Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

Benson’s eyes were blazing in his white face. He made a curious gesture with his left hand, and in a low, toneless voice began to chant in Latin.

“ Veni diabole, discalceame… recede, miser…”

The temperature of the room had changed. It was suddenly very cold. Doyle shuddered and stood up. Benson, his back turned, paid no heed. The incantation had become a rhymed gibberish which was in no language Doyle knew.

Bagabi laca bachabe

Lamac cahi achababe

Karrelyos…

Doyle took a stubby black automatic from his pocket, aimed it with painstaking care, and pulled the trigger.

The explosion was not loud. Benson’s body jerked convulsively, and he turned to stare at his cousin with astonished eyes.

Doyle thrust the gun back in his pocket and stepped back. There must be no bloodstains on his clothing. He watched Benson intently.

The dying man fell forward, and his body made an ugly thudding noise as it hit the floor. The arms and legs moved feebly, as though in monstrous imitation of a swimmer. Doyle hesitated, half drew the automatic. A sound from nearby made him wheel, gun lifted.

From the darkness outside the pentagram came a faint whisper, a curious stirring in the dark air. It was as though a little breeze had sprung up suddenly within the silent room. Momentarily the darkness in the corner seemed to crawl with movement; then the whisper died. There was a tight smile on Doyle’s face as he lowered the weapon, listening intently. No further sound came until a metallic clatter brought Doyle’s gaze down to the floor.

Benson lay sprawled, his arms outflung. Just beyond his fingers one of the silver lamps lay overturned, its flame extinguished. In Benson’s glazing eyes there was mirrored a look of malevolent amusement, and as Doyle watched, it changed and grew until the white face was all alight with a sort of triumphant, unholy merriment. The expression remained fixed, and presently Doyle realized that Benson was dead.

He stepped outside the pentagram, not without an involuntary shrinking, and hurriedly touched the electric switch. Then, methodically, he began to ransack the room. He had carefully refrained from leaving possible fingerprints, but now, to make doubly sure, he drew on a pair of rubber gloves. There was nothing much of value—a set of silver-backed brushes, a little jewelry, perhaps a hundred dollars in cash.

Doyle stripped a sheet from the bed and made a bundle of the loot. Then he let his gaze travel over the room. It would not do now to blunder through carelessness. He nodded, switched off the light, and left the cabin. Then he found a stick and broke a window, fumbled with the latch. It opened easily.

The moon was rising, and a pale shaft of radiance streamed in through the open window, made Doyle’s shadow a black, misshapen blotch on the floor. He moved aside quickly, and the light fell on the white face of the dead man. Doyle stared through the window for a long moment before turning away.

One thing remained undone. Half an hour later that too was accomplished, and the loot was at the bottom of a stagnant, marshy lake a dozen miles from the cabin. There was nothing now to prove that Benson had not died at the hands of a burglar. As Doyle headed his roadster toward the city he was conscious of a feeling of tremendous relief, as though his taut nerves were at last relaxing.

There was an unexpected reaction, however. Doyle began to feel very sleepy. The lethargic drowsiness that was creeping over him could not be dispelled, although he let down the windshield to allow the cool night breeze to strike his face.

Twice he just avoided going off the road. At last, realizing that he dared drive no further, he drew up off the shoulder of the highway, drew a rug over his legs and relaxed. When he awoke it would take only a few hours to reach home.

He fumbled uneasily with the rug. The night had become very cold. Icy stars seemed to watch him intently from a sky ablaze with chill brilliance. Just as he went to sleep he imagined he heard someone laughing—

Sleep that was haunted with strange, grotesque images—a feeling of dropping through giddy abysses—a horrible vertigo that passed and left him spent and helpless to the dreams that came—

In his dream he was back in Benson’s house. The sable hangings still swathed the walls, the pentagram still glowed faintly on the floor, but the silver lamps were no longer alight. All around were darkness and silence, and a chill wind was blowing.

With the odd inconsequence of dreams, Doyle realized without any particular feeling of surprise that the room was roofless. Cold stars blazed in a jet sky. Without warning an irregular patch of blackness sprang into existence overhead. Something, invisible save as a shapeless silhouette against the stars, was hovering over the roofless room.

Looking down, Doyle saw Benson’s body lying where it had fallen. The glazed eyes seemed to shine with a shocking semblance of internal light. They were not looking at him; they were staring upward, and the light that was emanating from those ghastly hollows was actually beating back the darkness of the room.

And now, Doyle saw that something like a thick, knotted rope was descending from above. It paused above the dead man’s face, coiling and wriggling with a slow, worm-like motion. Following the rope with his eyes, Doyle saw that it disappeared in the black patch of shadow far above, and he was oddly glad that his eyes could not pierce the gloom that shrouded the hovering thing.

Very slowly the lids of Benson’s eyes began to close. There was no other movement in the still white face, save for the almost imperceptible shutting of the eyelids. At last they were completely closed. Doyle saw the black rope move, twisting and coiling restlessly across the room toward him, and slowly a dim radiance began to glow overhead. It waxed and grew until the stars were dim ghosts against its splendor, and then it began to drop silently through the air, slanting toward Doyle as it sank.

Stark horror gripped the man. He tried to fling himself back and found that he could not move; some strange dream-paralysis held him rigid and helpless. And in the pale radiance above him he caught a glimpse of a vague, amorphous shape that swam slowly into view.

The rope-like thing came on. Doyle made a sudden frightful effort to move, to break the invisible bonds that fettered him. And this time he was successful.

The paralysis fled away; he whirled to escape and saw before him—emptiness. A gulf of blackness seemed to open abruptly at his feet, and he felt himself toppling forward. There was a jarring shock, a wrenching jolt that utterly confused all his faculties at once. For a second Doyle felt himself plummeting down into a gulf of utter abandon, and then gray light enveloped him. The roofless room was gone. Both Benson and the floating horror had vanished.

He was in another world. Another dream-world!

This weird feeling of unreality! Doyle stared about him, discovering that he was bathed in a gray, shadowless light that came from no visible source, while overhead the air thickened into a misty, opaque haze. Curious little crystal formations speckled the flat plain about him, a conglomeration of glinting, flashing light. Extraordinary balloon-like creatures, as large as his head, swung ceaselessly in the air all around him, drifting gently with the air currents. They were perfectly round, covered with flashing reptilian scales.

One of them burst as he watched, and a cloud of tiny, glowing motes floated slowly down. When they touched the ground a strange crystalline growth began to form as the motes were metamorphosed into the little crystals that stretched into the hazy distance about him.