old carpet green with mildew.

  The place had a cold, unlived-in feeling, despite its attempt at feudal grandeur. It looked like the reception hall in some high-class funeral parlor with pretensions towards Baroque.

  “Well, we’re here,” Brian grunted. “Let’s look around—explore.” There were tall stained glass windows in the grand dining hall, whose heavy oak table must have seated twenty guests, if guests had ever been welcome here, and I had a queasy feeling they had not. Bronze statuary stood about on old sideboards and stone mantles, and there was quite a clutter of end-tables and bric-a-brac, some fine pieces of old Indian pottery, Victorian art glass, ashtrays and brass pots. The air was musty and unwholesome, although the house had not really been closed that long: Hiram Stokely had only recently died, after all—did he have something about open windows and fresh air?

  Or did the breeze that blew across Hubble’s Field, where hundreds and hundreds of corpses had rotted into the earth over centuries, bear with it the taint of some miasma, some pestilence so unholy, that even in the hot summer months, Hiram Stokely had preferred to stifle behind shut windows, rather than breathe it in?

  It was a question to which I really desired no answer.

  We found the library on the second floor, a huge room, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. I didn’t really feel in the mood for evaluating my inheritance that grey and gruesome afternoon: but ran my eye cursorily over the shelves. Tooled leather bindings held standards sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, the Lake Poets. Doubtless, a good second-hand book dealer in San Francisco could turn a tidy profit for me, if the damp and mildew hadn’t gotten to the books first.

  “My God! What’s that?” ejaculated Brian in startled tones. He was staring at an oil painting which hung on the paneled wall beside the door. Dim with dust and neglect, its thickly scrolled gilt frame held a shocking scene I could not quite make out in the dim light.

  Peering closer, I read the little brass plate attached to the bottom of the frame. “Richard Upton Pickman,” I murmured. “I’ve heard of him, Boston artist—”

  Then I lifted my eyes to study the painting. With a distinct sense of shock I saw a dim, shadowy graveyard vault, stone walls slick with trickling moisture, pallid and bloated fungi sprouting underfoot; scores of obscenely naked, un-wholesomely plump men and women, naked and filthy, with heavy clawed hands and a suggestion of dog-like muzzles about their sloping brows and distorted lower faces, were clustered about one who held a guidebook. What was so spine-chillingly ghastly about the grotesque painting was the uncanny, the virtually photographic realism of the artist’s technique…that, and the hellish expressions of hideous, gloating relish stamped on the fat features of the degenerate, the almost bestial, hound-muzzled faces…

  With a shudder of aversion, I dropped my gaze hastily from the oil, to scan the title of the picture.

  “‘Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn,’” I read half-aloud.

  Brian looked sick. “God, I’ll sell that abomination first off!” he swore feelingly. And I didn’t blame him: frankly, I’d have burned the grisly thing.

  We decided to stay the night, since it would have taken us hours to drive back to Santiago. We’d driven past a dingy little diner near the docks on our trip through town, but, somehow, neither of us felt like retracing our path through those rutted streets lined with tottering, decaying tenements. In a mood of festive generosity, Brian’s landlady had packed us a large picnic lunch, which we had only nibbled at along the way, so we built a fire in a cavernous stone fireplace and wolfed down cold tea, ham and chicken sandwiches and potato salad by the flickering orange light of the blaze. A thin, drizzly rain had started up; the skies were leaden and overcast; a mournful wind prowled and whimpered about the eaves. It was going to be a filthy night, and neither of us felt like crawling into bed after one look at damp, stale-smelling sheets and empty, drafty bedrooms. We fed the fire and curled up on a couple of sofas, wrapped in quilts found in an upstairs closet.

  Brian was soon snoring comfortably, but I found myself unable to get relaxed enough to feel drowsy. Giving it up after a while, I stirred up the fire and lit an old hurricane lamp we’d found on the back porch, which still held plenty of oil. Then I went hunting through the shelves for something to read. Twain, Dumas, Balzac—all of the standard classics were too heavy for my gloomy mood, but surely, somewhere in among all of these thousands of embalmed masterpieces, Uncle Hiram must have tucked away a good thriller or a juicy detective story…

  On one of the lower shelves I noticed something odd: a row of books and pamphlets which stood behind the front row, which made me wonder if all of the bookshelves were built double…or was this, perhaps, where Uncle Hiram had squeamishly concealed from casual public discovery a small, choice collection of “risqué” Victoriana? Grinning, I pried one of the volumes out and held it up to the light so that I could read the title.

  It was Night-Gaunts, a novel by Edgar Henquist Gordon, published in London by Charnel House Publishers…great heaven! I was holding in my hands an extremely rare and very valuable book. It was the first book Gordon had published and, probably because of what critics of the period had damned as its “excessive morbidity,” had been a total failure, which was why the volume I held in my grasp was so sought-after by collectors of the bizarre and the fantastic.

  Setting it down gently on the table, I removed the front row of books and began to take out and to examine one by one the hidden volumes they had concealed. The next one was also by Gordon, his privately published novel, The Soul of Chaos. This was followed by a rare copy of the obscure magazine Outré, the very issue which contained Gordon’s famous first short-story, “Gargoyle”…for my p
rojected book on Decadence in literature I had studied a photographic copy of “Gargoyle,” obtained not easily and with considerable expenditure of time, and I remembered well its phantasmagoric lore of black cities on the outermost rim of space, where weird beings whisper unmentionable blasphemies from formless thrones that stand beyond the domain of matter…

  The next volume was a slim volume of verse by Edward Pickman Derby entitled Azathoth and Other Horrors, into which I had also peered and which was a valuable first edition in a very desirable state. Paired with this was a second volume of verse, The People of the Monolith, by Justin Geoffrey; then came several crumbling and yellowed copies of Outré and another magazine called Whispers which contained the famous tales of that extraordinary, overlooked young genius, Michael Hayward. But the next book was such an astonishing find that I virtually reeled backwards in slack-jawed amazement: it was the original, unpublished manuscript of Amadaeus Carson’s notorious and legendary novel, Black God of Madness, which most authorities believed no longer to be in existence.

  I had stumbled upon an amazing trove of literary treasures so fabulously rare as almost to be considered legendary.

  Which made me wonder—it was only an idle, passing thought!—what other hidden treasures the house of Hiram Stokely might conceal.

  Chapter V

  When Brian woke to a grey and drizzly morning, and I shared with him the wonder and delight of my discoveries, he was considerably less enthralled than he might have been. I suppose it takes a Liberal Arts education with a deep interest in decadent literature to fully appreciate the profundity of my discoveries, but, still, he could have showed a little more interest—!

  “Pretty rare stuff, and really valuable, eh?” he mused, leafing through the bound manuscript of Black God of Madness.

  “Some of these items are almost priceless,” I said. “The one you’re examining is not the only unpublished manuscript, either: here’s what seems to be the authentic original manuscript of Simon Maglore’s celebrated, prize-winning poem “The Witch is Hung,” famous for its riot of wild imagery and eldritch color…and here’s a gem: a true first edition of Halpin Chalmer’s arcane and recondite work, The Secret Watcher, another first edition from Charnel House in London…”

  “Yes, and here’s another one,” he muttered, looking through a slender pamphlet. “Visions from Yaddith, verses by Ariel Prescott, Charnel House, Publishers: London, 1927…I’ve heard of her; didn’t she die raving in a madhouse, like your Harold Hadley Copeland?”

  “Yes; in Oakdeane,” I said briefly. “And here’s the notorious January, 1922 issue of Whispers, which contains that famous—or infamous!—tale by Randolph Carter, “The Attic Window.” This copy could be worth hundreds to the right collector; when the story appeared, it aroused such an outcry of revulsion that every known copy of that issue was withdrawn from the newsstands…”

  Brian was glancing through some magazines, flaking and yellowed with age. “Who was Phillip Howard?” he murmured curiously.

  “The author of several short-stories that would have delighted the soul of Poe and Bierce,” I declared. “‘The House of the Worm’ is probably the most notorious; at least one young reader, a student at Midwestern University, I believe, went insane because of it. Another of his tales is in one of the issues you’re looking at: ‘The Defilers,’ it’s called; I remember an article in the Partridgeville Gazette as claiming the magazine received no fewer than three hundred and ten letters of outraged indignation when they published that tale…”

  “Didn’t know Uncle had such morbid tastes in literature,” he said wonderingly. Then, looking up: “What’s that you’ve got?”

  “More original manuscripts,” I whispered almost reverently. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of that appalling young genius, Robert Blake? I thought not; well, he only died last year, after all…but word is getting around about these stories.”

  I stared at the neatly-written manuscript pages of “Shaggai,” “The Feaster from the Stars,” “The Stairs in the Crypt,” “The Burrower Beneath,” and “In the Vale of Pnath.”

  “Someday, they must be published, for all to read,” I murmured, hungrily scanning the papers.

  But Brian was examining the pile in bafflement. “If they’re so rare and valuable, why hide them away behind another row of books?” he asked, almost challengingly. “I always thought collectors liked to show off their treasures—why?”

  I gave him look for look.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  * * * *

  We drove to the diner for breakfast and bought some supplies for lunch, as the utilities were still turned on and it might be more pleasant to cook something than go out through the rain again. We spent the rest of the morning cataloguing the furniture and pictures; I don’t know much about antiques, but everything looked pretty valuable to me. With a little luck, we could each come away from this with a sizable sum of money. The real estate value of Uncle Hiram’s house was another matter; the way the town was slouching into decay—and the nearness of the house to Hubble’s Field—might bring the resale value way down.

  I was mulling over these things while going through my Uncle’s curio collection, when I was roused by a startled whoop from Brian.

  “What’s up?” I demanded, joining him in the library. “You just about gave me a heart attack…”

  Then my words trailed away. Brian was grinning at me excitedly, beside a door-size opening in the bookshelves. “A secret room!” he exclaimed, eyes a-gleam with boyish enthusiasm. “I was searching behind the shelves to see it there were any more concealed books, and must have triggered the mechanism. Like to scared me out of a year’s growth! Take a look…”

  I peered past his burly shoulders into a narrow, small, cramped, airless room, revealed to view when one of the bookcases had swung ajar like a door. It was so dark within the hidden chamber that, at first, all I could see was a huge piece of ancient oakwood furniture. It took me a few moments to identify it.

  “My God! That’s an adumbry; looks authentic, too,” I gasped.

  “What’s—”

  “Sort of a Medieval bookcase. Monks in the old monasteries used them to lay flat books too huge to stand on edge,” I said absently.

  “Looks like they left a few behind, then,” he remarked. For there were a number of immense volumes on the low, flat shelving—books bound in vellum, wrinkled and yellowed with age, or in flaking black leather. I pulled one down, screwing up my face at the reek of ancient mildew and decay which arose from it like a palpable touch.

  The next instant a pang of fearful surmise stabbed through me. I held in my hands an Elizabethan folio of fabulous age, a bound manuscript written in a crabbed hand on thick sheets of excellent parchment. And the title page bore this inscription: Al Aziph, ye Booke of ye Arab, Call’d, ye Necronomicon of Abdoul Al-hazred, Newly Englisshed by Me, Master Jno. Dee, of Mortlake, Doctor of ye Arts.

  Even Brian could not help but be impressed, by the discovery, doubtless remembering that I had called the Necronomicon “one of the rarest books in the world,” which indeed it was. It was worth, I suppose, thousands…even more, if it truly was what it seemed to be. That is, I am no expert in Elizabethan or Jacobean handwriting, but the huge folio pages looked old enough to have been in Dr. Dee’s own hand. Could this be the original manuscript?

  “Here’s another one,” Brian muttered thoughtfully. “Livre d’Eibon…”

  “…The Book of Eibon,” I said dazedly. I examined it; the ancient bound manuscript was tattered and in a disreputable condition, the pages water-stained and foxed with mildew. Still and all, the antiquated Norman-French seemed legible enough…and also, the calligraphy of the handwriting looked old enough to be in Gaspard du Nord’s veritable hand…

  With repetition, I found, the shocks of discovery diminish. The min
d numbs, can bear no more. There were other books on the shelves, but we did not look at them. The light from the open door revealed cabalistic designs traced in chalk on the floor; curious and oddly obscene instruments of brass, copper, or steel glittered on the topmost shelf; the air was rank with mouldering decay, stale and vitiated. Quite suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach: now I knew, or thought I knew, why Uncle Hiram had broken off relations with his family.

  It was not his doing, it was theirs. The Winfields were of ancient stock; rumors and whispers of disgusting witch-cult survivals in our accursed corner of New England had come to them, with whispers of certain disturbing and unsettling doings in Arkham, Innsmouth and Dunwich.

  The Winfields had cast Uncle Hiram out because he was dabbling in rituals and lore too loathsome, too blasphemous, to be tolerated.

  And I am a Winfield…

  No words passed between us, but we left the secret room together, as if in obedience to the same impulse. And we left the hidden door ajar.

  Chapter VI

  We did little more the rest of that cold, drizzly day; nor did we discuss what we had found. Brian was too healthy-minded, too whole-boyishly wholesome and normal to have read the queer old texts and the tainted literature into which I have delved deeper than I wish I had. But he sensed the evil that lurked all about us, in the pages of those abominable old books, and that gloated down from the smirking canine faces in that grisly painting, and that breathed about the dark old house from that charnel pit of buried horrors men call Hubble’s Field…

  Later, feeling a bit hungry, and oddly desirious of some human companionship, we drove through the dank drizzle back to the diner by the waterfront. Before, it had been empty, save for a slatternly girl behind the counter and a fat cook chewing on the stub of a dead cigar, bent over the steam-table. Now, though, it was half-full, and I thought the locals looked at us oddly as we went in and took a table by the blurred and greasy window. They were a disreputable lot, men with stubbled cheeks and furtive eyes, clad in filthy overalls and flannel shirts. We paid them no attention, but it seemed to me that we were a larger object of curiosity, or resentment, than we should have been, even taking into consideration the attention a “city stranger” draws in secluded, decaying backwaters like Durnham Beach.