But it was not him.
Something was squirming down the tunnel, clumsy and uncertain of its progress. It was a creature with an ovoid body that resembled a huge slug, with dangling limbs that were more like fins than arms. From the centre of its body rose a long neck, and upon this grew the head, like a bizarre fruit. It was human, but grown three times its normal size. Orgoom saw the staring eyes first, but as the thing came slithering down the tunnel, blocking it entirely, he recognised the head of Snare. It had been given a new and blasphemous life. As it saw the Gelder, it laughed evilly, its voice that of the man who had been Ubeggi’s slave. “No escape, Gelder! Not here.”
Orgoom readied both hands, prepared to tear this disgusting abomination to pieces, but would it be possible? Could he destroy it? He waited, shaking with terror, and the thing that Snare had become drew closer, moved only by the fires of its madness.
Behind him, Orgoom heard the valve hiss open and beyond it could sense the great void that was the dreaming mind of Ybaggog, the hell of hells. The Voidal was moving towards it. Orgoom turned, shielding his eyes, and tried to catch his sickles in the cloak of the dark man, but the fabric was like mist. The Gelder could not stop him.
Snare screamed with maniacal glee. “You cannot save him! He belongs to Ybaggog now. The Dark Gods have thrown him out—they have no power here! Only Ybaggog can command. Follow him, Gelder! Follow him and plunge into the deeps of the Dark Destroyer. Drink!” Snare flicked out a whip-like tongue and Orgoom slashed it in half with a lightning chop. But the awful mouth spat out more of them. Orgoom slashed again, but as each severed part fell, it wriggled back and was absorbed by the round bulk of Snare’s body.
The Voidal was through the orifice and stood beyond, eyes facing whatever was out there. Inside his body, the Sword of Madness began an awful gush of sound, twisted and painful, a crescendo of all that was frightful. The blade turned and shivered as if it, too, endured agonies. Orgoom’s ears threatened to burst as he lurched back to the tunnel wall and crouched there, almost melting into the walls. They seemed to be made of pulp, shuddering as if vibrating to the din made by the sword, as though its appalling sounds cut deep into them. Snare struggled on past Orgoom, no longer interested in the huddled Gelder.
There was a timelessness about the Voidal’s encounter with the void. Ybaggog’s wild dreams and nightmares floated across the pit of his mind like vast naval fleets, some drifting across to the Voidal, whose own tormented mind was closed in on itself, chained up by the madness lodged in his vitals. The first of the Sendings enveloped the dark man, and something of its power seeped through. Huge aerial monsters were tearing and ripping at each other, scattering stars in their wake and crushing whole universes as they struggled in the wildest regions of the omniverse. Gods roared their fury and burst asunder, while billions of their servants fused into rivers of molten light that poured away into the abysses of oblivion. Entire pantheons were reduced to cinders as god after god perished, and the spreading plague of horrors spawned by the lunacy of Ybaggog devoured and devoured. In the memory of the Devourer of Universes, every struggle of the gods of the omniverse still reverberated, locked into a repeated cycle of perpetualness. All was confusion, chaos, tumult and turmoil, and on this ghastly diet, Ybaggog thrived.
Yet the Sword of Madness had built its own wall of turmoil around the walls of the Voidal’s seething mind, so that as the visions came, staggering in their immensity, they struck the eyes of the Voidal and shattered like ice images before the steel hammers of a madman. Ybaggog’s universe shook to its roots, the entire length of it reverberating to the impact.
The Dark Gods had not allowed for such a confrontation, for the Voidal picked out from the slivers of smashed image many things that had meaning for him. Shards of memory gleamed there and he snatched them avidly, repairing them until new visions came to him. As the mad god sent more of his awesome dreams across the void, the Voidal snared at will the pieces that he wanted. As long as the Sword inside him countered the oncoming Sendings, he was in command.
The Snare creature rushed through the valve, made aware by Ybaggog of what had happened. The mad god commanded its beast. It wrapped its broken fronds around the hilt of the Sword of Madness and pulled, shrieking deafeningly as it did so. Orgoom could not watch as the sword fought like a living serpent to remain in the body of the Voidal. Snare pulled and pulled, inching the weapon out, his flesh charring, his limbs shriveling and dropping off. Yet gradually the sword came out, until a last heave brought it free. Snare’s mouth opened wide in a crazed laugh of triumph, and then that ghastly head burst in a welter of smoking gore. Within moments the body began to rupture and then it, too, burst, its leaking remains flung far out into the void of Ybaggog’s dreams.
Orgoom tore free from the wall of the tunnel, which had been absorbing him like a sponge. He saw the Sword of Madness fall at the feet of the Voidal, and looked up at the dark man. The latter stood with his back to Ybaggog’s lunatic void and abruptly looked down at the weapon with an intensely evil smile. In a moment he had picked it up and caressed it. He stared at Orgoom, and in that look the Gelder knew more terror than in anything he had yet lived through.
“Orgoom,” said the Voidal. “The Sendings have not broken your mind.”
“No, master,” said the Gelder, shivering anew. Plainly the Voidal was far from mad, and no prisoner.
“Do not look at what lies behind me.” The Voidal said no more. Ybaggog must have understood now that the dark man was at his mercy, for he began to send out across that black space the most terrible of his visions. The Voidal could feel it coming like a tidal wave of lunacy, but he was ready. He raised up the sword in his right hand, grinning at the hand that was his own and no longer moved by the will of his tormentors, and waited. Eagerly.
At last he span round. His eyes were closed as he flung the weapon, and it tore like a blazing sun across the interstellar vastness of that black mind, its point seeking the vision that raced to meet it.
“To your feet!” the Voidal shouted, gripping Orgoom’s elbow and lifting him. They were both racing up the tunnel as the impact came. It was as if a score of universes had met and fused themselves. Soon the consequent explosion came: Ybaggog’s mind writhed and tore itself apart in the chaos that followed. His body felt the rigours of an immense seizure, followed by more, greater than the first.
“What happens?” cried Orgoom, stumbling but still running.
“Ybaggog’s power is disintegrating, smashed by a greater one.” The Voidal laughed horribly. “I have seen it.” He said no more, but laughed again. It was no longer the laughter of a madman, but laughter that spoke of some unimaginable secret, something that only the dark man knew of, for in that laughter there was confidence that a god might envy.
When they came to the plaza, they found that all of Ybaggog’s servants had burst like fruit, and the heart of the god was pumping madly, turning huge parts of itself to stone and dust. These cracked and tumbled. Orgoom whimpered in terror at the thought of what must happen to him, but the Voidal gazed at the carnage with a terrible smile.
“I think this will not be the end for us, Gelder. Ybaggog will writhe and shudder for eons to come, locked away inside his own mad universe. His Sendings will torment only himself until the distant millenium when he rots at the edge of the omniverse.”
“How will we get out?”
“Our work is done. We have all been used, even Ubeggi. The will of the Dark Gods has triumphed here, as I guessed that it would.”
The Voidal ignored the terrible sounds of destruction around them and put his hand gently on Orgoom’s blue skin. “Go to sleep.”
“We meet again?”
“In some other hell perhaps.”
Within moments the Gelder had slumped down, eyes closed, and soon after that he was gone. For a while the Voidal was left alone to contemplate the broken riddles of his own destiny; then he, too, slipped into the great darkness until the Dark Gods would see fit to wake hi
m again.
EPILOGUE
The inn was silent, the cats asleep, the embers of the fire burning low. Drath nodded to himself and closed the last of the shutters. Outside there was some kind of disturbance, the air stirred as if by a distant storm, passing mercifully beyond Ulthar. The innkeeper thought of the strange company who had visited the inn, their impact on this stranger world. It was over. Tomorrow night, what stranger dreams might come?
Meanwhile, far from Ulthar, Vulparoon the Divine Asker listened with the keen ears of a bird of prey to the remote sounds, almost beyond the limits of hearing. Somewhere a mad god was falling, as mad gods did. The Asker smiled for a moment. But then he thought of the burden he carried, the knowledge that he must pay for the summoning he had made in Ulthar. Tomorrow, a week hence, ten years? Better not to know. But, as with death itself, let it be swift, he prayed.
And Elfloq, the errant familiar, popped out on to the astral realm with a grunt of mixed emotion. He was thankfully free of Ubeggi and the revolting Snare, but what of his master? Elfloq squinted into the fog. He would have to begin again. Next time they would, he hoped, meet under more auspicious circumstances. But with the Voidal, one never knew. Only the Dark Gods really knew anything. Elfloq grimaced. Even in his scheming mind, he did not have the temerity to curse them.
1 Ubeggi first appears in “The Weaver of Wars,” a Voidal story published in Weirdbook 23/24 (1988).
2 Elfloq first meets Orgoom in “At the Council of Gossipers,” published in Dark Horizons 21 (1980).
3 Elfloq first meets the Divine Askers in “Astral Stray,” a Voidal story published in Heroic Fantasy, edited by Gerald Page & Hank Reinhardt, (DAW Books, 1979)
THE DUNWICH HORROR, by H. P. Lovecraft
“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same.… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.”
—Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fears”
I
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age—since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town’s and the world’s welfare at heart—people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason—though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers—is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:
“It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’d raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only bl
ack Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.”
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil’s Hop Yard—a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
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