Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

Benson threw some powder into the censer, and the smoke rose more thickly. Gradually a faint haze was beginning to pervade the atmosphere. Doyle quickly repressed a tight smile as Benson glanced at him.

“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” asked Benson.

“No,” Doyle said, and was silent. He had gauged his opponent too well to start a stream of protestations which would inevitably ring false.

Benson, smiling, leaned back, facing his cousin. From his pocket, he drew a battered pipe, eyed it longingly, and thrust it back.

“This is the worst of it,” he said irrelevantly, and chuckled. Abruptly he grew serious.

“They may have told you in the village that I’m mad. But they don’t think so. They fear me, Al—God knows why, for I’ve never harmed them. All I’m after is knowledge, and they wouldn’t understand that. But I don’t mind, for it keeps them away from here, and I need solitude for my research. Besides, it keeps them from blundering in where ordinary people shouldn’t be.”

“They call this the ‘Wizard’s House,”’ Doyle said, anxious to agree.

“Yes, I suppose so. Well, after all, they may be right. Long ago men who sought after hidden knowledge were called wizards. But it’s all science, Al, although a science of which the ordinary man— even your conventional scientist—knows nothing. The scientist is wiser, though, for he realizes that beyond his three-dimensional world of sight and hearing and tasting and smelling there are other worlds, with another kind of life on them.

“What I’m going to tell you may seem unbelievable, I know— but I must tell you, for the sake of your sanity. You must be prepared for what you’re going to see tonight. Another cosmos—.” He pondered, glancing down at the book. “It’s hard. I’ve gone so far, and you know so little.”

Doyle shifted uneasily. His hand went into his pocket, and remained there as Benson looked up at him. He knew better than to jerk it out with betraying haste.

“Put it this way,” Benson went on. “Man isn’t the only type of intelligent life. Science admits that. But it does not admit that there is a super-science which enables man to get in contact with these ultra-human entities. There has always been a hidden, necessarily furtive lore, persecuted by the mob, which delves deeply into this secret wisdom. Many of the so-called wizards of ancient times were charlatans, like Cagliostro. Others, like Albertus Magnus and Ludwig Prinn, were not. Man must indeed be blind to refuse to see the unmistakable evidences of these hidden things!”

There was a flush creeping into Benson’s cheeks as he talked, and he stabbed a slender forefinger down upon the book that lay open before him.

“It’s here, in the Book of Karnak —and in the other books, La Tres Sainte Trinosophie , the Chhaya Ritual , the Dictionnaire Infernal of de Plancy. But man won’t believe, because he doesn’t want to believe.

He has forced belief from his mind. From ancient times the only memory that has come down is fear—fear of those ultra-human entities which once walked the Earth. Well, dynamite is dangerous, but it can be useful too.

“My God!” Benson exclaimed, a strange fire burning in his somber eyes. “If I had only been alive then, when the old gods walked the Earth! What might I not have learned!”

He caught himself, stared at Doyle almost suspiciously. A gentle hissing began to come from the censer. Benson got up hastily to inspect the six lamps. They were still burning, although a curious blueness now tinged their flames.

“As long as they burn we’re quite safe,” he said. “As long as the pentagram is not broken.”

Doyle could not repress an irritable frown. Benson was mad, of course, but nevertheless Doyle was becoming nervous, and no wonder. Even a man not keyed up to high tension might well be shaken by these fantastic preparations, Benson’s insane hints of monstrous—what was the term—“ultra-human entities?” Doyle determined to end the grotesque comedy swiftly, and his finger caressed the trigger of the gun.

“It’s one of these beings that I am summoning,” Benson went on. "You must not allow yourself to be frightened, no matter what happens, for you’re quite safe within the circle. I am calling up an entity which mankind worshiped eons ago as—Iod. Iod, the Hunter.”

Silently Doyle listened as his cousin spoke of the secret and forgotten lore hidden in the ancient tomes and manuscripts he had studied. He had learned strange, well-nigh incredible things, Benson related. And perhaps strangest of all was the legend of Iod, the Hunter of Souls.

Man had worshiped Iod in older days, under other names. He was one of the oldest gods, and he had come to Earth, the tale went, in pre-human eons when the old gods soared between the stars, and earth was a stopping place for incredible voyagers. The Greeks knew him as Torphonios; the Etruscans made nameless sacrifices diurnally to Vediovis, the Dweller beyond Phlegethon, the River of Flame.

This ancient god did not dwell on Earth, and a certain apt phrase the Egyptians had coined for him meant, rendered into English, the Dimension Prowler. The evilly famous De Vermis Mysteriis spoke of Iod as the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds—which, Prinn hinted, meant other dimensions of space.

For the soul has no spatial limitations, and it was the human soul, the Flemish magician wrote, which the ancient god hunted. It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit; but if an adept took the necessary precautions, he could safely summon Iod, and the god would serve him in certain curious but desirable ways. Yet not even in the suppressed De Vermis Mysteriis could the incantation be found which would summon the Dimension Prowler from his secret dwelling place.

Only by diligent searching through certain half-fabulous cryptograms—the monstrous Ishakshar and the fabled Elder Key —had Benson been able to piece together the incantation which would summon the god to Earth.

No man could say, moreover, what shape Iod would assume; it was whispered that he did not always retain the same form. In Rajgir, the cradle of Buddhism, the ancient Dravidians wrote with a peculiar horror of the god. Reincarnation is a vital factor in the religions of India, and to the mind of an Indian the only true type of death is that of the soul.

The body may perish, crumble to dust, but the soul will live again in other bodies—unless it falls victim to the dreadful hunting of Iod. For Iod pursues always, Benson whispered; the soul has power to flee through the hidden worlds from the Shining Pursuer, but it has no power to escape. And for a human being to see the shape of Iod in all its frightful completeness, unprotected by the necessary precautions, meant swift and certain doom.

“There’s a parallel in science,” Benson concluded. “Known science, I mean. The synapse gives the clue. The nerve gap over which thought impulses travel. If a barrier is erected in this gap, blocking the impulses, the result is—”

"Paralysis?”

“Rather, catalepsy. Iod extracts the vital forces of being, leaving only—consciousness. The brain lives, but the body dies. What the Egyptians called life-in-death. They— wait! ”

Doyle glanced up quickly. Benson was staring beyond the pentagram at a shadowy corner of the room.

"Do you feel any change yet?” he asked.

Doyle shook his head, and then hesitated. “It’s—cold, isn’t it?” he said, frowningly.

Benson stood up. “Yes, that’s it. Now listen, Al, stay just as you are. Don’t move if you can help it. Whatever you do, don’t leave the pentagram until I’ve dismissed the—the thing that I’m calling up. And don’t interrupt me.”