Gary Mayers: The House of the Worm

The old man went to the edge of the pit and looked into its depths. The lights played eerily across his wrinkled face, showing so well each ghastly expression that lived there. And as the three guests moved closer, he told them in croaking whispers scarcely audible above the daemonia-cal flutes that this was the tomb where seethed and bubbled that unmentionable One; that ancient evil the frightened Elder Gods had sought to hide beneath a last binding and senescent spell; that hellish reason he must keep the pillars and the Elder Sign inviolate forever. Nor would he fail that trust, lest the very curse of Nodens descend upon his head; not though the stars come right and the children of Azathoth rise from the nethermost pits of Hell — for were they not already risen? Had he not heard their great, sloshing footsteps in the bowels of the World, or felt the breath of their titanic wings? They came to open a Way for this abomination’s return, even as the Pnakotic Manuscripts foretold and all men feared. Let them come! What could they ever hope to do while he, the Jailor, the Guardian of the Elder Sign, yet lived? He was screaming now, and his eyes blazed with a holy light. And before anyone even realized what was happening, something slithered up from the well like a river of burning pitch and swept that old man into the abyss.

Verily was it know to the good cotters of Vornai that Yohk, the fat-bellied clerk in the Street of Frogs, was a sorcerer of no little accomplishment; and when it happened that many of their number disappeared mysteriously and under curious circumstance, these same cotters were scandalously quick to lay blame at his dubious threshold.

This Yohk had entered the city, by way of the Gate of Mists, in the grey dawn of that morning three madmen came down the hill there is outside Vornai, shrieking disquieting things of shadows and the World’s ending. The day is one of especial note to the purple-robed chroniclers of the city — though whether because of Yohk’s coming or the madmen’s is uncertain — and they still relate how the terrible history of the Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak was muttered because someone remarked upon a startling resemblance between those madmen and the unfortunate three who never returned from dining at the old man’s sinister House, and how Yohk listened avidly to those tales, and smiled. They tell too how it was Yohk who first advocated the destruction of that great House which some name the Worm’s for no sensible reason, and particularly the breaking of the five shocking pillars that guard it. But the people did not like his soft flabby face and tiny eyes, and feared too the ire of strange gods.

Shortly thereafter, Yohk rented the abandoned temple of a lesser god in the Street of Frogs to dwell in, taking the clerk’s trade for his own, but practicing frightful thaumaturgies at his leisure, as old wives attest. Where the madmen chose to live is nowhere recorded.

Now it was soon obvious to the indignant cotters that the fat clerk did not intend to behave at all properly, in those accepted patterns custom dictates. Yohk spurned the city’s rightful gods, Nasht and Kaman-Thah, and worshipped an idol carved out of jade and set on a smoky crystal wherein fitful shadows danced — it looked for all the World like a squid with ears. And when priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah came to admonish him against this wicked idolatry, Yohk only made a curious gesture with his left hand and laughed horribly. He had taken something of the priests’ that he kept imprisoned in a little ebon box and subjected to inexplicable tortures. And his appalling refusal to eat as other men gave rise to much speculation about his obesity, and whether he was mortal. Such speculation Yohk always found entertaining. And had the precise nature of certain visitors who came with the Moon been revealed, it is doubtful whether the gossips had dared utter another word.

So when a seller of myrrh disappeared one evening exactly two weeks before Walpurgis Night, it seemed only natural that Yohk should be blamed, and no one was surprised.

In years that are one with the dust, Yohk had visited that cryptic, yellow-robed One whose silken veil bulges damnably, and heard the voiceless oracle of Bokrug piping strangely of Sarnath’s dreadful doom. He studied long with pale hands trembling in the mildewed scrolls of black magic and lunacy, bartered from the meeping, hound-faced ghouls who pilfered them from the shadow-guarded crypts of Leng. He sent his soul to gaze on the Vale of Pnath, and the grim onyx walls of Kadath in the Cold Waste where no man treadeth; where it pronounced the detestable runes graven there, and the unspeakable name of Azathoth, and in age-old corridors of madness searched frantically, until the ravening Guardians sent it fleeing. At night beneath the wan Moon’s leprous face he sloughed away the dust mercifully hiding that which sleeps in certain unhallowed graves.

And in these forbidden delvings he found again the spell that was lost with primal lb, whereby men are transformed into spiders with maimed and broken legs; and how to invoke the dead, which is perilous, and how to clothe in flesh the spirits of them that never lived, which is infinitely worse. He knew signs that grant power over storms and supremacy over Hell’s black legions. He learned how one might traverse those whimpering zones that lie beyond the nethermost dark stars. The seven thousand appellations of daemons he consulted, and the five hundred and fifty and five chants of the Dholes, and the scriptures of Dzyan and Klek — but the Word of unbinding, the Key that opens no door save One, he never found: the spell that if any in the World must free the Great Old Ones. For Yohk well knew of those Old Gods Who lay entombed and dead in the dark places of the World, and knew too that They would not always stay dead. Yes, Yohk knew! And so he prayed to Their images and sought ever that one Word, knowing that at its utterance his gods would be freed to reward Their chosen with the dark jewels of incredible wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice, as is taught among those who expect to receive them and therefore must be true. But Yohk was certain now that the spell he sought was nowhere in the World, and so he must search behind it. He would open a Way that something might pass through, something that knew things and would tell, for a price.

And at last, armed with his scroll and all the proper accouterments, he made his way by devious paths out of the city at evening, to the wooded hill that cotters shun who know the tales of that Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak, and know them to be true. It was not yet dark when he set out. But soon the stars crept out from behind the East and Night came like a furtive thing. Red Betelgeuse peered threateningly down through the sinister clouds, but the fat clerk paid no heed; he trudged on through the watchful, evil trees and brambles and thorns, up to that doubtful House where the rats hold blasphemous revels and chuckling, sapphire-eyed spiders spin crazily in the dark, and where Yohk had good reason to know his shocking god lay sleeping. He went in by the back door, picking his way very carefully over fragments of broken stone — grey stars that almost unsettled him— into that dim, pentagonal hall silent with Time’s unprinted dust, where once a drunken old man spoke of dreadful things to his guests. And there in the dust Yohk traced those three charmed concentric circles as is prescribed in such matters, and lighted the black candle made from the fat of corpses, and spoke thrice the summons to those beings who wait for just such purposes somewhere outside the World. And nothing at all happened.

So Yohk the necromancer swore wickedly and dropped his guards and stamped out of the House of the Worm, forgetting that not all things who come when they are called are readily seen, a fact which cannot be forgotten with impunity. And that night something followed him home.