Gary Mayers - The House of the Worm

In some dark necropolis of shadow-guarded Leng, he turned in haste and fear from the lurid fires of ghoulish feedings beneath the Moon, but followed after a silent, hooded shape loping through the shades of tombs and over sunken graves. Beneath a precarious lintel it vanished; but Snireth-Ko traced in the dust a sign whose meaning he could not know, and hurried down the broken steps to the lightless vaults beyond. And there with the gloating shadows for aeons he threaded the insane labyrinth of the tomb, fumbling in the dark and disturbing the rats and far less pleasant things with his breathing. At last his eyes, grown large with the unending night, found the light beneath a secret door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He turned back into the friendly dark alive with the titterings of rats.

But he was mad to suppose those evil lights were eyes; for in a third vision the haunted skies engulfed him in the starry aether, and bore him on spectral winds to that lonely ashen sphere of silence and horror and cold men name the Moon, never suspecting Who it is that lurks bubbling and blaspheming beyond the Rim in full view of the Moon’s dark side. More delirious than that which the pale toad-things sliced and prodded with curious weapons as it bulged hugely from a sickening crevasse, or what carted the flesh sinfully away on disturbing wains, yet it was but the lowly Messenger of that Other: that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth…

Snireth-Ko shrieked and fled madly back through dizzying gulfs of space, back to the World of glittering cities and light, back through a jewelled pane into that wide, dim cell of dubious transactions, where he saw how the idol had tricked him. The Keeper of Dreams flopped stickily from its altar and wriggled across the floor in a manner that must have revolted even the cabalistically figured tiles, the painted box of astonishing rumour held open in one flabby claw. Snireth-Ko could not mistake what it is that the insidious Keeper hoards against the awakening of those Old Gods who possessed the Earth aforetime, for purposes of blackmail or perhaps to purchase unspeakable favours; neither did he guess wrongly the fee that slobbering idol now required of him; and he turned and plunged back through the charmed pane.

And the fate of Snireth-Ko remains a matter of grim speculation. Some believe that the idol was not cheated of its nameless fee, but snatched him back in absurd limbs from the dreams he hoped to hide in … and afterwards locked the little painted box and used the clean-picked bones to make its altar more comfortable. Others say that Snireth-Ko fell screaming into the starry abyss the window overlooks when the idol’s services are not required, that he is falling even now. But in a dream of that alien city of grey towers and smokes, uncouthly named London by they that dwell there with pale, worried faces that come of too much brooding on unhealthy things, I found an old man cowering in an alley, who would only claw the sightless walls of brick with long, fleshless fingers, and mumble sadly of the faith he had lost and a fee he had not wished to pay; and in the ruin of his face hovered the thin phantom of him who made the incense once, in Ulthar beyond the river Skai.

In which of the Seven Cryptical Books is forgotten, Hsan records this peculiar and exceedingly doubtful fact: that wisdom possessed in life is not permitted to pass with the soul toward whatever death really is, but cleaves to the mouldering corpse to fester and diminish even as flesh beneath the gentle nibblings of worms. Such perhaps is the reason dust from certain graves is valued in unlawful practices, and why necromancers are burned, lest the worms acquire arcane knowledge it is better they should not have. And such most certainly drove Snurd in secrecy through the high iron gate of Zulan-Thek, onto that dim, star-litten plain where they of Zulan-Thek were wont to inter their dead in dreams that died before men’s wasted souls.

Of Snurd and his dubious parentage men once hinted unmentionable things, indicating as evidence that hitherto only the detestable ghouls and kindred horrors were known to inflict such enormities upon the dead. What, they inquired of one another in hushed voices, became of the fat miller before the sextons came, and who defiled Klotlei’s grave and Shek’s in the night? Then they would gesture knowingly but make no more lucid answer. Little did Snurd care! He knew how the bones were taken down from the high place where the camels passed from Gak, laiden with bright silks and spices of exotic name, and where malefactors were displayed on a grisly hook set there for that purpose; only that morning they were taken and dragged by the muffled sextons whose duty it was, to the catacombs where their odour would not offend the camels. He guessed the nature of those crimes for which this penalty was exacted, and that all to some degree approximate witchcraft. And few knew better than Snurd what is written in Hsan’s Cryptical Books.

He went out with only the stars to see: they of Zulan-Thek were fearful of their dead, and kept the Night securely bolted out of doors and peering vainly at shuttered windows. How the Night finally overcame these barriers to extinguish all the lamps and hope, does not concern this tale. Snurd feared neither darkness nor the buried dead. But leaping grotesquely in the deep shadows of crumbling mounds, he ran his tongue over his pointed teeth in a hunger not often manifested by fully human persons. He remembered the screams of the carrion fowl flapping darkly in the gloom around the mewling bundle on the hook, and how the bundle lost its own tongue trying to charm the ravens from its eyes. Perhaps, ah, perhaps the avid beak could not wholly penetrate those bleeding sockets to the maddened brain. Perhaps it was still shut away within the clean-picked skull… And Snurd laughed and leered at the frightened Moon.

It did not take him long to find that path the sextons used in their particular trade, for Snurd was more familiar than any sexton should have been with the startling ways of that path. The weeds there grew too quickly, and made little rustling noises even without the wind. But it was no business of Snurd’s who stirred the weeds. He hurried over a confusing rise and between the huddled, leaning boulders, and moments ere the Dawn paled the East in wholesomer lands and the tides of Night receded, Snurd crept near to that vine-hidden stone door with the hippogryph on either side. The graven signs and expressions on the faces of those images were too worn to ascertain their correct meaning; but the swollen vines slithered quietly back at his approach, and Snurd passed through and down the fifty-seven lightless steps to those darker lower halls where it must be blasphemy that light should ever come. Snurd had not that inconvenience of requiring light to see, and moved quickly and with improbable sureness over the floor slimed and worn smooth by the passage of nameless things and Time, disturbing the rats and less pleasant things with his breathing. The rats were whispering plots in the dark with uncouth scarabs. Once he spied a light beneath a secretive door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He came at last to a little unlighted vault and found where the sextons had deposited the leavings of that grisly hook. It was doubtlessly only his imagination that the pale skull grinned when Snurd entered the room…