The House of the Worm

by Gary Myers

  (Once out at sea the nets were cast and drawn back curiously slashed and gnawed; but the net of one boat was less easy to draw back, and men had scrambled frantically to cut it loose, and died horribly.)

  Dreams were not pleasant that night, and the candles burned far into the small dark hours, and the morning did not bring the relief looked for. The shadow intruding into the fitful sea was a city beyond any doubt, and people were very grateful now for that white fog which had driven men mad for a glimpse of the clean sky, because it disclosed only shadows. In hushed taverns sailors whispered fearfully of what may be seen by moonlight in the queer waters six nights out of Bahama. Their listeners were not eager to leave, because of what had come out with the fog; squat rubbery things that were felt but seldom seen, wet things that came up Lhosk’s winding streets from the sea. Nothing human skulked in the crooked sea-ward alleys, dragging unmentionable burdens, for nothing human slides plump tentacles behind it in the dark. And men wisely refrained from following their foul, slimy trails where they might have led them between the tottering sheds in the fog.

  During this period few would have cared to notice how the rug-merchant had altered the singular display in his shop-window: the customary dolls were not there at all, but only the crude waxen images of nothing human, with long silver pins thrust into each uncouth belly in an undeniable pattern: each pin the vertex of a pentagon, or perhaps the point of a five-pointed star, which is sometimes more meaningful. But their maker was observed to be in a state of great unease, and had even overlooked the beating of Lir for some new truancy. Only once had Dlareb glanced at the stars in the vicinity of Orion, then screamed and gone to hide that blasphemous silver ball lest its Owner should send for it; if its Owner should come personally he could not hope to escape. Then, mumbling pitifully to himself, he had molded those repellent little dolls. But even as he had worked the changes began, his body assumed that unhealthy flabbiness so loathsomely apparent later, and the other peculiarities that caused Lir to flee that little shop and never return.

  Who found that unfortunate seller of carpets crouching grotesquely beneath a blood-coloured rug in his shop, is not remembered now. Certain horrible doubts were cast upon the identity of the corpse, because of the scaliness of the bloated features, and what had become of the hands. They attached no significance to those two curious glyphs drawn on the carpet with a burnt stick, or the third one done in blood, supposing that someone had slipped in with the Night for no better purpose than murder; though few reputable human assassins would ever resort to a method so dubiously effective as jabbing with many long silver pins. Having discussed these matters in hushed voices, they wound him in the blood-coloured rug and buried him with a scandalous lack of ceremony.

  But it was not until they returned to close up Dlareb’s shop that they realized whence the pins had come. Some wanted to burn those repellent little dolls, detesting the way they postured and leered, while others thought their sculpting somewhat less crude than it had been before. But the dolls only made odd squealing noises on the fire, and had to be cast into the fitful sea beneath the fog-veiled stars.

  Inscrutable are the ways of the gods, that men cannot hope to know. Even as the last of those effigies was cast into the muttering sea a gentle bubbling began, as if something with questionable intentions were laughing just beneath the surface. And so they moved away more quickly than they might otherwise have done, and never saw, until too late, what it was that crawled nastily behind them, its black, rubbery hide glistening wetly, across the beach and up the sheer seawall, slipping unobtrusively up the crooked alleys in the dark and the fog.

  And only Lir, whose old head is decidedly queer because of something he has seen, can tell of that shocking final horror: what it was that wriggled out of the night to flop sickeningly over Dlareb’s grave and open it with distasteful sucking noises; what snatched the struggling, screaming corpse from its secret burrow in the mud, and dragged it still gibbering and cursing back towards the shunned wharves and the seething, uncomfortable water; and how, hours later, both were drawn up into a weedy tower through a tiny lighted window, by something that bore a fiendish resemblance to the tentacle of a devil-fish.

  CHAPTER VII

  Hazuth-Kleg

  Hazuth-Kleg

  Out of the mocking shades of doubtful sleep slipped Sliph like only another shadow, to find the locked gate the sign on the stone had indicated. Sliph had beheld that sign in other dreams, and never chosen to disregard its cryptic warning, perceiving that it is unwise to act perversely when one knows not to whom he will have to answer later. But now he remembered the coral domes of antique Cathuria that departed the World long since, leaving only the stars in her place; he thought then of the bright pavilions, and perfumed gardens amid the ginkgo trees, and minstrels striking softly their little bells and playing sweetly their rosewood flutes; and of Matthew Phillips, whom Sliph had left dreaming in a little garret in Providence, with only books and dreams to ward off madness until he might learn whither Cathuria has flown. And Sliph went down to the locked gate, for the city behind it is named on no maps but the charts wherewith hooded astrologers consult the rebellious stars.

  The design of that gate is nothing more conventional than a lofty, tangled web of verdigris-mottled serpents whose eyes are too moist for amethysts. Sliph sat cross-legged beside the gate, where he would not have to abide too closely the fearful gaze of the eyes.

  There came by at this time that evil old woman in black dragging her fiendish bundle and reeking nauseously of embalming spices, and the musk of unwholesome slimy things that creep beneath dank stones. Sliph could hear quite plainly what she prattled to herself, or perhaps for the speculated ears of something that stirred nastily in her sack. But when she pulled the latch-string and scuttled through the gate, he rose and slipped in behind her (and of course brushed that tiny silver cord which tinkles a little bell in a small chamber very deep underground, where there dwells all alone in the dark outside the World One who, on hearing that little bell, took up in its paw a silver pen, and began to write).

  Then that old woman turned and leered at Sliph in her repellent fashion, and flaffed her long, shapeless sleeves at him in gestures having clearly some reference to the stars. Sliph could not understand those gestures, but he guessed that they did not bode him any good. And when she actually bent to untie that disquieting sack, which was already snuffling towards him, he ran and hid behind a dune. And she only whistled for her sack, and hobbled away with it towards the watchful lamps of the city.

  At what hour he knew only dimly, Sliph perceived the Night in his slinking retreat into the West and its mythical well, whence Night may come by legendary subterranean paths unto the East again. The stars sailed slowly, one by one, over the jagged edge of the World; and soon there were no more stars, for such jewels are the rightful possessions of Night only, and not of that grim twilight brooding eternally over the city. But Sliph thought not of these matters, only wondering why with Night flown the Day came not to usurp the empty sky. And he remembered the old woman’s eagerness that he should note a certain star. For one pale star had never sought the abyss, but hung watchfully above the shadowy basalt towers…

  Meanwhile three figures were approaching him from the East. Sliph did not like the look of those figures, or the way one hopped queerly about on all fours when another prodded it. Their progress was silent and quick: Sliph did not have to wait long before they had come beneath his dune, up the difficult slope of which he had already crept to watch the Night: he could even read the hieroglyphs on the yellow robe of that first Thing whose scaly muzzle was all drawn up in a horrible grin; its long retainer went wrapped in a winding sheet and drove the third along at the tip of an iron goad; of this last being it would not be tasteful to speak. The first made a sign to its fellows, and hissed at them through rows of disturbingly numerous teeth, “There was whispering among the stars tonight.” “It is time, surely,” quoth that long retainer. The third being said noth
ing at all, but tittered and wiped the spittle from its soft, flabby chin. Then all three stole off across the plain to the city and its terrible star. Sliph descended quietly and followed at a prudent distance, and in consequence lost them in an alley winding off the Street of the Tobacconists.

  The streets of that city are dark, narrow and winding, and in too many places the bleak houses lean perilously to shut in the lonely ways and bring certain shuttered attic windows into frightful proximity with the slippery cobbles. Houses all of tottering, grey, lichen-crusted brick peer oddly through leaded panes, or mutter strangely with voices the wind ought not to have. Sliph detested the way those houses edged away and made the streets confusing. Sometimes the shadowy lanes discovered broad courts opening on the sky, where the hollowed flags still bore sardonic astrological symbols and names of many infamous daemons, and names of some lesser known but infinitely more terrible. But Sliph did not care to linger in those dark, suspicious courts either, because the disquieting windows overlooking them were open and trailed ladders of braided rope. At last he came upon a small iron gate fashioned all too obviously by the same craft as the gate of bronze beyond the plain; but he would not approach too closely, seeing how the eyes were more skillfully made. Also Sliph did not want to disturb the Watcher on the other side of the little gate. This alarming personage squatted with its back to him, performing certain appalling rituals with a stick.

  Beyond the Watcher’s head and a little above what it used as a shoulder, Sliph looked out on a wide, cobbled avenue lit by the sinful red lamps of temples raised on either side to all disreputable gods whom men deny, foolishly supposing that worship could possibly matter to the gods In Ulthar they have strange accounts of unlawful idols who provide their own sacrifices without any observance of the proper seasons or which of her houses the Moon occupies, and covet other flesh than goats’. In that street also was a low, terrible house without any windows. Sliph noticed it first when a small, dark man with a jewelled sword and stealthy, slippered feet, left that low door and stole out into Pantheon Street on a business in which darkness and a fabulous gem figured not unimportantly.

  After several minutes a second figure emerged from that same low, dreadful house… that evil old woman in black with her fiendish bundle. She seemed intent upon urgent matters, and scuttled towards the iron gate and cuffed the monstrous Watcher away; and that latter being only withdrew sulking and growling into a crack there was in the base of an onyx wall. Then she passed through the gate and down the narrow lane. But when Sliph turned to go out into the broad street with the temple lights, he found the Watcher already shifting its enormous bulk back into the proper position against the gate, which was shut. And fearing he might never find his way back through those winding lanes, dreading what might happen if he did not, Sliph hurried back in the one direction he most instinctively disliked: the one instinct said the witch had taken.

  And just when the alleys had begun to play queer tricks with his sanity, he spied her muffled form only slipping around a corner, and that shapeless black sack shambling at her heels. But when he had hurried up to the place where he had seen her, she was already gone. Then a candle was lit in an upper room by whatever pressed its face against the window-glass, and somewhere behind Sliph a door whose hinges were in a deplorable state, opened slowly…

  And in a broad court where madly sentient houses leaned shockingly away from something they feared, and queer, flaffing shadows rustled their black wings in the light of that one hellish star, which now appeared to squat upon a windowless tower, chuckling and dangling tentacles listlessly, Sliph found the old woman. She stood on the fifth step of a hoary dais whose steps were all unmentionably defiled by the less orthodox names of Azathoth, wrought in tiny emeralds; bent over that lichened, blasphemous altar, crooning softly and making certain curious patterns with the entrails of a child. Something she read in the entrails seemed to please her, and she spat thrice upon the altar and shouted a Name.

  There watched seated from the shadows, apathetically, three whom Sliph had already met on the plain. On hearing that shouted Name they crept to the foot of the hoary dais, and made an obeisance on their faces before that evil old woman lolling on the fifth step, and that sack bulging limply across her knees. The sack whispered a terrible thing in the old woman’s ear, and she turned to glare at Sliph and shake her head, saying only, “There, there,” soothingly to her sack, and that perhaps Matthew Phillips, a name Sliph felt he should know for a reason no longer clear, had dined unwisely before sleep—

  (Here that hidden recorder in the deep, dark, secret chamber, being thoroughly bored with the proceedings, laid aside its silver pen. And in the morning a charwoman entered a certain Providence garret after repeated unanswered knockings, and screamed at what she found there.)

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Loot of Golthoth

  The Loot of Golthoth

  Over the desert of Cuppar-Nombo and the city Golthoth, named by some the Damned, Night rose and shook his hoary wings. An evil twilight was creeping across the sky, with multitudenous waxing stars; hidden bats stirred uneasily in doubtful sleep; and in the painted wagons men lighted incense whose duty it was, and chanted the old songs, as they have always done at evening for the last four thousand years.

  For a song and no more creditable reason the painted wagons came to Cuppar-Nombo. For though deceitful Time has concealed much behind the centuries, still those songs forget not the greatness of Golthoth’s limestone temples and obelisks, nor any rumor of the arts whereby the cyclopean limestone blocks were moved, which is one with the dust of architects. Very splendid still are Golthoth’s temples, with their images and myriad columns spectral in that light which filters only at noon down through the shadowy fanes. There by little copper lamps the shaven priests mumbled once over papyrus scrolls before the cryptical gods: strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions, and jackal-headed Anubis whose concern is with the dead. But the old gods and kings are unnamed for the last four thousand years, since a certain thing happened which even the songs dare not hint. Some have surmised a curse which the gods once spoke in anger and could never since recall. But the songs say only how after this certain thing the eyes and glyphic name of Anubis were chipped off the temple walls by the shaven priests, before the priests disappeared, and how he people fled their ancient, horrible city, screaming.

  Now this certain thing was forgotten, for the songs made no mention of it, and the old gods slept. And in cities less ancient and horrible than Golthoth strange, dark wanderers began to think again of the opulence of their ancient kings all lonely in the desert, sentineled only by the lean jackals and their shadows. These people considered how one might spend so many emeralds, and the uses men have for gold. One morning the strange, dark wanderers were gone with their painted wagons from the market places of cities where they told fortunes for silver and bought gay beads from the merchants, which displeased no one but the torturers and dispensers of justice who are not kind to thieves. When they came to Cuppar-Nombo the high walls were all blue with the evening.

  Much has been sung of the wealth of the old kings. It was the intention of the dark people to come beneath the high tomb shaped, as was customary, like a pyramid, and to locate therein the hidden door such tombs are known to have. Among their number were several persons for whom familiarity had made the felonious arts of burglary wholly contemptable; and one wearing the head-dress with the two horns and a curious disk between the horns, who was not unlearned concerning cold guardians of tombs who have a deplorable appetite for the blood of venturesome thieves, and how most effectively to curb that appetite. Many had mattocks and spades. On Cuppar-Nombo in sight of the beautiful blue walls the burglars confered with the priest, who consulted in turn the little ivory fetishes he had, and so determined that the enterprise so dear to all their hearts should begin with the first light of dawn. No one knows when Snid and Leshti and Loth decided upon their own enterprise, but for several
days more than one person had missed a spade or mattock from among his personal belongings.

  For Leshti and Loth were of course both notably fine thieves, but the deeds of Snid have become a matter of fable. When ever his name is mentioned men stop smiling and look to their shutters; jewellers who remember what became of the gnomes’ opals, justly fear the deftness of his quick brown fingers; in a certain disreputable quarter of Celephais they wonder how once he appropriated, by means not entirely honest, the three unlikely ruby coffers and the key to the Vaults of Zin, all in a single night’s work. It is therefore not surprising that the plan should have occurred to Snid. And the plan was not at all uncongenial to Messrs. Leshti or Loth.

  When those three conspiritors left the watch-fires in front of the painted wagons the stars were already out, still nobody saw them steal away into the shadows. Perhaps someone did see a lean, crouching shape slipping suspiciously just past the edge of sight, noticed hardly at all, while elsewhere one overheard the crack of a pebble (or was it only the fire?) and a little breeze rattling in the grass. But of course it was neither Snid nor Leshti nor Loth—who were much too subtle—for they had already gotten as far as the secret path which men never made, that goes furtively down along Golthoth’s dizzy walls, past the pits there are on the far side, and thence by devious ways down into that valley where the three hoped to find and loot the high tomb. They would not enter that ancient, horrible city, for Snid had spent many hours in pondering the old songs and his plan, and it seemed to him not improbable that the old gods who slept might also dream. And Snid had his reasons for not wishing to meet any dream of the gods. So they came, those three thieves with their mattocks and spades and the three zebras brought for a purpose, which Snid had concealed in his wagon so cunningly that no one even suspected, the zebras on whose backs they hoped to bear away their loot to Drinen, thereby confounding their tribe; so they came down that old forgotten path between the crumbling lesser tombs, and found at last that which of all things the thieves had least reason to expect: the high tomb was not there!