Gary Mayers - The House of the Worm

Beyond the Watcher’s head and a little above what it used as a shoulder, Sliph looked out on a wide, cobbled avenue lit by the sinful red lamps of temples raised on either side to all disreputable gods whom men deny, foolishly supposing that worship could possibly matter to the gods In Ulthar they have strange accounts of unlawful idols who provide their own sacrifices without any observence of the proper seasons or which of her houses the Moon occupies, and covet other flesh than goats’. In that street also was a low, terrible house without any windows. Sliph noticed it first when a small, dark man with a jewelled sword and stealthy, slippered feet, left that low door and stole out into Pantheon Street on a business in which darkness and a fabulous gem figured not unimportantly.

After several minutes a second figure emerged from that same low, dreadful house… that evil old woman in black with her fiendish bundle. She seemed intent upon urgent matters, and scuttled towards the iron gate and cuffed the monstrous Watcher away; and that latter being only withdrew sulking and growling into a crack there was in the base of an onyx wall. Then she passed through the gate and down the narrow lane. But when Sliph turned to go out into the broad street with the temple lights, he found the Watcher already shifting its enormous bulk back into the proper position against the gate, which was shut. And fearing he might never find his way back through those winding lanes, dreading what might happen if he did not, Sliph hurried back in the one direction he most instinctively disliked: the one instinct said the witch had taken.

And just when the alleys had begun to play queer tricks with his sanity, he spied her muffled form only slipping around a corner, and that shapeless black sack shambling at her heels. But when he had hurried up to the place where he had seen her, she was already gone. Then a candle was lit in an upper room by whatever pressed its face against the window-glass, and somewhere behind Sliph a door whose hinges were in a deplorable state, opened slowly…

And in a broad court where madly sentient houses leaned shockingly away from something they feared, and queer, flaffing shadows rustled their black wings in the light of that one hellish star, which now appeared to squat upon a windowless tower, chuckling and dangling tentacles listlessly, Sliph found the old woman. She stood on the fifth step of a hoary dais whose steps were all unmentionably defiled by the less orthodox names of Azathoth, wrought in tiny emeralds; bent over that lichened, blasphemous altar, crooning softly and making certain curious patterns with the entrails of a child. Something she read in the entrails seemed to please her, and she spat thrice upon the altar and shouted a Name.

There watched seated from the shadows, apathetically, three whom Sliph had already met on the plain. On hearing that shouted Name they crept to the foot of the hoary dais, and made an obeisance on their faces before that evil old woman lolling on the fifth step, and that sack bulging limply across her knees. The sack whispered a terrible thing in the old woman’s ear, and she turned to glare at Sliph and shake her head, saying only, “There, there,” soothingly to her sack, and that perhaps Matthew Phillips, a name Sliph felt he should know for a reason no longer clear, had dined unwisely before sleep — (Here that hidden recorder in the deep, dark, secret chamber, being thoroughly bored with the proceedings, laid aside its silver pen. And in the morning a charwoman entered a certain Providence garret after repeated unanswered knockings, and screamed at what she found there.)

Over the desert of Cuppar-Nombo and the city Golthoth, named by some the Damned, Night rose and shook his hoary wings. An evil twilight was creeping across the sky, with multitudenous waxing stars; hidden bats stirred uneasily in doubtful sleep; and in the painted wagons men lighted incense whose duty it was, and chanted the old songs, as they have always done at evening for the last four thousand years.

For a song and no more creditable reason the painted wagons came to Cuppar-Nombo. For though deceitful Time has concealed much behind the centuries, still those songs forget not the greatness of Golthoth’s limestone temples and obelisks, nor any rumor of the arts whereby the cyclopean limestone blocks were moved, which is one with the dust of architects. Very splendid still are Golthoth’s temples, with their images and myriad columns spectral in that light which filters only at noon down through the shadowy fanes. There by little copper lamps the shaven priests mumbled once over papyrus scrolls before the cryptical gods: strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions, and jackal-headed Anubis whos concern is with the dead. But the old gods and kings are unnamed for the last four thousand years, since a certain thing happened which even the songs dare not hint. Some have surmised a curse which the gods once spoke in anger and could never since recall. But the songs say only how after this certain thing the eyes and glyphic name of Anubis were chipped off the temple walls by the shaven priests, before the priests disappeared, and how he people fled their ancient, horrible city, screaming.

Now this certain thing was forgotten, for the songs made no mention of it, and the old gods slept. And in cities less ancient and horrible than Golthoth strange, dark wanderers began to think again of the opulence of their ancient kings all lonely in the desert, sentineled only by the lean jackals and their shadows. These people considered how one might spend so many emeralds, and the uses men have for gold. One morning the strange, dark wanderers were gone with their painted wagons from the market places of cities where they told fortunes for silver and bought gay beads from the merchants, which displeased no one but the torturers and dispensers of justice who are not kind to thieves. When they came to Cuppar-Nombo the high walls were all blue with the evening.

Much has been sung of the wealth of the old kings. It was the intention of the dark people to come beneath the high tomb shaped, as was customary, like a pyramid, and to locate therein the hidden door such tombs are known to have. Among their number were several persons for whom familiarity had made the felonious arts of burglary wholly contemptable; and one wearing the head-dress with the two horns and a curious disk between the horns, who was not unlearned concerning cold guardians of tombs who have a deplorable appetite for the blood of venturesome thieves, and how most effectively to curb that appetite. Many had mattocks and spades. On Cuppar-Nombo in sight of the beautiful blue walls the burglars confered with the priest, who consulted in turn the little ivory fetishes he had, and so determined that the enterprise so dear to all their hearts should begin with the first light of dawn. No one knows when Snid and Leshti and Loth decided upon their own enterprise, but for several days more than one person had missed a spade or mattock from among his personal belongings.

For Leshti and Loth were of course both notably fine thieves, but the deeds of Snid have become a matter of fable. When ever his name is mentioned men stop smiling and look to their shutters; jewellers who remember what became of the gnomes’ opals, justly fear the deftness of his quick brown fingers; in a certain disreputable quarter of Celephais they wonder how once he appropriated, by means not entirely honest, the three unlikely ruby coffers and the key to the Vaults of Zin, all in a single night’s work. It is therefore not surprising that the plan should have occurred to Snid. And the plan was not at all uncongenial to Messrs. Leshti or Loth.

When those three conspiritors left the watch-fires in front of the painted wagons the stars were already out, still nobody saw them steal away into the shadows. Perhaps someone did see a lean, crouching shape slipping suspiciously just past the edge of sight, noticed hardly at all, while elsewhere one overheard the crack of a pebble (or was it only the fire?) and a little breeze rattling in the grass. But of course it was neither Snid nor Leshti nor Loth — who were much too subtle — for they had already gotten as far as the secret path which men never made, that goes furtively down along Golthoth’s dizzy walls, past the pits there are on the far side, and thence by devious ways down into that valley where the three hoped to find and loot the high tomb. They would not enter that ancient, horrible city, for Snid had spent many hours in pondering the old songs and his plan, and it seemed to him not improbable that the old gods who slept might also dream. And Snid had his reasons for not wishing to meet any dream of the gods. So they came, those three thieves with their mattocks and spades and the three zebras brought for a purpose, which Snid had concealed in his wagon so cunningly that no one even suspected, the zebras on whose backs they hoped to bear away their loot to Drinen, thereby confounding their tribe; so they came down that old forgotten path between the crumbling lesser tombs, and found at last that which of all things the thieves had least reason to expect: the high tomb was not there!