Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

“But what are they?” Mason burst out. “Have you no idea? Such things don’t just appear. Some hybrid form of life from the sea, perhaps—some unknown form of life—”

Hayward nodded. “Exactly. An unknown form of life. But one totally alien, foreign to mankind. Not from the sea, Bill, not from the sea. From another dimension—another plane of existence.”

This was too much for me. “Oh, come, Hayward,” I said. “You can’t really mean—why, it’s against all logic.”

“You didn’t see it,” Mason said, glaring at me. “If you’d seen that frightful, obscene thing, as I did—”

“Look here,” cut in Hayward abruptly. “I—I shouldn’t have brought you into this. Seeing what it’s done to Bill has made me realize—you’re still free to go, you know. Perhaps it would be better—”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to run from a cry in the night, an odd-looking vine, an optical illusion. Besides, I knew what an effort it had cost Hayward to get out those words of renunciation. But before I could speak, a strange, shrill cry came from outside the house. Hayward glanced quickly at the window. He had pulled the shade down.

His face was grave. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “You mustn’t leave the house tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps—”

He turned to his desk, picked up a small pillbox. Mutely he extended his hand, on which he had dropped a few round, blackish pellets.

I picked one up, sniffed at it curiously. I felt an odd tickling sensation in my nostrils, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, thought of a childhood incident long buried in the past—nothing important, merely a clandestine visit to an apple orchard with two youthful chums. We had filled two gunny sacks—

Why should I remember this now? I had entirely forgotten that boyhood adventure—at least, I hadn’t thought of it in years.

Hayward took the pellet from me rather hastily, watching my face. “That was the beginning,” he said after a pause. “It’s a drug. Yes,” he went on at our startled expressions. “I’ve been taking it. Oh, it’s not hashish or opium—I wish it were! It’s far worse—I got the formula from Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. ”

“What?” I was startled. “Where did you—”

Hayward coughed. “As a matter of fact, Gene, I had to resort to a little bribery. The book’s kept in a vault in the Huntington Library, you know, but I—I managed to get photostatic copies of the pages I needed.”

“What’s it all about, this book?” Mason asked, impatiently.

“Mysteries of the Worm,” I told him. “I’ve seen it mentioned in dispatches at the paper. It’s one of the tabooed references—we’ve got orders to delete it from any story in which it appears.”

“Such things are kept hushed up,” Hayward said. “Scarcely anyone in California knows that such a book exists in the Huntington Library. Books like that aren’t for general knowledge. You see, the man who wrote it was supposed to be an old Flemish sorcerer, who had learned forbidden lore and evil magic—and who wrote the book while he was in prison awaiting trial for witchcraft. The volume’s been suppressed by the authorities in every country in which it’s been issued. In it I found the formula for this drug.”

He rattled the pellets in his hand. “It’s—I may as well tell you—it’s the source of my weird stories. It has a powerfully stimulating effect on the imagination.”

“What are its effects?” I asked.

“It’s a time drug,” Hayward said, and watched us.

We stared back at him.

“I don’t mean that the drug will enable the user to move in tjme—no. Not physically, at any rate. But by taking this drug I have been able to remember certain things that I have never experienced in this life.

“The drug enables one to recall his ancestral memories,” he went on swiftly, earnestly. “What’s so strange about that? I am able to remember past lives, previous reincarnations. You’ve heard of transmigration of souls—over one-half the population of the world believes in it. It’s the doctrine that the soul leaves the body at death to enter another—like the hermit crab, moving from one shell to another.”

“Impossible,” I said. But I was remembering my strange flash of memory while I was examining one of the pellets.

“And why?” Hayward demanded. “Surely the soul, the living essence, has a memory. And if that hidden, submerged memory can be dragged from the subconscious into the conscious—the old mystics had strange powers and stranger knowledge, Gene. Don’t forget that I’ve taken the drug.”

“What was it like?” Mason wanted to know.

“It was—well, like a flood of memory being poured into my mind—like a moving picture being unfolded—I can’t make it clearer than that.

“It brought me to Italy, the first time. It was during the Borgia reign. I can remember it vividly—plots and counterplots, and finally a flight to France, where I—or rather this ancestor of mine—died in a tavern brawl. It was very vivid, very real.

“I’ve kept taking the drug ever since, although it isn’t habit- forming. After I wake up from my dream-state—it takes from two to four hours, generally—my mind feels clear, free, unleashed. That’s when I do my writing.

“You have no idea how far back these ancestral memories go. Generations, ages, inconceivable eons! Back to Genghis Khan, back to Egypt and Babylon—and further than that, back to the fabulous sunken lands of Mu and Atlantis. It was in those first primal memories, in a land which exists today only as a memory and a myth, that I first encountered those things—the horror you saw tonight. They existed on Earth then, uncounted millennia ago. And I—”

Again the skirling, shrill cry shrieked out. This time it sounded as if it came from directly above the cottage. I felt a sudden pang of cold, as though the temperature had taken an abrupt drop. There was a heavy, ominous hush in which the crashing of the surf sounded like the thunder of great drums.

Sweat was standing out in beads on Hayward’s forehead.

“I’ve called them to Earth,” he muttered dully, his shoulders drooping. “ The Mysteries of the Worm gave a list of precautions to be taken before using the drug—the Pnakotic pentagon, the cabalistical signs of protection—things you wouldn’t understand. The book gave terrible warnings of what might happen if those precautions weren’t taken—specifically mentioned those things—‘the dwellers in the Hidden World’, it called them.

“But I—I neglected finally to safeguard myself. I didn’t foresee— I thought I might get a stronger effect from the drug if I didn’t take the directed precautions, improve my stories. I unbarred the gateway, and called them to Earth again.”

He stared into space, his eyes blank and unseeing. “I have committed terrible sin by my neglect,” he muttered, it seemed to himself.

Mason was suddenly on his feet, his whole body shaking. “I can’t stay here! It’ll drive us all mad. It’s only an hour’s drive to Santa Barbara—I can’t stand this waiting, waiting, with that thing outside gloating over us!”

Was Mason, too, losing his nerve? His mind? In the face of this unseen menace, whatever it was?

Sea birds, a mirage of spray—men, perhaps—were responsible for Mason’s fear—I tried to tell myself that.

But deep in my heart I knew that no ordinary fear could have driven my two companions to the verge of craven hysteria. And I knew that I felt a strange reluctance to go out into that brooding, silent darkness on the beach.

“No,” Hayward said. “We can’t—that’d be walking right into the thing. We’ll be all right in here—”

But there was no reassurance in his voice.