The House of the Worm

by Gary Myers

  They still tell in Ulthar how once it was this same Snireth-Ko who prepared the incense burned at all hours in the left ear of the image Nasht to confound his perception, lest Nasht be angered perceiving that his worshippers are sinful; in his other ear they pray. And Snireth-Ko mulled the golden wine with an herb well loved by the temple cats, who yet touch it not, but accept gladly the proffered cream afterwards when the priests have lapped up the wine. But despite his profound knowledge of even these most sacred traditions of the mild gods of Earth, or perhaps because of them, in the end the mystery and the beauty of these traditions were lost to him, for his cleverness had discerned the nonexistence of the gods. And while Nasht with his brethren atop unknown Kadath guffawed at some wry jest and cared not for the affairs of men, Snireth-Ko turned away from his gods and went out into the lonely streets.

  Whither his wanderings took him that night is uncertain, for only the graceful cats were there to see, and these would only sit and clean their whiskers unconcernedly, after the immemorial way of cats, that takes not into account the sad mutterings of disillusioned venders of incense kept from sleep by thoughts not good to have. Perhaps even Snireth-Ko knew not where his footsteps would bring him. Something felt him there in the cobbled lanes, mumbling sadly to himself of the faith he had lost; for then a muffled piping drew him out of the night to that dim, evil-smelling alley mentioned elsewhere, and through the secret doorway where all such go in time, which something closed and locked behind him.

  On the brick cylinders of Kadatheron many curious things are written, in archaic letters few now can read. There is revealed the madness that hungers in starless gulfs, the reason its own abominable spawn must flee to hostile worlds of light, blaspheming those worlds with horrible mockeries of form and substance. It was dark in that wide chamber which by all sane laws should be Woth’s respectable shop and the winding street in which it lies; then a light was struck somewhere to fall upon the idol’s shocking face, and Snireth-Ko knew where he was. That pale idol squatting obscenely on the altar of piled bones was more like a salamander than a leech, and its eyes were improperly placed. But Snireth-Ko did not like what it had in lieu of a mouth, and perhaps he should not be judged harshly for that one tiny scream. He well knew what services that idol offers, but he had heard unpleasant surmises about the fee that deceitful proprietor demands of clients. For it is told in Ulthar and in Nir, and passed by devious means throughout the Six Kingdoms, that what the Keeper of Dreams vends from its high altar is nothing less prized than men’s desires. All desires are goods in that infamous shop that should be Woth’s, for in its farthest end is a window sorcerously opening on all the dreams that men may have. Whether the dreams are of poets or eaters of hasheesh makes no difference to that dubious idol. And when the idol’s services are not required, the window overlooks only an abyss full of stars.

  The daemon stirred its fretted wings, peered obliquely at its client, and smiled; and Snireth-Ko saw that he had been mistaken about the stars. Without that fabulous window lay all the bright opulence of wonder and incredible mystery he had lost with his faith, all the weird beauty, waiting to receive him, with pulsing vortices of scented flame and myths veiled in purple. And Snireth-Ko was wafted through the shimmering pane to the crystal dreams beyond…

  In what far clime he knew not, the dreamer trudged the viscous shore of some vast continent of weeds, wrenched from the murky depths of what nameless sea he did not like to think. Slimy things watched his passage with numerous glazed eyes; fantastic polyps menaced him with ropey tentacles and gnashed their frightful beaks and sank back into the churning water; still he trudged on through the green rottenness towards an unspoken goal. White mists shredded from distant spires and proud minarets glinting emerald in the sun; and Snireth-Ko walked crystal ways between tall columns of figured glass, and riven temple-domes and cyclopean ruins of brilliant green, to a wide court where an emerald demigod banded with queer runes sat and stared unseeing at the stars. The dreamer too sought the stars and guessed what messages their cryptic winkings might convey, and shuddered. And when he heard that shocking moan from the god’s weed-bearded lips, he leapt into darkness rather than hear what Name that image would pronounce.

  In some dark necropolis of shadow-guarded Leng, he turned in haste and fear from the lurid fires of ghoulish feedings beneath the Moon, but followed after a silent, hooded shape loping through the shades of tombs and over sunken graves. Beneath a precarious lintel it vanished; but Snireth-Ko traced in the dust a sign whose meaning he could not know, and hurried down the broken steps to the lightless vaults beyond. And there with the gloating shadows for aeons he threaded the insane labyrinth of the tomb, fumbling in the dark and disturbing the rats and far less pleasant things with his breathing. At last his eyes, grown large with the unending night, found the light beneath a secret door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He turned back into the friendly dark alive with the titterings of rats.

  But he was mad to suppose those evil lights were eyes; for in a third vision the haunted skies engulfed him in the starry aether, and bore him on spectral winds to that lonely ashen sphere of silence and horror and cold men name the Moon, never suspecting Who it is that lurks bubbling and blaspheming beyond the Rim in full view of the Moon’s dark side. More delirious than that which the pale toad-things sliced and prodded with curious weapons as it bulged hugely from a sickening crevasse, or what carted the flesh sinfully away on disturbing wains, yet it was but the lowly Messenger of that Other: that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth…

  Snireth-Ko shrieked and fled madly back through dizzying gulfs of space, back to the World of glittering cities and light, back through a jewelled pane into that wide, dim cell of dubious transactions, where he saw how the idol had tricked him. The Keeper of Dreams flopped stickily from its altar and wriggled across the floor in a manner that must have revolted even the cabalistically figured tiles, the painted box of astonishing rumour held open in one flabby claw. Snireth-Ko could not mistake what it is that the insidious Keeper hoards against the awakening of those Old Gods who possessed the Earth aforetime, for purposes of blackmail or perhaps to purchase unspeakable favours; neither did he guess wrongly the fee that slobbering idol now required of him; and he turned and plunged back through the charmed pane.

  And the fate of Snireth-Ko remains a matter of grim speculation. Some believe that the idol was not cheated of its nameless fee, but snatched him back in absurd limbs from the dreams he hoped to hide in … and afterwards locked the little painted box and used the clean-picked bones to make its altar more comfortable. Others say that Snireth-Ko fell screaming into the starry abyss the window overlooks when the idol’s services are not required, that he is falling even now. But in a dream of that alien city of grey towers and smokes, uncouthly named London by they that dwell there with pale, worried faces that come of too much brooding on unhealthy things, I found an old man cowering in an alley, who would only claw the sightless walls of brick with long, fleshless fingers, and mumble sadly of the faith he had lost and a fee he had not wished to pay; and in the ruin of his face hovered the thin phantom of him who made the incense once, in Ulthar beyond the river Skai.

  CHAPTER V

  The Return of Zhosph

  The Return of Zhosph

  In which of the Seven Cryptical Books is forgotten, Hsan records this peculiar and exceedingly doubtful fact: that wisdom possessed in life is not permitted to pass with the soul toward whatever death really is, but cleaves to the mouldering corpse to fester and diminish even as flesh beneath the gentle nibblings of worms. Such perhaps is the reason dust from certain graves is valued in unlawfu
l practices, and why necromancers are burned, lest the worms acquire arcane knowledge it is better they should not have. And such most certainly drove Snurd in secrecy through the high iron gate of Zulan-Thek, onto that dim, star-litten plain where they of Zulan-Thek were wont to inter their dead in dreams that died before men’s wasted souls.

  Of Snurd and his dubious parentage men once hinted unmentionable things, indicating as evidence that hitherto only the detestable ghouls and kindred horrors were known to inflict such enormities upon the dead. What, they inquired of one another in hushed voices, became of the fat miller before the sextons came, and who defiled Klotlei’s grave and Shek’s in the night? Then they would gesture knowingly but make no more lucid answer. Little did Snurd care! He knew how the bones were taken down from the high place where the camels passed from Gak, laiden with bright silks and spices of exotic name, and where malefactors were displayed on a grisly hook set there for that purpose; only that morning they were taken and dragged by the muffled sextons whose duty it was, to the catacombs where their odour would not offend the camels. He guessed the nature of those crimes for which this penalty was exacted, and that all to some degree approximate witchcraft. And few knew better than Snurd what is written in Hsan’s Cryptical Books.

  He went out with only the stars to see: they of Zulan-Thek were fearful of their dead, and kept the Night securely bolted out of doors and peering vainly at shuttered windows. How the Night finally overcame these barriers to extinguish all the lamps and hope, does not concern this tale. Snurd feared neither darkness nor the buried dead. But leaping grotesquely in the deep shadows of crumbling mounds, he ran his tongue over his pointed teeth in a hunger not often manifested by fully human persons. He remembered the screams of the carrion fowl flapping darkly in the gloom around the mewling bundle on the hook, and how the bundle lost its own tongue trying to charm the ravens from its eyes. Perhaps, ah, perhaps the avid beak could not wholly penetrate those bleeding sockets to the maddened brain. Perhaps it was still shut away within the clean-picked skull… And Snurd laughed and leered at the frightened Moon.

  It did not take him long to find that path the sextons used in their particular trade, for Snurd was more familiar than any sexton should have been with the startling ways of that path. The weeds there grew too quickly, and made little rustling noises even without the wind. But it was no business of Snurd’s who stirred the weeds. He hurried over a confusing rise and between the huddled, leaning boulders, and moments ere the Dawn paled the East in wholesomer lands and the tides of Night receded, Snurd crept near to that vine-hidden stone door with the hippogryph on either side. The graven signs and expressions on the faces of those images were too worn to ascertain their correct meaning; but the swollen vines slithered quietly back at his approach, and Snurd passed through and down the fifty-seven lightless steps to those darker lower halls where it must be blasphemy that light should ever come. Snurd had not that inconvenience of requiring light to see, and moved quickly and with improbable sureness over the floor slimed and worn smooth by the passage of nameless things and Time, disturbing the rats and less pleasant things with his breathing. The rats were whispering plots in the dark with uncouth scarabs. Once he spied a light beneath a secretive door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He came at last to a little unlighted vault and found where the sextons had deposited the leavings of that grisly hook. It was doubtlessly only his imagination that the pale skull grinned when Snurd entered the room…

  Thus ends the unhappy tale of Zhosph as recorded elsewhere, and told once by them of Zulan-Thek until the Night came with his retinue of shadows to feast in Zulan-Thek’s palaces and fanes, attended by Fear: that when the sextons who carried Zhosph’s bones returned to the hippogryph-guarded entrance on a matter of unfinished business, they found things not quite as they had left them. The faces of the hippogryphs seemed altered and strangely smug, and the vines misbehaved shockingly, deliberately tripping the frenzied rats as they fled madly from the catacombs, and strangling them in a manner the sextons did not like. But worse was the wailing in the depths that had frightened the rats. One man later averred that it moaned disturbingly of something evil that should have been dead but scratched subtly in back of the mind, changing things for a purpose and tittering within. And certainly they all heard that tearing scream in the dark, and saw afterwards the queer little being with large ears that scampered up the dark stairs and made a terrible sign at them before drying its curious wings and fluttering back toward Zulan-Thek against the cryptic stars, to bargain with the Night.

  When at last the sextons had confered in bleak whispers and descended to that tiny room where they had left it, they found the skeleton of Zhosph the thaumaturge disturbed, the skull split like the rind of a pomegranate and the sorcerer’s brain quite gone. This was attributed to the activities of rats, until later. One other thing they found which was less easily explained: a shrivelled yellowish membrane much as a serpent might leave in moulting, or the chrysalis of certain rare moths, not entirely recognizable as the skin of Snurd turned inside-out. The sextons did not pause long to ponder the riddle.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Three Enchantments

  The Three Enchantments

  The apprentice Lir is aged beyond even Wisdom’s ripeness, and the wonderful memories he once possessed Time has long since snatched away. But the bright sand that flows down to the azure Cerenerian Sea below long wharves of teak he remembers still: where the turbaned fishers sit and mend their nets and watch the day pass flaming into the West with the first pale stars that follow, and where Lir came often as a little boy, to play upon the white sand and hear the quaint speech of the mariners. Lir was apprenticed to that very Dlareb who used to sell carpets in Lhosk, and had duties more pressing than to watch the ships sailing for fabulous ports where the sea joins the sky, as Dlareb was wont to remind him with his knotted stick; but Lir was only a small boy and loved the rose-tinted sails.

  Here it was that once pausing in his solitary games, Lir spied a brightness half covered by the white sea-sand, and found that famous silver ball with its three cunning glyphs. The ball was tarnished and very old, but even very ordinary things cast up by the sea are objects of wonder when one is a very little boy; and the thoughts of Lir as he examined his treasure were far off with the drowned, perilous halls of that evilly aquatic One, dead Kthulhut to whom the frightened sailors allude only with furtive glances and meaningful nods, or the hoards of splendid galleons pulled down by the muttering waves… . And then Dlareb came by with his knotted stick, from discovering the family of round golden spiders busily spinning in the rolled, blood-coloured rug from remote Sona-Nyl, which Lir had neglected to sweep away. Instantly Lir forgot his prize to dodge his master’s ill-aimed blows, and escaped back to Lhosk and the little shop of Dlareb, where he fell asleep hiding behind the rolled carpets, sorely perplexing the spiders.

  And that rug-merchant only spat into the sea and muttered something under his breath very like a curse, and turned to hobble back to the high seawall and the city. But the lengthening shadows had long since allied themselves with Night ere ever he came home again or lit a little candle; and Lir rubbed the sleep from his eyes and peeped out from his hiding place to see what his master was about, whether he was drunk, and perhaps to allay a little fear. And there was Dlareb with the sea still dripping from him, clutching that silver ball; but with subtle alterations in his manner, and something obviously terrible about his eyes; and the light on his puffy face was more than any single candle could account for. Then Dlareb took a burned stick and traced the least of the three glyphs on the blood-coloured carpet of Sona-Nyl. Lir covered his head with the ends of rugs and stuffed their corners in his ears.

  When several of Dlareb’s clients, those with unsettled accounts, fell ill with discomforts of the least pleasant description, there were those who said that certain dolls which the rug-merchant displayed in his shop-window st
rangely resembled these clients, who screamed of pains in precisely those places where bamboo splinters transfixed the dolls. Only the unimaginative remarked upon this odd coincidence, all others swore nervously and hurried away.

  One morning the gulls flew perilously low above the broad towers and gambrel roofs of Lhosk, away from the fitful sea; people heard only a brief flurry of wings and the wind. But those who went to take out their boats were puzzled by this ominous migration of the gulls; and seeing also that peculiar aura around the Moon, they wondered. Some spoke of storms, but this explanation satisfied no one when they remembered the colour of the Moon before it passed, and the shocking expression it had presented to the watchers.

  Only four boats sailed with their nets and their crews from the long wharves of teak when the sun had attained a comfortable altitude. The others lay untended on the beach, while their owners watched from high up along the great seawall, murmuring snatches of half-remembered legends concerning the sleep of certain discreditable gods, or praying when the clouds began to assume a more definite shape. The sun climbed higher, and still they watched for the return of the boats. And when the sun began to fall all their little hopes went with it; the day passed with annoying speed behind the distant Tanarian hills, where in his jewelled palace at Celephais King Kuranes noted its shrunken appearance but did not inquire to the priests.