Ramsey Campbell - The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

"Owen? So you’re all right, after all!” said the doctor’s relieved voice.

"No, I’m not,” Owen forced out. "It happened again — brought something back — in the room now—” Unable to say more, he dropped the receiver into place.

He suddenly felt an urge toward the circular chest; to lift the lid and see what lay inside. Already one hand was twitching in its direction. Viciously he drove his fist into the edge of the table, causing such pain that the impulse subsided.

His concentration arranged itself around the throbbing hand, but was interrupted by an impatient battering at the front door. Owen staggered into the hall and with his uninjured hand let Dr Nash in.

(Look at the bastard! He tells you you’re possessed, but you know what he really means, don’t you? That you’re schizophrenic… Push him out, quick! Don’t let him come poking round your mind!)

"Quick — upstairs, for God’s sake!” Owen screamed. "Smash that pentacle, no matter what happens!”

Dr Nash hesitated a moment, staring at him, then peered closer. What he saw Owen never discovered, but the doctor pushed him away and clattered upstairs. There came a sound of glass breaking, and something seemed to pass from Owen; a shadow which fluttered against the ceiling faded away murmuring. He felt very weak, and all urge to open the chest had disappeared.

The doctor hurried anxiously into the hall. “Where is the — the thing you brought back?”

Owen led him into the livingroom, and they stood over it. "What do we do with it?”

"Burn it, I suppose,” replied Dr Nash. "And I don’t think we’d better open it, even though I don’t know what’s in it.”

"I do,” said Owen, shuddering, and began to drag it into the hall. "There was something carved over — where I found it. not quite a spider, not quite a snake, and it had a face that. Come on, for God’s sake let’s get it out.”

They carried the chest into the back garden and lit the petrol they poured over it, standing ready with pokers for anything that might struggle out. But only a long white member fell out as the lid warped, and then the contents began to bubble; but they watched until nothing remained except ashes which wheeled away on the night wind. Then they drove to Gladstone Place and fought sleep until the night had passed.

Owen left Victoria Road the next day, and now writes in a room looking out on Southport beach. He has not forgotten, however; and particularly when the sea is lashing blackly in the night he remembers a crudely-chipped gravestone, and echoes: "God grant she stay dead.”

Edward Taylor was twenty-four years old when he first became interested in the metal mined on Yuggoth.

He had led a strange life up to that point. He was born, normally enough, of Protestant parents in Brichester Central Hospital in 1899. From an early age he preferred to sit reading in his room rather than play with the neighborhood children, but such a preference is not remarkable. Most of the books he read were normal, too, though he tended to concentrate on the more unusual sections; after reading the Bible, for instance, he startled his father by asking: "How did the witch of Endor call the spirit?” Besides, as his mother remarked, surely no normal eight-year-old would read Dracula and The Beetle with such avidity as Edward.

In 1918 Taylor left school and enrolled at Brichester University. Here the stranger section of his life began; his tutors soon discovered that his academic studies frequently gave way to less orthodox practices. He led a witch-cult, centering round a stone slab in the woods off the Severnford road. The members of the cult included such people as the artist, Nevil Craughan, and the occultist, Henry Fisher; all members being subsequently exposed and expelled. Some of them gave up sorcery, but Taylor only became more interested. His parents were dead, his inheritance made work unnecessary, and he could spend all the time he wished in research.

But although he had enough normal possessions, Taylor was still not satisfied. He had borrowed the Revelations Of Glaaki from another cultist, and had visited the British Museum twice to copy passages from the Necronomicon . His library included the horrible untitled Johannes Henricus Pott book which the Jena publishers rejected, and this was the book which gave him his final interest. That repulsive immortality formula which Pott wrote was more than half true, and when Taylor compared certain of the necessary ingredients with references by Alhazred, he put together a hitherto unconnected series of hints.

On Tond, Yuggoth, and occasionally on Earth, immortality has been attained by an obscure process. The brain of the immortal is transplanted from body to body at thirty-five-year intervals; this otherwise impossible operation being carried out using a tok’l container, in which the naked brain is placed between bodies. Tok’l is a metal mined extensively on Yuggoth, but neither exists nor can be created on Earth.

"The lizard-crustaceans arrive on Earth through their towers,” Alhazred tells us; not in their towers, Taylor noted, but through them, using the method of turning space in on itself which has been lost to men since Joiry. It was dangerous, but Taylor only had to find an outpost of the Yuggoth-spawn and pass through the barrier in the transport tower there. The danger did not lie in the journey to Yuggoth; the barrier must change the organs of bodies passing through it, or else the lizard-crustaceans could never live in their outposts on Earth, where they mine those metals not to be had on their planet. But Taylor disliked the miners; he had once seen an engraving in the Revelations Of Glaaki and been repelled by it. It was unlike anything he had seen before; the body was not really that of a lizard, nor did its head too closely resemble that of a lobster, but those were the only comparisons he could make.

For some time Taylor could not have gone among the Yuggoth- spawn, even if he had found one of their outposts. But a page reference in the Revelations led him to the following in the Necronomicon :

"As Azathoth rules now as he did in his bivalvular shape, his name subdues all, from the incubi which haunt Tond to the servants of Y’golonac. Few can resist the power of the name Azathoth, and even the haunters of the blackest night of Yuggoth cannot battle the power of N-, his other name .”

So Taylor’s interest in travel to Yuggoth was renewed. The lizard-crustaceans were no longer dangerous, but occasionally Taylor felt twinges of unease when he thought of certain hints in the Revelations . There were occasional references to a pit which lay near one of the cities — a pit whose contents few lizard-crustaceans cared to view, and which was avoided during certain periods of the year by all. No description of what lay in the pit was included, but Taylor came across the words: "at those times of the year the lizard-crustaceans are glad of the lightlessness of Yuggoth.” But the hints were so vague that he usually ignored them.

Unfortunately, the "other name” of Azathoth was not given in the Necronomicon , and by the time he needed to know it, the exposure of the cult had placed the Revelations Of Glaaki beyond his reach. In 1924 he began a search for some person with the complete edition. By chance he met Michael Hinds, one of the former cultists, who did not have a copy but suggested a visit to a farmhouse off the Goats wood road.

"That’s Daniel Norton’s place,” Hinds told him. "He’s got the complete edition, and a lot more items of interest. He’s not very bright, though — he remembers all the Tagh-Clatur angles, but he’s content to live the way he does and worship rather than use his knowledge to better himself. I don’t like him particularly. He’s too stupid to harm you, of course, but all that knowledge going to waste annoys me.”