The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  Seated bolt upright in his chair, Crow saw the bookshelf door swing open, saw Carstairs framed in the faintly luminous portal, a loose-fitting cassock belted about his narrow middle. Tall and gaunt, more cadaverous than ever, the occultist beckoned.

  “Come, Titus Crow, for the hour is at hand. Rise up and come with me, and learn the great and terrible mysteries of the worm!”

  Crow rose and followed him, down the winding steps, through reek of henbane and opium and into the now luridly illumined cellar. Braziers stood at the four corners, glowing red where heated metal trays sent aloft spirals of burned incense, herbs, and opiates; and round the central space a dozen robed and hooded acolytes stood, their heads bowed and facing inward, toward the painted, interlocking circles. Twelve of them, thirteen including Carstairs, a full coven.

  Carstairs led Crow through the coven’s ring and pointed to the circle with the white-painted ascending node. “Stand there, Titus Crow,” he commanded. “And have no fear.”

  Doing as he was instructed, Crow was glad for the cellar’s flickering lighting and its fume-heavy atmosphere, which made faces ruddy and mobile and his trembling barely noticeable. And now he stood there, his feet in the mouth of the ascending node, as Carstairs took up his own position in the adjoining circle. Between them, in the “eye” where the circles interlocked, a large hourglass trickled black sand from one almost empty globe into another which was very nearly full.

  Watching the hourglass and seeing that the sands had nearly run out, now Carstairs threw back his cowl and commanded: “Look at me, Titus Crow, and heed the Wisdom of the Worm!” Crow stared at the man’s eyes, at his face and cassocked body.

  The chanting of the acolytes grew loud once more, but their massed voice no longer formed Crow’s name. Now they called on the Eater of Men himself, the loathsome master of this loathsome ritual:

  “Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

  “Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

  “Wamas, Wormius, Vermi—”

  And the sand in the hourglass ran out!

  “Worm!” Carstairs cried as the others fell silent. “Worm, I command thee—come out!”

  Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow’s lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man’s mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.

  And out of that mouth—out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head—there now appeared a writhing white flood of maggots, grave worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!

  “Now, Titus Crow, now!” cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. “Take my hand!” And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.

  “No!” said Titus Crow. “No, I will not!”

  Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried, “What?” His cassock billowed with hideous movement. “Give me your hand—I command it!”

  “Do your worst, wizard,” Crow yelled. back through gritted teeth.

  “But…I have your Number! You must obey!”

  “Not my Number, wizard,” said Crow, shaking his head, and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of terror filling the cellar.

  “You lied!” Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. “You…cheated! No matter—a small thing.” In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. “Worm, he is yours. I command you—take him!”

  Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor—and drew back from Crow’s circle as from a ring of fire. “Go on!” Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. “Who is he? What does he know? I command you!”

  “I know many things,” said Crow. “They do not want me—they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916—on second December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr. Carstairs!”

  The 2nd December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes. “A Master!” Crow heard the whisper. “A twenty-two!”

  “No!” Carstairs fell to his knees. “No!”

  He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. “Durrell, to me!” His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.

  “Not me!” shrieked Durrell, flinging off his cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. “Not me!” Wildly he clambered from sight—and eleven like him hot on his heels.

  “No!” Carstairs gurgled once more.

  Crow stared at him, still unable to avert his eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final—the first!—dark, Arab visage of his origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer’s face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.

  Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:

  “For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs…”

  • • •

  Later, in his right mind but changed forever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they crawled. Crow barely noticed them.

  The tires of his car paid them no heed whatever.

  The House of the Temple

  Let’s step hack a year or two from Lord of the Worms. In April 1980, while serving out my last year at the Training Centre of the Royal Military Police, I mistakenly sent out two copies of The House of the Temple…a genuine error on my part—in no way my usual practice—as double submissions of that sort are much frowned upon. However, one copy went to editor Lin Carter who was editing a line of newly revived, mass market paperback issues of “Weird Tales” under the Zebra imprint, and the other to my then good friend Francesco Cova in Genoa, Italy. Cova was looking for quality stories for his exceptional Italian/English-language semi-pro “Kadath” magazine, and I had promised to do my very best for him. This novella is one of my best, I fancy, not least because both Carter and Cova bought it and brought it out uncomfortably close together in respectively, “Weird Tales” vol. 48, No. 3, and “Kadath” vol. 1, No. 3—the latter being in fact the true first in November 1980. This last quarter century has seen the story reprinted more than once, most notably in my Fedogan & Bremer collection “A Coven of Vampires.”

  (Incidentally, when that last-mentioned collection went out of print very quickly after publication, it became Fedogan & Bremer’s fastest selling hook. While there’s no direct association, F&B picked up the Best Small press award at the very next World Fantasy Convention.)

  I. The Summons

  I suppose under the circumstances it is only natural that the police should require this belated written statement from me; and I further suppose it to be in recognition of my present highly nervous condition and my totally unwarranted confinement in this place that they are allowing me to draw the thing up without supervision. But while every kindness has been shown me, still I most strongly protest my continued detainment here. Knowing what I now know, I would voice the same protest in respect of detention in any prison or institute anywhere in Scotland…anywhere in the entire British Isles.

  Before I begin, let me clearly make the point that, since no charges have been leve
lled against me, I make this statement of my own free will, fully knowing that in so doing I may well extend my stay in this detestable place. I can only hope that upon its reading, it will be seen that I had no alternative but to follow the action I describe.

  You the reader must therefore judge. My actual sanity—if indeed I am still sane—my very being, may well depend upon your findings…

  • • •

  I was in New York when the letter from my uncle’s solicitors reached me. Sent from an address in the Royal Mile, that great road which reaches steep and cobbled to the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle itself, the large, sealed manila envelope had all the hallmarks of officialdom, so that even before I opened it I feared the worst.

  Not that I had been close to my uncle in recent years (my mother had brought me out of Scotland as a small child, on the death of my father, and I had never been back) but certainly I remembered Uncle Gavin. If anything I remembered him better than I did my father; for where Andrew McGilchrist had always been dry and introverted, Uncle Gavin had been just the opposite. Warm, outgoing and generous to a fault, he had spoilt me mercilessly.

  Now, according to the letter, he was dead and I was named his sole heir and beneficiary; and the envelope contained a voucher which guaranteed me a flight to Edinburgh from anywhere in the world. And then of course there was the letter itself, the contents of which further guaranteed my use of that voucher; for only a fool could possibly refuse my uncle’s bequest, or fail to be interested in its attendant though at present unspecified conditions.

  Quite simply, by presenting myself at the offices of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee in Edinburgh, I would already have fulfilled the first condition toward inheriting my uncle’s considerable fortune, his estate of over three hundred acres and his great house where it stood in wild and splendid solitude at the foot of the Pentlands in Lothian. All of which seemed a very far cry from New York…

  As to what I was doing in New York in the first place:

  Three months earlier, in mid-March of 1976—when I was living alone in Philadelphia in the home where my mother had raised me—my fiancée of two years had given me back my ring, run off and married a banker from Baltimore. The novel I was writing had immediately metamorphosed from a light-hearted love story into a doom-laden tragedy, became meaningless somewhere in the transformation, and ended up in my waste-paper basket. That was that. I sold up and moved to New York, where an artist friend had been willing to share his apartment until I could find a decent place of my own.

  I had left no forwarding address, however, which explained the delayed delivery of the letter from my uncle’s solicitors; the letter itself was post-marked March 26th, and from the various marks, labels and redirections on the envelope, the US Mail had obviously gone to considerable trouble to find me. And they found me at a time when the lives of both myself and my artist friend, Carl Earlman, were at a very low ebb. I was not writing and Carl was not drawing, and despite the arrival of summer our spirits were on a rapid decline.

  Which is probably why I jumped at the opportunity the letter presented, though, as I have said, certainly I would have been a fool to ignore or refuse the thing…Or so I thought at the time.

  I invited Carl along if he so desired, and he too grasped at the chance with both hands. His funds were low and getting lower; he would soon be obliged to quit his apartment for something less ostentatious; and since he, too, had decided that he needed a change of locale—to put some life back into his artwork—the matter was soon decided and we packed our bags and headed for Edinburgh.

  It was not until our journey was over, however—when we were settled in our hotel room in Princes Street—that I remembered my mother’s warning, delivered to me deliriously but persistently from her deathbed, that I should never return to Scotland, certainly not to the old house. And as I vainly attempted to adjust to the jet-lag and the fact that it was late evening while all my instincts told me it should now be day, so my mind went back over what little 1 knew of my family roots, of the McGilchrist line itself, of that old and rambling house in the Pentlands where I had been born, and especially of the peculiar reticence of Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee, the Scottish solicitors.

  Reticence, yes, because I could almost feel the hesitancy in their letter. It seemed to me that they would have preferred not to find me; and yet, if I were asked what it was that gave me this impression, then I would be at a loss for an answer. Something in the way it was phrased, perhaps—in the dry, professional idiom of solicitors—which too often seems to me to put aside all matters of emotion or sensibility; so that I felt like a small boy offered a candy…and warned simultaneously that it would ruin my teeth. Yes, it seemed to me that Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee might actually be apprehensive about my acceptance of their conditions—or rather, of my uncle’s conditions—as if they were offering a cigar to an addict suffering from cancer of the lungs.

  I fastened on that line of reasoning, seeing the conditions of the will as the root of the vague uneasiness which niggled at the back of my mind. The worst of it was that these conditions were not specified; other than to say that if I could not or would not meet them, still I would receive fifteen thousand pounds and my return ticket home, and that the residue of my uncle’s fortune would then be used to carry out his will in respect of “the property known as Temple House.”

  Temple House, that rambling old seat of the McGilchrists where it stood locked in a steep re-entry; and the Pentland Hills a grey and green backdrop to its frowning, steep-gabled aspect; with something of the Gothic in its structure, something more of Renaissance Scotland, and an aura of antiquity all its own which, as a child, I could still remember loving dearly. But that had been almost twenty years ago and the place had been my home. A happy home, I had thought; at least until the death of my father, of which I could remember nothing at all.

  But I did remember the pool—the deep, grey pool where it lapped at the raised, reinforced, east-facing garden wall—the pool and its ring of broken quartz pillars, the remains of the temple for which the house was named. Thinking back over the years to my infancy, I wondered if perhaps the pool had been the reason my mother had always hated the place. None of the McGilchrists had ever been swimmers, and yet water had always seemed to fascinate them. I would not have been the first of the line to be found floating face-down in that strange, pillar-encircled pool of deep and weedy water; and I had used to spend hours just sitting on the wall and staring across the breeze-rippled surface…

  So my thoughts went as, tossing in my hotel bed late into the night, I turned matters over in my mind…And having retired late, so we rose late, Carl and I; and it was not until 2 P.M. that I presented myself at the office of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee on the Royal Mile.

  II. The Will

  Since Carl had climbed up to the esplanade to take in the view, I was alone when I reached my destination and entered MA and L’s offices through a door of yellow-tinted bull’s-eye panes, passing into the cool welcome of a dim and very Olde Worlde anteroom; and for all that this was the source of my enigmatic summons, still I found a reassuring air of charm and quiet sincerity about the place. A clerk led me into an inner chamber as much removed from my idea of a solicitor’s office as is Edinburgh from New York, and having been introduced to the firm’s Mr. Asquith I was offered a seat.

  Asquith was tall, slender, high-browed and balding, with a mass of freckles which seemed oddly in contrast with his late middle years, and his handshake was firm and dry. While he busied himself getting various documents, I was given a minute or two to look about this large and bewilderingly cluttered room of shelves, filing cabinets, cupboards and three small desks. But for all that the place seemed grossly disordered, still Mr. Asquith quickly found what he was looking for and seated himself opposite me behind his desk. He was the only partner present and I the only client.

  “Now, Mr. McGilchrist,” he began. “And so we managed to find you, did we? And doubtless you’re wondering what it
’s all about, and you probably think there’s something of a mystery here? Well, so there is, and for me and my partners no less than for yourself.”

  “I don’t quite follow,” I answered, searching his face for a clue.

  “No, no of course you don’t. Well now, perhaps this will explain it better. It’s a copy of your uncle’s will. As you’ll see, he was rather short on words; hence the mystery. A more succinct document—which nevertheless hints at so much more—I’ve yet to see!”

  • • •

  “I Gavin McGilchrist,” (the will began) “of Temple House in Lothian, hereby revoke all Wills, Codicils or Testamentary Dispositions heretofore made by me, and I appoint my Nephew, John Hamish McGilchrist of Philadelphia in the United States of America, to be the Executor of this my Last Will and direct that all my Debts, Testamentary and Funeral Expenses shall be paid as soon as conveniently may be after my death.

  “I give and bequeath unto the aforementioned John Hamish McGilchrist everything I possess, my Land and the Property standing thereon, with the following Condition: namely that he alone shall open and read the Deposition which shall accompany this Will into the hands of the Solicitors; and that furthermore he, being the Owner, shall destroy Temple House to its last stone within a Threemonth of accepting this Condition. In the event that he shall refuse this undertaking, then shall my Solicitors, Macdonald, Asquith and Lee of Edinburgh, become sole Executors of my Estate, who shall follow to the letter the Instructions simultaneously deposited with them.”

  The will was dated and signed in my uncle’s scratchy scrawl.

  I read it through a second time and looked up to find Mr. Asquith’s gaze fixed intently upon me. “Well,” he said, “and didn’t I say it was a mystery? Almost as strange as his death…” He saw the immediate change in my expression, the frown and the question my lips were beginning to frame, and held up his hands in apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, “so very sorry—for of course you know nothing of the circumstances of his death, do you? I had better explain: