The Mammoth Book of Sorceror's Tales

by Mike Ashley

  One evening, when the shop was closed and the streets empty, Lockyer tapped at the clockmaker’s back door. Bell was in his workroom, as he usually was in the evening hours, and he opened the door after a short delay.

  “Mr. Bell, you must seek protection.” Lockyer said without preamble when the door opened.

  “I need no protection,” Bell replied.

  “You do,” Lockyer insisted. “You must know the stories that are going around town.”

  “I have heard foolish rumors,” Bell conceded.

  “You and I know that they’re foolish, but others in town are beginning to believe them. There’s talk of coming to your shop and demanding an account of Monson’s disappearance.”

  Bell’s voice was unperturbed. “My shop will be open at the usual hour. I have always been willing to answer reasonable questions. Will you come in, Mr. Lockyer?”

  “No, no, I can’t,” said Lockyer, drawing back. “But you must do something to protect yourself. Monson’s friends are behind this, and they want to hurt you. They may break in on you in the night.”

  “Will the townspeople permit this?”

  Lockyer hesitated, then lamely replied, “No one wants anything to happen to you. But Monson’s friends have everyone confused. They have a lot of influence in this town; some of them do, anyway. And the people have heard so many stories that they don’t know what to believe. They’re confused.”

  “So I must fear the actions of a lawless mob.”

  “I’m afraid that’s the case. You must protect yourself.”

  “I will, Mr. Lockyer,” said Bell. Without another word, he closed the door. Lockyer heard the bolt slide into place.

  They came to the shop later that night, eleven men strong. Others waited outside, at front and back. Several had been customers at one time or another, and some had come on occasion to observe the clocks as they struck the hour, or watched the display in the window. Three who had been present when Bell had presented Monson with his repaired watch were the leaders. The others did not speak.

  “We’re here to find out what you did to our friends, Bell. We’re not leaving until we’re satisfied,” said one, planting himself in front of the clockmaker.

  “Why do you blame me?” Bell asked, looking calmly down on him.

  “They said they were coming here. We all heard them say that. And then we never saw them again. You’re the one behind their disappearance, all right.”

  “Just admit it, Bell. We can make you tell us everything, if you force us to,” one of the others said. He raised a walking stick and tapped it on the glass top of the display case.

  “We can smash this place to bits, and you with it,” said the first. “Now, tell us what you did to our friends.”

  Bell looked down at him, then at the man with the walking stick, then at such others as met his glance. He raised his hand and pointed to the door. “It is best that you leave my shop,” he said.

  “Best for you, that’s certain. But we’re not leaving,” said the first man, and several of the others, under the challenge of his ferocious gaze, murmured their agreement.

  “Don’t try to bluff us, Bell. You’ve bluffed this whole town for too long. Answer our questions, or it’s going to get mighty unpleasant,” said the second. He brought his stick down sharply. The glass cracked.

  Then, suddenly, at exactly nine minutes past the hour of one, all the clocks in the shop began to strike in unison. Deep gongs and crystalline chimes, resonant bells and the sound of tiny drums and trumpets, music and birdsong and a din of indistinguishable pealings and tollings and clangings, all blended to engulf the intruders in a wave of sound; and on and on they struck, twelve times and twelve more and twelve times twelve more, rapidly at first, and then steadily diminishing in volume and rapidity, fading as if they were receding at a steady rate, becoming ever fainter until they could be heard no more.

  The men stood benumbed by the assault of sound. They felt no pain and sensed no restraint by external force. Not one of them carried any trace of physical harm as a result of that night. Their breath came freely; they could move their eyes and hear every sound. But their bodies were held, as if the air had grown viscid and glutinous, clinging to them, dragging at them like thick mud or heavy snow, but a thousand times more inhibitive than mud or snow because, invisible and insensible as it was, it clung not only to their feet and legs, but to their hands, arms, heads, and bodies. They felt as if time itself had crawled almost to a halt, congealing and trapping them within it like insects in amber.

  Those who spoke of that night – and few of them ever did so, and those few reluctantly, after long silence, and still fearful of ridicule – agreed on several points. Bell, they all said, was untouched by the phenomenon. He removed the clocks from the shelves and the window and the display case, one by one, carefully and lovingly, and took them into his workroom. This process took some time, several hours at least, but none of the men felt the pain or cramping that such a long period of enforced immobility, or near immobility, would be certain to cause. Bell worked methodically, ignoring the intruders, his attention confined to his clocks.

  On these facts all agreed, but each had his own particular memory of that night. According to one man, the shop grew steadily darker; another said that the light remained constant, but Bell himself moved ever more swiftly, until at last he moved too fast for the eye to follow, and vanished from sight; a third man claimed that Bell grew more insubstantial and wraithlike with each timepiece he removed, and at last simply faded into nothingness. One man recalled a sight of a fly that passed before his face so slowly that he could count the beats of its wings. The fly progressed no more than a foot; and yet the man swore that its passage consumed three hours, at the very least. One of his companions spoke of the disturbing sight of ash fallen from the cigar in the hand of a man standing near him: it fell to the ground so slowly that in all the time he stood confined, no less than four hours by his calculation, it had not reached the floor. Two other men mentioned their awareness of each tick of a clock, separated by an agonizing interval. One claimed a full hour’s space, while the other spoke only of “a horrible long wait” between one tick and the next.

  Whatever happened on that night, however it happened, when the men could move – and their immobility ended in an instant, without warning – Bell and all the clocks were gone.

  Five men fled the shop in terror the instant they had command of their legs. Those who remained did so more from fear of showing fear than from courage, or even anger. They looked to one another uncertainly, awaiting direction, and finally someone said, “We have to go after him.”

  The workroom was dark and empty. They drew the bolt on the back door, and one shouted to the others waiting outside, “Did you see him?”

  A man carrying a pick handle emerged from the shadows. “Didn’t see nobody. Nobody’s come out that door.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course we’re sure, damn it!” called an unseen voice near at hand. “What happened? Bell get away from you?”

  They did not reply. They returned to the shop, and noticed something that had escaped them in the first shock of freedom. The shop was thick in dust, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling and rounded the upper corners of the shelves. The air was stale, like that of a room long sealed. As they looked around them, the clock in the town hall struck the quarter hour. One man looked at his watch and announced in a hushed voice, “One-fifteen.”

  No one ever learned what became of the clockmaker. No clocks like his were ever seen again by any of the townspeople, even those who traveled widely and took an interest in such things. Those that he sold have been passed on through three or four or even five generations. They keep perfect time, and have never required repair.

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was alleged to read a dictionary most days for relaxation, delighting in the more obscure and magical sounding words. I don’t know how true that is, but it woul
dn’t surprise me. Every time you read a Smith story you need to keep the dictionary handy. Why call someone a wizard when he could be a thaumaturge? Why have a shadow when it could be an adumbration? The words maketh the story, and in the eyes of Smith, who began his literary career as a poet, before becoming engulfed by the wonder of weird fiction, the words created the worlds. Although his writing life spanned fifty years, most of his weird fiction was concentrated into a decade from about 1928–1937 when there was a phenomenal outpouring of strange and exotic stories, mostly for the greatest of all pulps, Weird Tales. Stories set in Atlantis, Xiccarph, Zothique, Hyperborea or Averoigne – the very names conjure up the magical and the mystical. His work has been collected in several volumes published by Arkham House, including Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci (1948) and Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), with a more recent “best of” selection, A Rendezvous in Averoigne (1988).

  When I was compiling this anthology and testing out ideas for stories with other enthusiasts, Clark Ashton Smith was the one name that everyone suggested as the premier writer of sorcerous tales. I thought so, too. And Smith regarded “The Double Shadow” as his best weird tale, so here’s the best from the best.

  MY NAME IS PHARPETRON, among those who have known me in Poseidonis: but even I, the last and most forward pupil of the wise Avyctes, know not the name of that which I am fated to become ere tomorrow, therefore, by the ebbing silver lamps, in my master’s marble house above the loud sea, I write this tale with a hasty hand, scrawling an ink of wizard virtue on the gray, priceless, antique parchment of dragons. And having written, I shall enclose the pages in a sealed cylinder of orichalchum, and shall cast the cylinder from a high window into the sea, lest that which I am doomed to become should haply destroy the writing. And it may be that mariners from Lephara, passing to Umb and Pneor in their tall triremes, will find the cylinder; or fishers will draw it from the wave in their seines; and having read my story, men will learn the truth and take warning; and no man’s feet, henceforward, will approach the pale and demon-haunted house of Avyctes.

  For six years I have dwelt apart with the aged master, forgetting youth and its wonted desires in the study of arcanic things. We have delved more deeply than all others before us in an interdicted lore; we have called up the dwellers in sealed crypts, in fearful abysses beyond space. Few are the sons of mankind who have cared to seek us out among the bare, wind-worn crags; and many, but nameless, are the visitants who have come to us from further bourns of place and time.

  Stern and white as a tomb is the mansion wherein we dwell. Far below, on black, naked reefs, the northern sea climbs and roars indomitably, or ebbs with a ceaseless murmur as of armies of baffled demons; and the house is filled evermore, like a hollow-sounding sepulcher, with the drear echo of its tumultuous voices; and the winds wail in dismal wrath around the high towers but shake them not. On the seaward side the mansion rises sheerly from the straight-falling cliff; but on the other sides there are narrow terraces, grown with dwarfish, crooked cedars that bow always beneath the gales. Giant marble monsters guard the landward portals; and huge marble women ward the strait porticos above the surf; and mighty statues and mummies stand everywhere in the chambers and along the halls. But, saving these, and the entities we have summoned, there is none to companion us; and liches and shadows have been the servitors of our daily needs.

  Not without terror (since man is but mortal) did I, the neophyte, behold at first the abhorrent and tremendous faces of them that obeyed Avyctes. I shuddered at the black writhing of sub-mundane things from the many-volumed smoke of the braziers; I cried in horror at the gray foulnesses, colossal, without form, that crowded malignly about the drawn circle of seven colors, threatening unspeakable trespass on us that stood at the center. Not without revulsion did I drink wine that was poured by cadavers, and eat bread that was purveyed by phantoms. But use and custom dulled the strangeness, destroyed the fear; and in time I believed implicitly that Avyctes was the lord of all incantations and exorcisms, with infallible power to dismiss the beings he evoked.

  Well had it been for Avyctes – and for me – if the master had contented himself with the lore preserved from Atlantis and Thule, or brought over from Mu. Surely this should have been enough: for in the ivory-sheeted books of Thule there were blood-writ runes that would call the demons of the fifth and seventh planets if spoken aloud at the hour of their ascent; and the sorcerers of Mu had left record of a process whereby the doors of far-future time could be unlocked; and our fathers, the Atlanteans, had known the road between the atoms and the path into far stars. But Avyctes thirsted for a darker knowledge, a deeper empery. . . . And into his hands, in the third year of my novitiate, there came the mirror-bright tablet of the lost serpent people.

  At certain hours, when the tide had fallen from the steep rocks, we were wont to descend by cavern-hidden stairs to a cliff-walled crescent beach behind the promontory on which stood Avyctes’ house. There, on the dun, wet sands, beyond the foamy tongues of the surf, would lie the worn and curious driftage of alien shores and trove the hurricanes had cast up from unsounded deeps. And there we had found the purple and sanguine volutes of great shells, and rude lumps of ambergris, and white flowers of perpetually blooming coral; and once, the barbaric idol of green brass that had been the figurehead of a galley from far hyperborcal isles. . . .

  There had been a great storm, such as must have riven the sea to its last profound; but the tempest had gone by with morning, and the heavens were cloudless on that fatal day; and the demon winds were hushed among the black crags and chasms; and the sea lisped with a low whisper, like the rustle of gowns of samite trailed by fleeing maidens on the sand. And just beyond the ebbing wave, in a tangle of russet sea-weed, we descried a thing that glittered with blinding sun-like brilliance.

  And running forward, I plucked it from the wrack before the wave’s return, and bore it to Avyctes.

  The tablet was wrought of some nameless metal, like never-rusting iron, but heavier. It had the form of a triangle and was broader at the widest than a man’s heart. On one side it was wholly blank, like a mirror. On the other side many rows of small crooked ciphers were incised deeply in the metal, as if by the action of some mordant acid; and these ciphers were not the hieroglyphs or alphabetic characters of any language known to the master or to me.

  Of the tablet’s age and origin we could form no conjecture; and our erudition was wholly baffled. For many days thereafter we studied the writing and held argument that came to no issue. And night by night, in a high chamber closed against the perennial winds, we pondered over the dazzling triangle by the tall straight flames of silver lamps. For Avyctes deemed that knowledge of rare value, some secret of an alien or elder magic, was held by the clueless crooked ciphers. Then, since all our scholarship was in vain, the master sought another divination, and had recourse to wizardry and necromancy. But at first, among all the devils and phantoms that answered our interrogation, none could tell us aught concerning the tablet. And any other than Avyctes would have despaired in the end . . . and well would it have been if he had despaired, and had sought no longer to decipher the writing.

  The months and years went by with a slow thundering of seas on the dark rocks, and a headlong clamor of winds around the white towers. Still we continued our delving and evocations; and farther, always farther we went into the lampless realms of space and spirit; learning, perchance, to unlock the hithermost of the manifold infinities. And at whiles Avyctes would resume his pondering of the sea-found tablet, or would question some visitant regarding its interpretation.

  At length, by the use of a chance formula, in idle experiment, he summoned up the dim, tenuous ghost of a sorcerer from prehistoric years; and the ghost, in a thin whisper of uncouth, forgotten speech, informed us that the letters on the tablet were those of a language of the serpent-men, whose primal continent had sunk eons before the lifting of Hyperborea from the ooze. But the ghost could tell us naught o
f their significance; for, even in his time, the serpent-people had become a dubious legend; and their deep, antehuman lore and sorcery were things irretrievable by man.

  Now, in all the books of conjuration owned by Avyctes, there was no spell whereby we could call the lost serpent-men from their fabulous epoch. But there was an old Lemurian formula, recondite and uncertain, by which the shadow of a dead man could be sent into years posterior to those of his own lifetime, and could be recalled after an interim by the wizard. And the shade, being wholly insubstantial, would suffer no harm from the temporal transition, and would remember, for the information of the wizard, that which he had been instructed to learn during the journey.

  So, having called again the ghost of the prehistoric sorcerer, whose name was Ybith, Avyctes made a singular use of several very ancient gums and combustible fragments of fossil wood; and he and I, reciting the responses of the formula, sent the thin spirit of Ybith into the far ages of the serpent-men.

  And after a time which the master deemed sufficient, we performed the curious rites of incantation that would recall Ybith. And the rites were successful; and Ybith stood before us again, like a blown vapor that is nigh to vanishing. And in words faint as the last echo of perishing memories, the specter told us the key to the meaning of the letters, which he had learned in the prehuman past. And after this, we questioned Ybith no more but suffered him to return unto slumber and oblivion.

  Then, knowing the import of the tiny, twisted ciphers, we read the tablet’s writing and made thereof a transliteration, though not without labor and difficulty, since the very phonetics of the serpent tongue, and the symbols and ideas, were somewhat alien to those of mankind. And when we had mastered the inscription, we found that it contained the formula for a certain evocation which, no doubt, had been used by the serpent sorcerers. But the object of the evocation was not named; nor was there any clue to the nature or identity of that which would come in answer to the rites. And, moreover, there was no corresponding rite of exorcism nor spell of dismissal.