Gary Mayers - The House of the Worm

It was in the hundredth year of his residence at the great House betwixt the pillars that the Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak gave the first of his famous banquets. For a century he had kept to himself and within his House, and his only dealings in the city below were for provisions, for which he paid with antique gold coins of no known kingdom. But now, whether because he desired company or for some darker reason, his invitations to dine that evening at the great House betwixt the pillars were found one morning tacked to the front doors of all the houses in the city, and none could say how they came there.

It is a trick, some said, and any who go will be set upon by creatures not good to imagine, and eaten for dinner instead of dining themselves. But some of the younger men were less sure. Who, they asked, has ever seen these creatures, or speaks with authority of the old man’s appetites? He is a vampire, said the others, who owes his unnatural longevity to a diet of human blood; but at this the young men laughed, for while it was uncommon for a man to live a hundred years, it was seldom supernatural. “We will go,” said they, and the others only shook their heads and looked sadly after them.

But in the evening as they trudged in file up to where the great House broods, all twenty of them doubted the wisdom of their choice. It was true that they did not believe the tales told of that strange old man and his queer ways, but they had heard the tales since infancy, and their hearts believed. Yet they did not turn back. And soon the night-songs of the insects grew strange in their ears, and they did not like the way Betelgeuse peered down at them from the heavens. And when at last the House came into view, their fears grew worse; for all the twinkling lights that burned in its many windows could not dispel the queerness in the shadows cast by those five pillars sticking out of the earth like the blackened finger-bones of a corpse in an ill-made grave. One man even fancied he saw a daemon squatting atop the nearest of these, and swore that it had no face where a face should have been. And still they went on, and at last stood before the great front door. And though the colour and grain of the wood was subtly wrong, and the little carvings seemed to twitch in the uncertain light, one man rapped the heavy knocker thrice; and they were ushered by a slant-lipped gnome into a great, gloomy pentagonal hall, where an oak fire burned green, and into the presence of that Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak, but of whom so many tales are told.

And there they dined at a pentagonal table, from plates and goblets of antique gold all traced with the sign of the five-pointed star; and the purple hangings were stitched with that same sign in silver thread; and it was woven into the deep rugs, and carved on the wooden furnishings; and set above the lintels of the doors, and on the sills of the shuttered, secretive windows, were five-pointed stars of a curious grey stone. They dined, and heard their strange host speak, and returned in silence to the city.

And so this curious ritual went for many nights, without change — but fewer and fewer guests returned to the old man’s House each night. Those who did not return had been frightened by that odd light which shone in the old man’s eyes, and by the things he said when in drink; for when the wine cups had been filled for the third time with a vintage surpassing even the heady red wine of Sarrub, being not of the World, and the green fire burned low, he would speak of things no sane man guesses. He told of the winged messengers from Outside, who fly on the aether even to the nethermost abysses of space, where violet gases sing hymns in praise of mindless gods; of what they bring from Yuggoth in the gulf, and what they take back for a nameless purpose. He revealed the. secrets the night-gaunts whisper to those luckless dreamers they snatch from the peak of Throk, to drive them mad; and the appearance of a Dhole; and the meaning of certain rites performed in worship of the goddess N’tse-Kaambl whose splendour hath shattered worlds; and the blasphemous Word that toppled the thrones of the Serpent-priests. He traced the sign of Koth on the table, and told of things in the forbidden Pnakotic Manuscripts which if written here would damn the writer. Men left his House weeping or mad, never to return; all save the three, the braver or perhaps the more foolish, who came to the House of the Worm on that last night.

On that night, while the three guests dined in silence from golden plates, and the green coals on the hearth glowed fitfully, and the wine that surpasses even Sarrub had gone round for the third time, he called their attention to the sign of the five-pointed star emblazoned throughout his gloomy hall, and reminded them that the pillars without were set on the points of that same sign, the Sign of the Elder Gods. He spoke then of those little gods, the present gods of Earth, whom men called the Elder Gods, by which was meant, the gods who love men, and to whom they prayed at evening. And he told how there were Other Gods before them, those Great Old Ones Who owned no master save only Azathoth, the daemon sultan, whose name no lip dares speak aloud. These had come down from the stars when the World was new, to infest and make horrible its dark and lonely places; but They were not wholly free of the stars, and when the stars were wrong They died, to await the distant time when the stars would be right again, and They might rise to shriek and revel and slay. They had already slept for unnumbered aeons when the Elder Gods came from Betelguese to find Them dreaming grotesquely and muttering Their dreams; and those weak little gods were afraid, and with a magic sent those hideous Ones into the keeping of hoary Nodens, who is lord not of the World but the Great Abyss, and bound Them beneath their Elder Sign forever. But there would come a time when hoary Nodens would sleep and forget his watch; and then would come those who would break the seals and the spells, and loose those horrible ravening gods who would not always stay dead. And the pillars marked the Sign of the Elder Gods, and beneath that Sign—

Suddenly the old man paused in his narrative. The silence that followed was oppressive, seeming even to suck the breath away; yet clearly that old man with his glittering eyes was listening for something more! The others heard nothing, but in the single taper’s light they saw that the old man was afraid. Then they heard it, that mad piping, wavering up from one of the cellars below; faint at first, but growing louder and wilder as the minutes passed; bringing strange visions of amorphous flute-players and howling daemons in pits of groping night. The guests remembered Azathoth, the daemon sultan, who gibbers unmentionably on his throne at the centre of Chaos, and something of the terror of their host was made clear to them; they shuddered. Then the old man rose, and taking the great candle from the table, whispered only, “Come!” and passed beneath a dark archway with carvings of hybrid monsters and stars. And because the three had drunk much wine, or because of some power in that one word uttered by their host, they followed him beneath the yawning arch.

Long they wandered down into those nighted regions of Stygian gloom where the moon and stars are mythical, down through the cellars and sub-cellars and still deeper. There were shallow stone steps leading down, and arches too low for the passage of men. Baleful-eyed rats watched them avidly. Deeper they went, ever deeper, and ever they heard that fiendish piping from below, and ever the old man’s light bobbed eerily before them, beckoning evilly. They passed by many corridors on their journey, above whose entrances were set signs that hinted of things even the Elder Gods have forgotten. These lightless halls drew the three despite the old man’s persistent warnings, until in the end of one they saw the distant stars, and a dread chuckle wafted on a frozen wind to where they stood… They looked in no more corridors. But hurrying on to a fork in the narrow way, they chose the left past a hoary altar in a circle of standing stones, and came quickly thence upon a boundless cavern, chasing the frightened shadows before them. Here the old man’s light failed, and the shadows left their hiding places to resume their guard and conceal anew their age old secrets; yet all was not dark. For there was a well in that cavern, a pit so vast that its farther edge was lost to sight, and from its gaping maw a hazy light poured. Here was the source of the piping.