The Taint and Other Novellas: Best Mythos Tales Volume 1

by Brian Lumley

  Then there would only be Carl and I and the night. And the old house. As if in answer to unspoken thoughts, settling timbers groaned somewhere overhead. Through the window, down below in the sharp shadows of the house, the dull green glint of water caught my eye.

  Carl and I, the night and the old house—

  And the deep, dark pool.

  5. The Music

  It was almost completely dark by the time Carl returned, but in between I had at least been able to discover my uncle’s system of reference. It was quite elementary, really. In his notebook, references such as “CA 121/7” simply indicated an item of interest in the Cthäat Aquadingen, page 121, the seventh paragraph. And in the work itself he had carefully underscored all such paragraphs or items of interest. At least a dozen such references concerning the Cthäat Aquadingen occurred in his notebook, and as night had drawn on I had examined each in turn.

  Most of them were meaningless to me and several were in a tongue or glyph completely beyond my comprehension, but others were in a form of old English which I could transcribe with comparative ease. One such, which seemed a chant of sorts, had a brief annotation scrawled in the margin in my uncle’s hand. The passage I refer to, as nearly as I can remember, went like this:

  “Rise, O Nameless Ones;

  It is Thy Season

  When Thine Own of Thy Choosing,

  Through Thy Spells & Thy Magic,

  Through Dreams & Enchantry,

  May know Thou art come.

  They rush to Thy Pleasure,

  For the Love of Thy Masters—

  —the Spawn of Cthulhu.”

  And the accompanying annotation queried: “Would they have used such as this to call the Thing forth, I wonder, or was it simply a blood lure? What causes it to come forth now? When will it next come?”

  It was while I was comparing references and text in this fashion that I began to get a glimmer as to just what the book was, and on further considering its title I saw that I had probably guessed correctly: “Cthäat” frankly baffled me, unless it had some connection with the language or being of the pre-Nacaal Kthatans; but “Aquadingen” was far less alien in its sound and formation. It meant (I believed), “water-things”, or “things of the waters”; and the—Cthäat Aquadingen was quite simply a compendium of myths and legends concerning water sprites, nymphs, demons, naiads and other supernatural creatures of lakes and oceans, and the spells or conjurations by which they might be evoked or called out of their watery haunts.

  I had just arrived at this conclusion when Carl returned, the lights of his vehicle cutting a bright swath over the dark surface of the pool as he parked in front of the porch. Laden down, he entered the house and I went down to the spacious if somewhat old fashioned kitchen to find him filling shelves and cupboards and stocking the refrigerator with perishables. This done, bright and breezy in his enthusiasm, he enquired about the radio.

  “Radio?” I answered. “I thought your prime concern was for peace and quiet? Why, you’ve made enough noise for ten since we got here !”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s not my noise I’m concerned about but yours. Or rather, the radio’s. I mean, you’ve obviously found one for I heard the music.”

  Carl was big, blond and blue-eyed; a Viking if ever I saw one, and quite capable of displaying a Viking’s temper. He had been laughing when he asked me where the radio was, but now he was frowning. “Are you playing games with me, John?”

  “No, of course I’m not,” I answered him. “Now what’s all this about? What music have you been hearing?”

  His face suddenly brightened and he snapped his fingers. “There’s a radio in the Range Rover,” he said. “There has to be. It must have gotten switched on, very low, and I’ve been getting Bucharest or something.” He made as if to go back outside.

  “Bucharest?” I repeated him.

  “Hmm?” he paused in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, yes—gypsyish stuff. Tambourines and chanting—and fiddles. Dancing around campfires. Look, I’d better switch it off or the battery will run down.”

  “I didn’t see a radio,” I told him, following him out through the porch and onto the drive.

  He leaned inside the front of the vehicle, switched on the interior light and searched methodically. Finally he put the light out with an emphatic click. He turned to me and his jaw had a stubborn set to it. I looked back at him and raised my eyebrows. “No radio?”

  He shook his head. “But I heard the music.”

  “Lovers,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Lovers, out walking. A transistor radio. Perhaps they were sitting in the grass. After all, it is a beautiful summer night.”

  Again he shook his head. “No, it was right there in the air. Sweet and clear. I heard it as I approached the house. It came from the house, I thought. And you heard nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.

  “Well then—damn it to hell!” he suddenly grinned. “I’ve started hearing things, that’s all! Skip it…Come on, let’s have supper…”

  • • •

  Carl stuck to his “studio” bedroom but I slept upstairs in a room adjacent to the study. Even with the windows thrown wide open, the night was very warm and the atmosphere sticky, so that sleep did not come easily. Carl must have found a similar problem for on two or three occasions I awakened from a restless half-sleep to sounds of his moving about downstairs. In the morning over breakfast both of us were a little bleary-eyed, but then he led me through into his room to display the reason for his nocturnal activity.

  There on the makeshift easel, on one of a dozen old canvasses he had brought with him, Carl had started work on a picture…of sorts.

  For the present he had done little more than lightly brush in the background, which was clearly the valley of the house, but the house itself was missing from the picture and I could see that the artist did not intend to include it. The pool was there, however, with its encircling ring of quartz columns complete and finished with lintels of a like material. The columns and lintels glowed luminously.

  In between and around the columns vague figures writhed, at present insubstantial as smoke, and in the foreground the flames of a small fire were driven on a wind that blew from across the pool. Taken as a whole and for all its sketchiness, the scene gave a vivid impression of savagery and pagan excitement—strange indeed considering that as yet there seemed to be so little in it to excite any sort of emotion whatever.

  “Well,” said Carl, his voice a trifle edgy, “what do you think?”

  “I’m no artist, Carl,” I answered, which I suppose in the circumstances was saying too much.

  “You don’t like it?” he sounded disappointed.

  “I didn’t say that,” I countered. “Will it be a night scene?”

  He nodded.

  “And the dancers there, those wraiths…I suppose they are dancers?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “and musicians. Tambourines, fiddles…”

  “Ah!” I nodded. “Last night’s music.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Probably…Anyway, I’m happy with it. At least I’ve started to work. What about you?”

  “You do your thing,” I told him, “and I”ll do mine.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “Before I do anything I’m going to soak up a lot of atmosphere. But I don’t intend staying here very long. A month or so, and then—”

  “And then you’ll burn this beautiful old place to the ground.” He had difficulty keeping the sour note out of his voice.

  “It’s what my uncle wanted,” I said. “I’m not here to write a story. A story may come of it eventually, even a book, but that can wait. Anyway, I won’t burn the house.” I made a mushroom cloud with my hands. “She goes—up!”

  Carl snorted. “You McGilchrists,” he said. “You’re all nuts!” But there was no malice in his statement.

  There was a little in mine, however, when I answ
ered “Maybe—but I don’t hear music when there isn’t any!”

  But that was before I knew everything…

  6. The Familiar

  During the course of the next week Scotland began to feel the first effects of what is now being termed “a scourge on the British Isles,” the beginning of an intense, ferocious and prolonged period of drought. Sheltered by the Pentlands, a veritable suntrap for a full eight to ten hours a day, Temple House was no exception. Carl and I took to lounging around in shorts and T-shirts, and with his blond hair and fair skin he was particularly vulnerable. If we had been swimmers, then certainly we should have used the pool; as it was we had to content ourselves by sitting at its edge with our feet in the cool mountain water.

  By the end of that first week, however, the drought’s effect upon the small stream which fed the pool could clearly be seen. Where before the water had rushed down from the heights of the defile, now it seeped, and the natural overflow from the sides of the dam was so reduced that the old course of the stream was now completely dry. As for our own needs: the large water tanks in the attic of the house were full and their source of supply seemed independent, possibly some reservoir higher in the hills.

  In the cool of the late afternoon, when the house stood in its own and the Pentlands’ shade, then we worked; Carl at his drawing or painting, I with my uncle’s notebook and veritable library of esoteric books. We also did a little walking in the hills, but in the heat of this incredible summer that was far too exhausting and only served to accentuate a peculiar mood of depression which had taken both of us in its grip. We blamed the weather, of course, when at any other time we would have considered so much sunshine and fresh air a positive blessing.

  By the middle of the second week I was beginning to make real sense of my uncle’s fragmentary record of his research. That is to say, his trail was becoming easier to follow as I grew used to his system and started to detect a pattern.

  There were in fact two trails, both historic, one dealing with the McGilchrist line itself, the other more concerned with the family seat, with the House of the Temple. Because I seemed close to a definite discovery, I worked harder and became more absorbed with the work. And as if my own industry was contagious, Carl too began to put in longer hours at his easel or drawing board.

  • • •

  It was a Wednesday evening, I remember, the shadows lengthening and the atmosphere heavy when I began to see just how my uncle’s mind had been working. He had apparently decided that if there really was a curse on the McGilchrists, then that it had come about during the construction of Temple House. To discover why this was so, he had delved back into the years prior to its construction in this cleft in the hills, and his findings had been strange indeed.

  It had seemed to start in England in 1594 with the advent of foreign refugees. These had been the members of a monkish order originating in the mountains of Romania, whose ranks had nevertheless been filled with many diverse creeds, colours and races. There were Chinamen amongst them, Hungarians, Arabs and Africans, but their leader had been a Romanian priest named Chorazos. As to why they had been hounded out of their own countries, that remained a mystery.

  Chorazos and certain of his followers became regular visitors at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I—who had ever held an interest in astrology, alchemy and all similar magics and mysteries—and with her help they founded a temple “somewhere near Finchley.” Soon, however, couriers from foreign parts began to bring in accounts of the previous doings of this darkling sect, and so the Queen took advice.

  Of all persons, she consulted with Dr John Dee, that more than dubious character whose own dabbling with the occult had brought him so close to disaster in 1555 during the reign of Queen Mary. Dee, at first enamoured of Chorazos and his followers, now turned against them. They were pagans, he said; their women were whores and their ceremonies orgiastic. They had brought with them a “familiar,” which would have “needs” of its own, and eventually the public would rise up against them and the “outrage” they must soon bring about in the country. The Queen should therefore sever all connections with the sect—and immediately!

  Acting under Dee’s guidance, she at once issued orders for the arrest, detention and investigation of Chorazos and his members…but too late, for they had already flown. Their “temple” in Finchley—a “columned pavilion about a central lake”—was destroyed and the pool filled in. That was in late 1595.

  In 1596 they turned up in Scotland, this time under the guise of travelling faith-healers and herbalists working out of Edinburgh. As a reward for their work among the poorer folk in the district, they were given a land grant and took up an austere residence in the Pentlands. There, following a pattern established abroad and carried on in England, Chorazos and his followers built their temple; except that this time they had to dam a stream in order to create a pool. The work took them several years; their ground was private property; they kept for the main well out of the limelight, and all was well…for a while.

  Then came rumours of orgiastic rites in the hills, of children wandering away from home under the influence of strange, hypnotic music, of a monstrous being conjured up from hell to preside over ceremonial murder and receive its grisly tribute, and at last the truth was out. However covertly Chorazos had organized his perversions, there now existed the gravest suspicions as to what he and the others of his sect were about. And this in the Scotland of James IV, who five years earlier had charged an Edinburgh jury with “an Assize of Error” when they dismissed an action for witchcraft against one of the “notorious” North Berwick Witches. In this present matter, however, any decision of the authorities was pre-empted by persons unknown—possibly the inhabitants of nearby Penicuik, from which town several children had disappeared—and Chorazos’s order had been wiped out en masse one night and the temple reduced to ruins and shattered quartz stumps.

  Quite obviously, the site of the temple had been here, and the place had been remembered by locals down the centuries; so that when the McGilchrist house was built in the mid-18th Century it automatically acquired the name of Temple House. The name had been retained…but what else had lingered over from those earlier times, and what exactly was the nature of the McGilchrist Curse?

  I yawned and stretched. It was after eight and the sinking sun had turned the crests of the hills to bronze. A movement, seen in the corner of my eye through the window, attracted my attention. Carl was making his way to the rim of the pool. He paused with his hands on his hips to stand between two of the broken columns, staring out over the silent water. Then he laid back his head and breathed deeply. There was a tired but self-satisfied air about him that set me wondering.

  I threw the window wide and leaned out, calling down through air which was still warm and cloying: “Hey, Carl—you look like the cat who got the cream!”

  He turned and waved. “Maybe I am. It’s that painting of mine. I think I’ve got it beat. Not finished yet…but coming along.”

  “Is it good?” I asked.

  He shrugged, but it was a shrug of affirmation, not indifference. “Are you busy? Come down and see for yourself. I only came out to clear my head, so that I can view it in fresh perspective. Yours will be a second opinion.”

  I went downstairs to find him back in his studio. Since the light was poor now, he switched on all of the electric lights and led the way to his easel. I had last looked at the painting some three or four days previously, at a time when it had still been very insubstantial. Now—

  Nothing insubstantial about it now. The grass was green, long and wild, rising to nighted hills of grey and purple, silvered a little by a gibbous moon. The temple was almost luminous, its columns shining with an eerie light. Gone the wraithlike dancers; they capered in cassocks now, solid, wild and weird with leering faces. I started as I stared at those faces—yellow, black, and white faces, a half-dozen different races—but I started worse at the sight of the Thing rising over the pool within the circle of glowing co
lumns. Still vague, that horror—that leprous grey, tentacled, mushroom-domed monstrosity—and as yet mainly amorphous; but formed enough to show that it was nothing of this good, sane Earth.

  “What the hell is it?” I half-gasped, half-whispered.

  “Hmm?” Carl turned to me and smiled with pleased surprise at the look of shock on my blanched face. “I’m damned if I know—but I think it’s pretty good! It will be when it’s finished. I’m going to call it The Familiar…”

  7. The Face

  For a long while I simply stood there taking in the contents of that hideous canvas and feeling the heat of the near-tropical night beating in through the open windows. It was all there: the foreign monks making their weird music, the temple glowing in the darkness, the dam, the pool and the hills as I had always known them, the Thing rising up in bloated loathsomeness from dark water, and a sense of realness I had never seen before and probably never again will see in any artist’s work.

  My first impulse when the shock wore off a little was to turn on Carl in anger. This was too monstrous a joke. But no, his face bore only a look of astonishment now—astonishment at my reaction, which must be quite obvious to him. “Christ!” he said, “is it that good?”

  “That—Thing—has nothing to do with Christ!” I finally managed to force the words out of a dry-throat. And again I felt myself on the verge of demanding an explanation. Had he been reading my uncle’s notes? Had he been secretly following my own line of research? But how could he, secretly or otherwise? The idea was preposterous.