Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

A great gust of icy, fetid air burst through the parted curtains, curiously sub-arctic in this sweltering temperature.

The candles blew out, all at once, as if simultaneously extinguished by a giant’s breath!

Zarnak sprang to his black case and snapped it open. He withdrew therefrom a curious object, like a magician’s wand. The handpiece was a tube of copper with a core of magnetized iron, and the rod was tipped with a curious talisman of gray-green stone, shapen like a five-pointed star. As the light died to densest gloom, a faint halo of greenish luminance flickered and shone about the star-shaped stone.

In one comer of the room, shadows swirled, clotted, thickened.

Cold perspiration bedewed Zarnak’s ascetic features. He brandished the star-tipped wand, whose luminance brightened, but when he thrust the wand towards the cloud of gathering shadows, the darkness drank the dim light and failed to disperse. Don Sebastian shrieked!

Zarnak looked desperately towards the open, undraped window. Fomalhaut leered like a dim eye above the horizon, barely visible through the sulphurous murk. He tried a last resort:

la! la! Cthugha!

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh

Cthugha Fomalhaut

N’gha-ghaa nafl thagn

Ia! Cthugha!

Three times he recited the uncouth vocables of this strange incantation, and all the while the dark thing thickened and grew ever more substantial in the far corner of the room, until it was veritably palpable.

Minute sparks of golden fire flickered into being, like a whirling cloud of fireflies. Their luminance did little to lighten the impenetrable gloom, but they warmed the air. There came a rustling as of gigantic, unseen wings—

Then the lights came on, dazzling, blinding!

The blackout had been very temporary, blessedly. The whirling cloud of pale golden sparks faded as Zarnak dismissed them. The heavy clot of darkness in the corner shrank; Zarnak advanced upon it, brandishing the star-stone rod. The massed darkness that was Zulchequon faded from view, leaving only icy fetid air behind.

Zarnak composed himself, turned to see Dona Teresa where she knelt in the opposite corner of the room, cradling her uncle’s still form in her arms, weeping. His face was white as milk, features distorted in a hideous grimace of sheer terror. Zarnak crossed the room in swift strides, knelt, examined the wasted form swiftly. No breath, no pulse, no heartbeat; the old man was dead.

The police came with an ambulance and a medical examiner. Zarnak took it upon himself to explain, in brief terms, that Don Sebastian had suffered from a neurotic fear of darkness. There were no signs of foul play. The medical examiner diagnosed the cause of death as a massive heart seizure. The police were satisfied. Ambulance workers in long white coats placed the corpse on a stretcher.

Observing the horrible expression of pure terror graven on the dead man's features, the doctor murmured, “Looks like I should write up this one as ‘dead of fright.’”

Zarnak, who stood with his arm around the shaking, sobbing form of Dona Teresa, permitted himself a small, grim jest:

“No, doctor. I would say ‘dead of night,”’ he muttered.

ROBERT M. PRICE has edited Crypt of Cthulhu for fourteen years. His essays on Lovecraft have appeared in Lovecraft Studies , The Lovecrafter , Cerebretron , Dagon , Etude Lovecraftienne , Mater Tenebrarum , and in An Epicure in the Terrible and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism . His horror fiction has appeared in Nyctalops , Eldritch Tales , Etchings & Odysseys , Grue , Footsteps , Deathrealm , Weirdbook, Fantasy Book, Vollmond, and elsewhere. He has edited Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos for Fedogan & Bremer, as well as The Horror of It All and Black Forbidden Things for Starmont House. His books include H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (Borgo Press) and Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds (Starmont). By day he is a theologian, New Testament scholar, editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism , and pastor of the Holy Grail Ecumenical Church.