Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

“I can’t stay here doing nothing!” Mason shouted. “I tell you, we’ll all go crazy. Whatever that thing is—I’ve got my gun. And I’ll stake bullets against it any time. I’m not staying here!”

He was beside himself. A short time ago the thought of venturing outside the cottage had seemed horrible to him; now he welcomed it as an escape from nerve-racking inaction. He pulled a vicious, flat automatic from his pocket, strode to the door.

Hayward was on his feet, stark horror in his eyes. “For the love of God, don’t open that door!” he shouted.

But Mason flung open the door, ignoring him. A gust of icy wind blew in upon us. Outside fog was creeping in, sending greasy tendrils coiling like tentacles toward the doorway.

“Shut the door!” Hayward screamed as he lunged across the room. I made a hasty move forward as Mason sprang out into the darkness. I collided with Hayward, went reeling. I heard the gritty crunch of Mason’s footsteps on the sand—and something else.

A shrill, mewing cry. Somehow—fierce, exultant. And it was answered from the distance by other cries, as though dozens of sea birds were wheeling high above us, unseen in the fog.

I heard another strange little sound—I couldn’t classify it. It sounded vaguely like a shout that had been clipped off abruptly. There was a rushing howl of winds and I saw Hayward clinging to the door, staring out as though stupefied.

In a moment I saw why. Mason had vanished—utterly and completely, as though he had been borne off by a bird of prey. There was the empty beach, the low dunes to the left—but not a sign of Bill Mason.

I was dazed. He couldn’t have sprinted from sight during the brief time my eyes had been turned away. Nor could he have hidden beneath the house, for it was boarded down to the sand.

Hayward turned a white, lined face to me. “They’ve got him,” he whispered. “He wouldn’t listen to me. Their first victim—God knows what will happen now.”

Nevertheless we searched. It was in vain. Bill Mason had vanished. We went as far as his car, but he wasn’t there.

If the keys of the car had been in the dashboard, I might have urged Hayward to get into the car with me, to race from that haunted beach. I was growing afraid, but I dared not admit my fear even to myself.

We went back to the cottage slowly.

“It’s only a few hours ‘til dawn,” I said after we had sat and stared at each other for a while. “Mason—we can find him then.”

"We’ll never find him,” Hayward said dully. “He’s in some hellish world we can’t even imagine. He may even be in another dimension.”

I shook my head stubbornly. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe. There must be some logical explanation, and I dared not lower my defenses of skepticism and disbelief.

After a time we heard a shrill mewing from outside. It came again, and then several sharp cries at once. I lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, got up and paced the room nervously.

“That damned drug,” I heard Hayward muttering. “It’s opened the gateway—I have committed sin—”

I paused, my attention caught by a word, a sentence, on a sheet of paper in Hayward’s typewriter. I ripped it from the platen.

“Material for a story,” Hayward said bitterly, glancing up at the sound. “I wrote that two nights ago, when I first got the memory of the things. I’ve told you how those damnable pills work. I got the—the memory in the afternoon, and sat down to hammer out a story from it that night. I was—interrupted.”

I didn’t answer. I was reading, fascinated, that half-page of type. And as I read, an eerie spell of horror seemed to settle down over me, like a chill shroud of dank fog. For in that eldritch legend Hayward had written, there were certain disturbing hints of things that made my mind shudder away from their frightfulness, even while I recognized them.

The manuscript read:

I dwelt in an archaic world. A world that had been long forgotten when Atlantis and Cimmeria flourished, a world so incredibly ancient that none of its records have ever come down through the ages.

The first human race dwelt in primal Mu, worshiping strange, forgotten gods—mountain-tall Cthulhu of the Watery Abyss, the Serpent Yig, Iod the Shining Hunter, Vorvadoss of the Gray Gulf of Yarnak.

And in those days there came to Earth certain beings form another dimension of space, inhuman, monstrous creatures which desired to wipe out all life from the planet. These beings planned to leave their own dying world to colonize Earth, building their titanic cities on this younger, more fruitful planet.

With their coming a tremendous conflict sprang into being, in which the gods friendly to mankind were arrayed against the hostile invaders.

Foremost in that cyclopean battle, mightiest of Earth’s gods, was the Flaming One, Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak, and I, high priest of his cult, kindled

There the manuscript ended.

Hayward had been watching me. “That was my—dream, Gene, when I last took the time-drug. It wasn’t quite as clear as most of them—there are always blind spots, odd gaps where my memory somehow doesn’t work. But the drug showed me what had happened in that prehistoric lifetime of mine, so many incarnations ago. We won—or rather our gods won. The invaders—those things—”

He broke off as a mewing cry sounded, very near, and then resumed in an unsteady voice. “They were driven back into their own world, their own dimension—and the gateway was closed, so they could not return. It’s remained closed through all these eons.

“It would still be closed,” he went on bitterly. “If I hadn’t opened it with my experiments, or had taken the precautions the Mysteries of the Worm gave. Now they've got Mason—and that’s all they need. I know that, somehow. A sacrifice to open the gate between this world and their own frightful dimension, so that their hordes can come pouring upon Earth—

“That’s how they got in before. By a human sacrifice—”

“Listen!” I held up my hand urgently. The mewing cries had died, but there was another sound—a faint high-pitched moaning coming from outside the cottage. Hayward didn’t move.

“It may be Mason,” I jerked out as I went to the door. Momentarily I hesitated, and then swung it open, stepped out on the sand. The moaning grew louder. Hayward slowly came up by my side. His eyes were sharper than mine, for as he peered into the fog banks he gave a startled exclamation.

“Good God!” He flung out his arm, pointing. “Look at that!"

Then I, too, saw it, and I stood there glaring at the thing, unable to move.

There on that Pacific beach, with the yellow light from the open door pouring out into the fog, something was dragging itself painfully over the sand toward us—something distorted, misshapen, uttering little whimpering cries as it pulled itself along. It came into the beam of light and we saw it distinctly.

Beside me, Hayward was swaying back and forth, making hoarse sounds as though he were trying to scream and couldn’t. I stumbled back, flinging up my arm to shield my horrified eyes, croaking, “Keep away! For God’s sake, stay back—you—you—you’re not Bill Mason— damn you, stay back !”

But the thing kept on crawling toward us. The black, sightless hollows where its eyes had been were grim shadows in the dim light. It had been flayed alive, and its hands left red marks on the sand as it crept. A patch of bare white skull shone like a frightful tonsure on the crimsoned head.

Nor was that all—but I cannot bring myself to describe the dreadful and loathsomely abnormal changes that had taken place in the body of the thing that had been Bill Mason. And even as it crawled it was—changing!