Compleat Crow

by Brian Lumley

  As I hurried home to the grey stone house which has been my home ever since my father sent me out of America, I could not help but wonder at the romantic fool in me which prompts me all too often to spend my pennies on such pretty tomfooleries as these. Obviously an inherited idiosyncrasy which, along with my love of dark mysteries and obscure and antique wonders, was undoubtedly sealed into my personality as a permanent stamp of my world-famous father, the great New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny

  Yet if the mirror really was once the possession of that awful sovereign — why! What a wonderful addition to my collection. I would hang the thing between my bookshelves, in company with Geoffrey, Poe, d'Erlette, and Prinn. For of course the legends and myths I had heard and read of it were purely legends and myths, and nothing more; heaven forbid!

  With my ever-increasing knowledge of night's stranger mysteries I should have known better.

  At home I sat for a long time, simply admiring the thing where it hung on my wall, studying the polished bronze frame with its beautifully moulded serpents and demons, ghouls and efreets; a page straight out of The Arabian Nights. And its surface was so perfect that even the late sunlight, striking through my windows, reflected no glare but a pure beam of light which lit my study in a dream-engendering effulgence.

  Nitocris' Mirror!

  Nitocris. Now there was a woman — or a monster — whichever way one chooses to think of her. A sixth-dynasty Queen who ruled her terror-stricken subjects with a will of supernatural iron from her seat at Gizeh — who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates — whose mirror allowed her glimpses of the nether-pits where puffed Shoggoths and creatures of the Dark-Spheres carouse and sport in murderous lust and depravity.

  Just suppose this was the real thing, the abhorred glass which they placed in her tomb before sealing her up alive; where could Brown-Farley have got hold of it?

  Before I knew it, it was nine, and the light had grown so poor that the mirror was no more than a dull golden glow across the room in the shadow of the wall. I put on my study light, in order to read Brown-Farley's diary and immediately - on picking up that small, flat book, which seemed to fall open automatically at a well-turned page - I became engrossed with the story which began to unfold. It appeared that the writer had been a niggardly man, for the pages were too closely-written, in a crabbed hand, from margin to margin and top to bottom, with barely an eighth of an inch between lines. Or perhaps he had written these pages in haste, begrudging the seconds wasted in turning them and therefore determined to turn as few as possible?

  The very first word to catch my eye was - Nitocris!

  The diary told of how Brown-Farley had heard it put about that a certain old Arab had been caught selling items of fabulous antiquity in the markets of Cairo. The man had been jailed for refusing to tell the authorities whence the treasures had come. Yet every night in his cell he had called such evil things down on the heads of his jailers that eventually, in fear, they let him go. And -he had blessed them in the name of Nitocris! Yet Abu Ben Reis was not one of those tribesmen who swore by her name - or against it! He was not a Gizeh man, nor even one of Cairo's swarthy sons. His home- tribe was a band of rovers wandering far to the east, beyond the great desert. Where, then, had he come into contact with Nitocris' name? Who had taught him her foul blessing - or where had he read of it? For through some kink of fate and breeding Abu Ben Reis had an uncommon knack with tongues and languages other than his own.

  Just as thirty-five years earlier the inexplicable possessions of one Mohammad Hamad had attracted archaeologists of the calibre of Herbert E. Winlock to the eventual discovery of the tomb of Thutmosis III's wives, so now did Abu Ben Reis's hinted knowledge of ancient burial grounds — and in particular the grave of the Queen of elder horror — suffice to send Brown-Farley to Cairo to seek his fortune.

  Apparently he had not gone unadvised; the diary was full of bits and pieces of lore and legend in connection with the ancient Queen. Brown-Farley had faithfully copied from Wardle's Notes on Nitocris; and in particular the paragraph on her 'Magical Mirror': . . . handed down to their priests by the hideous gods of inner-Earth before the earliest civilizations of the Nile came into existence — a "gateway" to unknown spheres and worlds of hellish horror in the shape of a mirror. Worshipped, it was, by the- pre-Imer Nyahites in Ptathlia at the dawn of Man's domination of the Earth, and eventually enshrined by Nephren-Ka in a black, windowless crypt on the banks of the Shibeli. Side-by-side, it lay, with the Shining Trapezohedron, and who can say what things might have been reflected in its depths? Even the Haunter of the Dark may have bubbled and blasphemed before it Stolen, it remained hidden, unseen for centuries in the bat-shrouded labyrinths of Kith, before finally falling into Nitocris' foul clutches. Numerous the enemies she locked away, the mirror as sole company, full knowing that by the next morning the death-cell would be empty save for the sinister, polished glass on the wall. Numerous the vilely chuckled hints she gave of the features- of those who leered at midnight from out the bronze-barriered gate. But not even Nitocris herself was safe from the horrors locked in the mirror, and at the midnight hour she was wise enough to gaze but fleetingly upon it . .

  The midnight hour! Why! It was ten already. Normally I would have been preparing for bed by this time; yet here I was, so involved, now, with the diary that I did not give my bed a second thought. Better, perhaps, if I had . . .

  I read on. Brown-Farley had eventually found Abu Ben Reis and had plied him with liquor and opium until finally he managed to do that which the proper authorities had found impossible. The old Arab gave up his secret - though the book hinted that this knowledge had not been all that easy to extract - and the next morning Brown-Farley had taken a little-used camel-track into the wastes beyond those pyramids wherein lay Nitocris' first burial place.

  But from here on there were great gaps in the writing - whole pages having been torn out or obliterated with thick, black strokes, as though the writer had realized that too much was revealed by what he had written - and there were rambling, incoherent paragraphs on the mysteries of death and the lands beyond the grave. Had I not known the explorer to have been such a fanatical antiquarian (his auctioned collection had been unbelievably varied) and were I not aware that he had delved, prior to his search for Nitocris' second tomb, into many eldritch places and outre settings, I might have believed the writer mad from the contents of the diary's last pages. Even in this knowledge I half believed him mad anyway.

  Obviously he had found the last resting- place of Nitocris - the scribbled hints and suggestions were all too plain - but it seemed there had been nothing left worth removing. Abu Ben Reis had long since plundered all but the fabled mirror, and it was after Brown-Farley had taken that last item from the ghoul-haunted tomb that the first of his real troubles began. From what I could make out from the now-garbled narrative, he had begun to develop a morbid fixation about the mirror, so that by night he kept it constantly draped!

  But it was no good; before I could continue my perusal of the diary I had to get down my copy of Feery's Notes on the Necronomicon. There was something tickling me, there at the back of my mind, a memory, something I should know, something which Alhazred had known and written about. As I took down Feery's book from my shelves I came face to face with the mirror. The light in my study was bright and the night was quite warm —with that oppressive heaviness of air which is ever the prelude to violent thunderstorms — yet I shuddered strangely as I saw my face reflected in that glass. Just for a moment it had seemed to leer at me.

  I shrugged off the feeling of dread which immediately sprang up in my inner-self and started to look up the section concerning the mirror. A great clock chimed out the hour of eleven somewhere in the night and distant lightning lit up the sky to the west beyond the windows of my room. One hour to midnight.

  Still, my study is the most disconcerting place. What with those eldritch books
on my shelves, their aged leather and ivory spines dully agleam with the reflection of my study light; and the thing I use as a paper-weight, which has no parallel in any sane or ordered universe; and now with the mirror and diary, I was rapidly developing an attack of the fidgets unlike any I had ever known before. It was a shock for me to realize that I was just a little uneasy!

  I thumbed through Feery's often fanciful reconstruction of the Necronomicon until I found the relevant passage. The odds were that Feery had not altered this section at all; except, perhaps, to somewhat modernize the 'mad' Arab's old-world phraseology Certainly it read like genuine Alhazred. Yes, there it was And there, yet again, was that recurring hint of happenings at midnight

  ‘... for while the Surface of the Glass is still — even as the Crystal Pool of Yith-Shesh, even as the Lake of Hall when the Swimmers are not at the Frothing — and while its Gates are locked in all the Hours of Day; yet, at the Witching Hour, One who knows — even One who guesses — may see in it all the Shades and Shapes of Night and the Pit, wearing the Visage of Those who saw before. And though the Glass may lie forgotten forever its Power may not die, and it should be known:

  That is not dead which can forever lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die . . ;’

  For many moments I pondered that weird passage and the even weirder couplet which terminated it; and the minutes ticked by in a solemn silence hitherto outside my experience at The Aspens.

  It was the distant chime of the half-hour which roused me from my reverie-to continue my reading of BrownFarley's diary I purposely put my, face away from the mirror and leaned back in my chair, thoughtfully scanning the pages. But there were only one or, two pages left to read, and as best I can remember the remainder of that disjointed narrative rambled on in this manner

  '10th. The nightmares on the London — all the way out from Alexandria to Liverpool — Christ knows I wish I'd flown. Not a single night's sleep. Appears the so-called "legends" are not so fanciful as they seemed. Either that or my nerves are going! Possibly it's just the echo of a guilty conscience. If that old fool Abu hadn't been so damned close-mouthed — if he'd been satisfied with the opium and brandy instead of demanding money — and for what, I ask? There was no need for all that rough-stuff. And his poxy waffle about "only wanting to protect me". Rubbish! The old beggar'd long since cleaned the place out except for the mirror ... That damned mirror! Have to get a grip on myself. What state must my nerves be in that I need to cover the thing up at night? Perhaps I've read too much from the Necronomicon! I wouldn't be the first fool to fall for that blasted book's hocus-pocus. Alhazred must have been as mad as Nitocris herself. Yet I suppose it's possible that it's all just imagination; there are drugs that can give the same effects, I'm sure. Could it be that the mirror has a hidden mechanism somewhere which- releases some toxic powder or other at intervals? But what kind of mechanism would still be working so perfectly after the centuries that glass must have seen? And why always at midnight? Damned funny! And those dreams! There is one sure way to settle it, of course. I'll give it a few more days and if things get no better, well — we'll have to wait and see.

  '13th. That's it, then. Tonight we'll have it out in the open. I mean, what good's a bloody psychiatrist who insists I'm perfectly well when I know I'm ill? That mirror's behind it all! "Face your problems," the fool said, "and if you do they cease to bother you That's what I'll do, then, tonight.

  '13th. Night. There, I've sat myself down and it's eleven already I'll wait 'til the stroke of midnight and then I'll take the cover off the glass and we'll see what we'll see. God! That a man like me should twitch like this! Who'd believe that only a few months ago I was steady as a rock? And all for a bloody mirror. I' just have a smoke and a glass. That's better. Twenty minutes to go; good — soon be over now — p'raps tonight I'll get a bit of sleep for a change! The way the place goes suddenly quiet, as though the whole house were waiting for something to happen. I'm damned glad I sent Johnson home. It'd be no good to let him see me looking like this. What a God-awful state to get oneself into! Five minutes to go. I'm tempted to take the cover off the mirror right now! There — midnight! Now we'll have it!'

  And that was all there was!

  I read it through again, slowly, wondering what there was in it which so alarmed me. And what a coincidence, I thought, reading that last line for the second time; for even as I did so the distant clock, muffled somewhere by the city's mists, chimed out the hour of twelve.

  I thank God, now, that he sent that far-off chime to my ears. I am sure it could only have been an act of Providence which caused me to glance round upon hearing it. For that still glass — that mirror which is quiet as the crystal pool of Yith-Shesh all the hours of day — was still no longer!

  A thing, a bubbling blasphemous shape from lunacy's most hellish nightmare, was squeezing its flabby pulp out through the frame of the mirror into my room — and it wore a face where no face ever should have been.

  I do not recall moving — opening my desk drawer and snatching out that which lay within — yet it seems I must have done so. I remember only the deafening blasts of sound from the bucking, silver-plated revolver in my clammy hand; and above the rattle of sudden thunder, the whine of flying fragments and the shivering of glass as the hell-forged bronze frame buckled and leapt from the wall.

  I remember, too, picking up the strangely twisted silver bullets from my Boukhara rug. And then I must have fainted.

  The next morning I dropped the shattered fragments of the mirror's glass overboard from the rail of the Thames Ferry and I melted down the frame to a solid blob and buried it deep in my garden. I burned the diary and scattered its ashes to the wind. Finally, I saw my doctor and had him prescribe a sleeping-draft for me. I knew I was going to need it.

  I have said the thing had a face.

  Indeed, atop the glistening, bubbling mass of that hell-dweller's bulk there was a face. A composite face of which the two halves did not agree! For one of them was the immaculately cruel visage of an ancient Queen of Egypt; and the other was easily recognizable — from photographs I had seen in the newspapers — as the now anguished and lunatic features of a certain lately vanished explorer!

  AN ITEM OF SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

  THE NEXT TWO stories were shorts written expressly for August Derleth's Arkham Collector. This slim magazine or 'house journal' didn't have room for long pieces, so Derleth liked to keep stories short and to the point.

  But let's go back to a- time twenty years earlier:

  My father was a coal miner in a colliery an England's northeast coast, and he was also a very well-read, fascinating man with a keen and ever-thirsting mind. Museums drew him like a nail to a magnet, and some of his love of ancient civilizations and strange antiquities — his love of knowledge in general — naturally rubbed off on me. Sunderland had a fine museum, which we used to visit fairly regularly. And not far away, there stood Hadrian's Wall. I think we met Titus Crow there once, when we were walking under the wall.

  Come to think of it that might even have been the same day he stumbled across

  An Item of Supporting Evidence.

  It was the contents of a letter from Chandler Davies, the weird-artist, commenting upon the negative effect which my short story Yegg-ha's Realm had had on him, which determined me to invite him round to Blowne House. Not that I grieved to any great extent over Mr Davies' adverse comments - you can never please everyone - but I definitely disagreed with his expounded argument. He had had it that Mythological-Fantasy was 'out'; that the Cthulhu Mythos' fabled lands and creatures and Cimmeria's scintillating citadels and dark demons should have been allowed to die a sad but certain death along with their respective originators, and that constant culling from those tales - the brain children of my own, not to mention many another author's, literary progenitors - was weakening the impact of the original works. Nor, apparently, had my story - admittedly a Lovecraftian piece; set during the time of Rome's rule over Engl
and and involving the worship of an 'outside God' - irritated him in this respect alone. What seemed to have annoyed Mr Davies especially was the fact that I had portrayed 'so thoroughly unbelievable a God' as existing in such a well-known period of England's history that even an average student of our country's antiquities could hardly miss the obvious impossibility of my tale.

  I was pleased that Mr Davies had written directly to me and not to the letters section of Grotesque, in which magazine my tale had originally appeared, for then I would have been forced to take retaliatory measures which would undoubtedly have caused great tidal-waves of unwanted activity on many a scientific beach. Obviously the artist was not aware that all my stories have at least a tenuous basis in established fact, some more definitely than others, and that I have never chronicled anything which I believe could not possibly have happened or which has not, in some way or other, directly involved myself.

  Anyway, Mr. Davies accepted my invitation and braved the curious aura of foreboding which surrounds Blowne House to visit me one Sunday afternoon some weeks ago. It was the first time he had ever set foot inside my abode and I noted with satisfaction the way in which his eyes roved enviously over the contents of my amply stocked book-shelves.

  Briefly fingering the spine of an original copy of Geoffrey's People of the Monolith, he remarked upon my extreme good fortune at owning so many scarce volumes and read off some of their titles as he scanned them. His, short monologue included Feery's Original Notes on the Necronomicon, the abhorrent Cthaat Aquadingen, a literally priceless Cultes des Goules and many other similarly outre works including such anthropological source books as The Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch Cult. I made a point of bringing to his attention the fact that "I also owned a translated copy of Lollius Urbicus' little known Frontier Garrison, circa AD 138, and took the book down from its shelf before pouring my guest a welcoming brandy.