by Brian Lumley
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi”
And the sand in the hourglass ran out!
“Worm!” Carstairs cried as the others fell silent. “Worm, I command thee—come out!”
Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow’s lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man’s mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.
And out of that mouth—out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head—there now appeared a writhing pink flood of maggots, grave-worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!
“Now, Titus Crow, now!” cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. “Take my hand!” And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.
“No!” said Titus Crow. “No, I will not!”
Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried, “What?” His cassock billowed with hideous movement. “Give me your hand—I command it!”
“Do your worst, wizard,” Crow yelled back through gritted teeth.
“But… I have your Number! You must obey!”
“Not my Number, wizard,” said Crow, shaking his head—and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of terror filling the cellar.
“You lied!” Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. “You … cheated! No matter—a small thing.” In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. “Worm, he is yours. I command you—take him!”
Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb-horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor—and drew back from Crow’s circle as from a ring of fire. “Go on!” Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. “Who is he? What does he know? I command you!”
“I know many things,” said Crow. “They do not want me—they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916—on 2 December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr. Carstairs!”
The 2nd of December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes. “A Master!” Crow heard the whisper. “A twenty-two!”
“No!” Carstairs fell to his knees. “No!”
He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. “Durrell, to me!” His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.
“Not me!” shrieked Durrell, flinging off his cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. “Not me!” Wildly he clambered from sight—and eleven like him hot on his heels.
“No!” Carstairs gurgled once more.
Crow stared at him, still unable to avert his eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final—the first!—dark Arab visage of his origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer’s face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.
Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half-forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:
“For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs …”
Later, in his right mind but changed for ever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they crawled. Crow barely noticed them.
The tyres of his car paid them no heed whatever.
BENEATH THE MOORS
I: Discoveries in Convalescence
[From the Notebooks of Professor Ewart Masters]
Following the car accident that nearly killed me, causing what seemed at first rather severe brain damage and leaving me almost completely incapacitated for four months, I decided to spend my convalescence in a return to the interests of earlier years; to take up once more my studies of the ancient things of the world, the civilizations and cities of earth’s youth. The decision to do no actual work was taken as a necessity. One cannot lecture when at any second his memory is liable to fail, his very lucidity depart to leave him a mazed and mumbling wreck.
That was the early condition in which my accident had left me; barely capable of concentrating for more than five minutes at a stretch; prone to lapsing at the drop of a hat into shady worlds filled with half-formed visions of dimly remembered scenes and incomprehensible snatches of unrecognized conversations. Shady worlds which were, in effect, spontaneous daydreams, leftovers from my days of total unconsciousness and my secondary phase of semi-amnesia; guaranteed, if ever they should occur in public, to make Professor Ewart Masters a figure of ridicule. In such a condition lecturing was out, as was for that matter anything requiring more than a minimum of concentration.
But I could read and even study, so long as I rested myself as soon as I felt a dizzy spell coming on. And so, when finally I left the London hospital—a move allowed me wholly on my assurance that I would rest, that I would not yet attempt to work—it was to catch the first north-bound train out of King’s Cross and return to my native Harden on the north-east coast; to the home of my bachelor nephew, Jason Masters, where I might resume the restful studies of my youth.
Restful? I could hardly have been more wrong!
Jason had left nothing to chance, laying in a batch of the latest archaeological journals and papers, a copy of Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions, a complete report on the newly opened Mediterranean and Ahaggar digs, and two new illustrated paperbacks taking a refreshing look at the old ‘forgotten civilizations’ theme. I suppose he followed the principle that the more reading I did the less tempted I would be towards more strenuous exertions; but the truth of the matter was I had no intention of working. I had been pushing myself for far too long, with never a break in eight years, and doubtless it was the way I had knocked myself about that was to blame for my car accident. The fault was my own; I had been simply too tired to drive. No, relaxation and quiet were for me; no more long hours on the road, no more road-maps to consult, no more lengthy lectures in drafty, poorly lit town halls, and no more sleepless nights worrying over tomorrow’s programme; not for quite a long time at any rate.
Yet within a fortnight I was bored to tears, even though the uselessness of attempting anything more ambitious had been brought home to me time and time again. On no less than five occasions I had suffered trauma-like lapses while sitting at my desk with various papers, and once, while out stretching my legs with Jason, my mind had completely blanked and my nephew had had to lead me home while I mumbled to some unseen companion of my childhood.
Over a further period of some six weeks, however, my ‘funny turns’ slowly petered out and I began to get about more on my own. Jason was delighted with my progress and in the eighth week arranged a trip on which he accompanied me to Radcar Museum, to have a look at some of the newer acquisitions of the antiquities section. The idea of the trip sprang from the interest I had shown in an article in one of the archaeological magazines Jason had got in for me. It seemed that the museum had in its ‘Wonders of Ancient Britain’ showcases an artefact older than any other known item of British historical interest. Carbon dating and the Wendy-Smith Test had placed the thing—a miniature sculpture of some reptilian ‘god’—as being as much as twelve thousand years old; yet photographs in the magazine showed its
features to be as clearly defined as if cut only yesterday. And there was something else about it, a suggestion of latent … existence … which somehow disturbed me strangely.
From the moment I laid eyes on the actual figurine itself, resting behind glass in its museum showcase, I was lost. Oh, my studies had been restful enough until then, until the advent of this tiny bit of unknown prehistory. But now …?
Suddenly I had a purpose. It seems strange, I know, but I found myself so inexplicably fascinated by the thing that I became almost grateful for the accident which had led me to its discovery, and as soon as I got back to Harden I set to work sorting out all the information I could find on it—which eventually came to quite a bit…
Yes, now that I had something to do, something to look for, my health seemed to pick up amazingly, and as the weeks passed my lapses into that strange half-world grew less and less frequent until they ceased almost completely. It seemed the doctors had been quite wrong, work was doing me no harm at all. And, as I have said, I surprised myself at the amount of information I was eventually able to turn up.
Not that I had it all immediately to hand, on the contrary, but after some digging around—a peek or two at Wendy-Smith’s On Ancient Civilizations, a careful perusal of the ‘spoof’ death-notes of Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole (the author of one of those previously mentioned books procured for me by my nephew), a thoughtful examination of the ‘message’ of the translated but still baffling Kith Characters, and, finally, a slow scrutiny of the known and charted subterranean streams and rivers of the Yorkshire Moors—I was satisfied that I had garnered as much information on the subject as was available without going to a great deal more trouble.
The subject? Well, for me, fascinating though it had been from the start, the figurine itself was only a beginning, a clue, a pointer to … well, to something I did not quite understand myself. I only knew I had the feeling that I was on the first step of an amazing archaeological and anthropological staircase, and that at the top there awaited—?
My interest in speleological charts sprang from the fact that the green lizard-like figurine had been found in a stream where it appeared to have been washed from some underground region through a resurgence at Sarby-on-the-Moor. This, plus a mention in Walmsley's death-notes of a mythical city named Lh-yib (the location of which the professor had supposedly traced to a well-known but completely bleak and barren area of the moors), intrigued me tremendously. I saw a connection that to me was undeniable. After all, the fact that the surface of the moors at the area mentioned by Walmsley was barren, completely devoid of any prehistoric remains other than the normal fossils one might expect to find, did not prove conclusively that such a city had never existed. Why, with the passage of Lord-only-knows how many centuries since Lh-yib stood, if it ever stood, the Earth’s natural convulsions—earthquakes, tremors, erosion, floods and all the other planet—rending forces of time and nature—could easily have obliterated even the most fragmentary trace of the city! But in that case, why had the figurine not suffered to a like degree from these deteriorative forces? Had it been cached away somewhere underground to be washed out all these centuries later as clean and new as when first sculpted? This seemed to me the only likely explanation; for that a city should crumble to dust while a mere idol, small and quite susceptible to all Earth’s disintegrative processes, remained intact and unaffected down the aeons without some sort of protection was simply not reasonable.
From then on I spent a lot of time in Harden’s adequate library, and there, over the next week or two, I became a firm friend of the quite knowledgeable lady librarian Miss Samways; who helped me considerably in tracking down numerous books, even going so far as to have a number sent in from other branches. My purpose primarily was to try to trace the reptilian ‘god’ itself, to see if I could find any reference to it, or its worship, in the translated writings of the world’s great pre-dawn civilizations. To this and other ends I scanned or requested information on many a book half-remembered from my earlier years, many of them on archaeological subjects—the classical digs of Babylonia, Turkey, Pompeii, Chichen-Itza, Milcabamba and Knossos—and numerous others of far more doubtful authenticity; but nowhere, not even in such comprehensive anthropological texts as The Golden Bough, could I find mention of a creature or deity of passing similarity to the green figurine.
It was difficult to see how it fitted in, but I soon became so desperate for a clue that I even thought to briefly consider the Melanesian belief of a time ‘in the beginning’ when mythical beings dwelt on Earth—beings that evolved into men—in particular the crocodile god, Nuga. Then there was the mythology of the Shibiuk peoples of the Upper Nile regions of the Sudan. In these legends crocodile-girls came down from the moon to marry men, and the crocodile later became regarded as the patron of birth and—amazingly enough—protector of babies! Still in Africa, the Malagasy clans believe that the dead return (after growing tails in their graves) in the form of crocodiles; and there are numerous tales of witches and witch-doctors changing into crocodiles through their practising of Black Magic rites. Nor could I completely ignore the crocodile-headed ‘god’ of Crocodilopolis in ancient Egypt, Sobek, who lolled—jewel-adorned and with his teeth gold-plated—in the sacred pools of his temple. But in more sober frame of mind I had to admit to myself that none of these could be the creature or deity for which I searched.
Despairingly I turned to more truly zoological material in the hope that I might at least find the animal in whose likeness the statuette had been sculpted. I pored over Banfort's The Saurian Age, Nessiter’s Dragons of Myth and Legend, McGilchrist's Notes on ‘Nessie': the Secrets of Loch Ness Revealed!, and all and any other volumes which I thought might prove valid to my search. It was a stone wall all the way, and more than once I considered giving up an apparently hopeless task.
But then I turned again to Walmsley’s ‘spoof’ notes—those writings published after his inexplicable death—in the hope that somewhere he might have mentioned something of use to me; something perhaps to reinforce his theory of a prehistoric city on the moors…
How I had missed it before I cannot say, but sure enough there was in his notes a lead of sorts. Quite simply Walmsley had stated that the people of his alleged city were ‘fancifully described on the Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron…’
Just where he had acquired this information is difficult to say (Walmsley had died before Angstrom’s team smuggled their pirated treasures of time out of Arabia), but certainly such cylinders as the professor had mentioned were in existence; indeed, Walmsley’s own book on the translation of ancient languages had been used extensively in the deciphering of the inscriptions upon those relics of the dead past.
From the library I put through a call to the British Museum in London, requesting a brief reading of the translation. At first the gentleman on the other end of the line was a bit short with me—understandably, I suppose—but when I introduced myself as being Ewart Masters he brought the curator’s assistant, one Mr. Fleetly, to the telephone and I got my reading.
There was not a great deal to it in all; I had asked only for the portion, if such existed, containing the description of an ancient people. Mr Fleetly had snorted in answer to my request before telling me:
“People, sir? Things, more like! As wildly fanciful as anything the Greeks ever wrote …” And after I had heard the translation I found myself agreeing with him, but more intrigued than ever:
… and the Beings of lb are in Hue as green as the Lake of lb and the Mists that rise over the Lake: and their Eyes do bulge outward and their Lips do pout and are as Wattles; and their Ears are curiously formed; and they are without Voices, yet unheard they do speak! … Lo, they came down from the Moon one Night in a Mist; lo, they and the Lake and lb; and there did they worship Bokrug, the great Water-Lizard, and did dance most horribly to the full-waxed Moon …
So: that then was the description of the people—or rather the ‘beings’—of lb as inscribed on the�
��Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron. But those cylinders (the seven so far discovered at least) had come out of the east, while Walmsley's city had supposedly stood somewhere on the Yorkshire Moors!
Most puzzling, all of it, but rewarding insofar as I had at last apparently placed my figurine: which, or so it seemed, had been godhead to a world-wide cult!—though how that could possibly have been I was unable to even guess.
Well, one thing often leads to another, and with this in mind I spent a few more days trying to find other references, this time in connection with lb. But now it seemed that the more I searched the less I turned up. Apart from one mention, again supplied by the British Museum (this time from an ancient translation of doubtful literary origin—The Ilarnek Papyri—to the effect that lb’s inhabitants had been wiped out en masse by men from another ancient city, Sarnath, and that later a terrible doom had been visited upon Sarnath), there was nothing.
The time had arrived, it seemed, when I should turn my attention to other things …
II: Episode at Bleakstone
[From the Notebooks of Professor Ewart Masters]
Apparently then, I had run the thing to earth; there remained nothing to be discovered of the mystery. Oh, true, the mystery itself was as strange and fascinating as ever, but a means to any sort of solution seemed beyond my capabilities. None the less I felt my researches had not been entirely in vain; they had, I was sure, helped my brain combat the damage done by my accident. In support of this belief there stood the fact that those mental lapses of mine had at last completely disappeared (or so I thought) and my physical health, too, had returned almost fully to normal.
It was about this time that I learned of the gravel-pits at Bleakstone, determining to journey there at my earliest convenience to see if I could find some of the reputedly many and various fossils with which the area allegedly abounded.
Jason had watched closely my return through the various stages of recovery, but was still more than a little worried when I begged of him the use of his car to go out to Bleakstone for a day or two. I argued, however, that the change of scenery could only do me good, that I badly needed the exercise of scrambling over the rocks and pebbles of the gravel-pits. Yet in the end, despite all my protests, I had to resort to a promise of calling Jason at least daily on the telephone (to report of my continuing good health and on the results of my expedition) before he would agree to loan me his car—and then he would only agree on the additional guarantee that I never exceeded the speed limits laid down by the highway authorities.
