Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

The creature seemed to twist in midair, and the farmer went down beneath the onslaught. An agonized shriek welled out, broke off abruptly. The monster, crouching over Liggett’s body, lifted a muzzle wet with fresh blood and made a gobbling sound, dreadfully reminiscent of a chuckle, deep in its throat. Sick and shaking, Hartley felt the doorknob beneath his fingers, and he flung the door open as the creature leaped.

He slammed it just in time, but a panel splintered under a terrific impact. Hartley fled along the hall as the door crashed.

Outside the house he hesitated momentarily, glancing around in an agony of indecision. In the cold grayness that precedes the dawn he saw the nearest house perhaps two hundred feet away, but as he started to race toward it the thing came bounding into view, intercepting him. It had apparently crept out through the window by which it had entered.

Hartley suddenly remembered his automatic and clawed it out, fired point blank at the creature as it came at him. There was a croaking snarl of rage, and the loose slit-mouth worked hideously; a little stream of foul black ichor began to trickle slowly from a wound on the wattled, pouchy throat of the thing.

But it did not halt, and Hartley, realizing that a creature of such monstrous size must possess tremendous vitality, turned to flee. It was between him and the village, and as though realizing its advantage the thing kept at Hartley's heels, giving him no chance to double back. The thought flashed unbidden into Hartley’s mind: The monster was herding him!

He heard a window creak up, heard a shout. Then he was running for his life back along the road over which he had fled on the first night of the horror.

At the thought, and at sight of a small lane—a rutted cart path—joining the road at right angles, he twisted aside and raced along it. His only hope lay in somehow getting back to the village. Behind him came the gasping and slobbering, the rhythmic pounding that betokened the grim pursuit.

He chanced a snap shot over his shoulder, but the hazy light of the false dawn was deceptive, and he missed. He dared waste no more bullets.

The thing was herding him! Twice he saw paths that led back to the village, and each time the pursuing monster blocked his escape, circling with great leaps to his right until the paths had been passed. And presently the fields grew wilder, and the vegetation took on a lush, unhealthy greenness. He might have attempted to scale a tree, but there was none near enough to the road, and the pursuer was too close. With a dreadful shock of realization Hartley saw that the North Swamp lay before him—the ill-omened morass about which all the ghastly legends had centered.

The ridge to the east was silhouetted against pale grayness. From far away Hartley heard a sound that sent a thrill of hope through him. The sound of an automobile motor—no, two of them! He remembered his neighbor’s shout as he had fled from Liggett’s house. The man must have gone for help, roused the village. But the snarling breathing was dreadfully close.

Once the monster paused, and Hartley glanced over his shoulder to see it clawing in hideous rage at its wounded throat. The bullet must have handicapped it in the pursuit, else Hartley would long before have fallen beneath ripping talons. He brought up his gun, but the thing, as though realizing his purpose, sprang forward, and Hartley had to sprint in order to escape the great leaps. The sound of motors grew louder in the dawn stillness.

The path wound through the swamp. It was overgrown with weeds, rutted and pitted deeply, and at times the encroaching ooze had crept up until only a narrow ribbon of dry land was left. On all sides the lush greenness of the morass spread, with occasional open spaces of repellently black water. Over all lay a curious stillness, an utter lack of motion. No wind ruffled the tops of the grass fronds, no ripples spread over the waters. The sounds of the pursuit, the roaring of the motors, seemed an incongruous invasion of this land of deathly stillness.

The end came suddenly, without warning. Green slime covered the road for a distance of a dozen yards; Hartley, splashing through the icy, ankle-deep water, felt his foot go down into a hole, and fell heavily, wrenching his ankle. Even as he fell he rolled aside desperately, felt a wind brush him as the monster’s impetus carried it beyond him.

Hartley’s arms, outthrust, were abruptly embedded in something soft and clinging, something that sucked and pulled them down inexorably. With a rasping cry he wrenched them free from the quicksand, fell back to the firmer ground of the road. He heard the sound of a shot, and, flat on his back in the ooze, saw a monstrous mask of horror incarnate looming above him. The sound of motors had increased to a roar, and a shout of encouragement came to his ears.

The monster hesitated, drew back, and Hartley, remembering his gun, jerked it from his belt. He fired point blank at the creature, and coincidentally with the report of his own gun came a volley from the cars. Lead whined above him, and he felt a stinging pain in his shoulder.

Suddenly it seemed as though the monster were a huge bladder, punctured in a dozen places, pouring out black and nauseous ichor. With a hoarse gasping cry it flopped aside, made a crippled, one-sided leap, and came down in the bog beside the road. Then, swiftly, it began to sink.

The quicksand took it. Its huge hindquarters, black and glistening, corded with muscle, disappeared almost immediately, and then the distended, leprously white belly. Hartley, sick and fainting, felt hands lifting him to his feet, heard questioning voices that seemed to come from a great distance.

But he had eyes only for the abysmal horror that was being engulfed a dozen yards from him, the webbed and spurred flail-like talons that were desperately beating the slime, the misshapen, hideous head that rolled from side to side in agony. From the gaping mouth of the thing came a ghastly outpouring of croaking shrieks, a monstrous bellowing that suddenly grew horribly familiar, articulate, thick and guttural: a frenzied outcry of blasphemy such as might come from the rotting tongue of a long-dead corpse.

All the men fell back, white with loathing, and Hartley dropped to his knees, retching and moaning in an agony of horror, as the thing , its mouth half choked with the hungry quicksand, bellowed:

“ Awrrgh—ugh—ye—blast ye! Blast ye all! May the curse o’ Persis Winthorp rot yer flesh an’ send ye down to— ”

The frightful outburst of sound gave place to a terrible gargling shriek that was abruptly choked off. There was a brief commotion in the ooze; a great bubble formed and burst—and age-old stillness brooded once more over the North Swamp.

You will already be well aware of the in-joke origin of Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and its sequel, Lovecraft's “The Haunter of the Dark", and its sequel, Bloch’s “The Shadow from the Steeple. ” In the first HPL comes on stage as an erudite occultist who gets messily devoured by the avatar of Tsathoggua. In the second Bloch becomes Robert Blake and meets pretty much the same fate at the lobes of an avatar of Nyarlathotep. In the third, as Bloch himself revealed years later, Edmund Fiske is a mask for Bloch's friend and colleague Fritz Leiber. (Some have imagined Bloch himself in the role, misled by the red herring that Bloch sometimes used the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske). In “Hydra” we see the young Henry Kuttner joining the game. The character Robert Ludwig is surely Robert Bloch, the alter ego of Ludvig Prinn, while Paul Edmond must stand for Edmond Hamilton. Even though the character’s last name probably does derive from that source, a letter from Lovecraft to Bloch (December 3, 1936) reveals that the Paul Edmond character is supposed to be Kuttner himself, while Kenneth Scott is Lovecraft. All this leads us to speculate as to the origin of Kuttner’s own pseudonym: Is not Keith Hammond gematria for his early favorite and later friend Edmond Hamilton? I think so.