The Second Wish and Other Exhalations

by Brian Lumley

  Now the road narrowed more yet, swinging sharply to the right before passing round a rocky spur. The ground rose up beyond the spur and formed a shallow ridge, and my map told me that the gully or re-entry which guarded Temple House lay on the far side of this final rise. I knew that when we reached the crest the house would come into view, and I found myself holding my breath as the Range Rover’s wheels bit into the cinder surface of the track.

  “There she is!” cried Carl as first the eaves of the place became visible, then its oak-beamed gables and greystone walls, and finally the entire frontage where it projected from behind the sheer rise of the gully’s wall. And now, as we accelerated down the slight decline and turned right to follow a course running parallel to the stream, the whole house came into view where it stood half in shadow. That strange old house in the silent gully, where no birds ever flew and not even a rabbit had been seen to sport in the long wild grass.

  “Hey!” Carl cried, his voice full of enthusiasm. “And your uncle wanted this place pulled down? What in hell for? It’s beautiful — and it must be worth a fortune!”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” I answered. “It might look all right from here, but wait till you get inside. Its foun­dations were waterlogged twenty years ago. There were always six inches of water in the cellar, and the panels of the lower rooms were mouldy even then. God only knows what it must be like now!”

  “Does it look the way you remember it?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” I frowned. “Seen through the eyes of an adult, there are differences.”

  For one thing, the pool was different. The level of the water was lower, so that the wide, grass-grown wall of the dam seemed somehow taller. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the dam, without which the pool could not exist, or at best would be the merest pebble-bottomed pool and not the small lake, which it now was. For the first time it dawned on me that the pool was artificial, not natural as I had always thought of it, and that Temple House had been built on top of the dam’s curving mound where it extended to the steep shale cliff of the defile itself.

  With a skidding of loose chippings, Carl took the Range Rover up the ramp that formed the drive to the house, and a moment later we drew to a halt before the high-arched porch. We dismounted and entered, and now Carl went clattering away — almost irreverently, I thought — into cool rooms, dark stairwells and huge cupboards, his voice echoing back to me where I stood with mixed emotions, savouring the atmosphere of the old place, just inside the doorway to the house proper.

  “But this is it!” he cried from somewhere. “This is for me! My studio, and no question. Come and look, John — look at the windows letting in all this good light. You’re right about the damp, I can feel it — but that aside, it’s perfect.” I found him in what had once been the main living-room, standing in golden clouds of dust he had stirred up, motes illumined by the sun’s rays where they struck into the room through huge, leaded windows. “You’ll need to give the place a good dusting and sweeping out,” I told him.

  “Oh, sure,” he answered, “but there’s a lot wants doing before that. Do you know where the master switch is?”

  “Umm? Switch?”

  “For the electric light,” he frowned impatiently at me. “And surely there’s an icebox in the kitchen.”

  “A refrigerator?” I answered. “Oh, yes, I’m sure there is … Look, you run around and explore the place and do whatever makes you happy. Me, I’m just going to potter about and try to waken a few old dreams.”

  During the next hour or two — while I quite literally ‘pottered about’ and familiarized myself once again with this old house so full of memories — Carl fixed himself up with a bed in his ‘studio,’ found the main switch and got the electricity flowing, examined the refrigerator and satisfied himself that it was in working order, then searched me out where I sat in the mahogany-panelled study upstairs to tell me that he was driving into Penicuik to stock up with food.

  From my window I watched him go, until the cloud of dust thrown up by his wheels disappeared over the rise to the south, then stirred myself into positive action. There were things to be done — things I must do for myself, others for my uncle — and the sooner I started the better. Not that there was any lack of time; I had three whole months to carry out Gavin McGilchrist’s instructions, or to fail to carry them out. And yet somehow … yes, there was this feeling of urgency in me.

  And so I switched on the light against gathering shad­ows, took out the envelope left for me by my uncle — that envelope whose contents, a letter and a notebook, were for my eyes only — sat down at the great desk used by so many generations of McGilchrists, and began to read …

  4. The Curse

  “My dear, dear nephew,” the letter in my uncle’s uneven script began, “—so much I would like to say to you, and so little time in which to say it. And all these years grown in between since last I saw you.

  “When first you left Scotland with your mother I would have written to you through her, but she forbade it. In early 1970 I learned of her death, so that even my con­dolences would have been six months too late; well, you have them now. She was a wonderful woman, and of course she was quite right to take you away out of it all. If I’m right in what I now suspect, her woman’s intuition will yet prove to have been nearer the mark than anyone ever could have guessed, and—

  “But there I go, miles off the point and rambling as usual; and such a lot to say. Except — I’m damned if I know where to begin! I suppose the plain fact of the matter is quite simply stated — namely, that for you to be reading this is for me to be gone forever from the world of men. But gone … where? And how to explain?

  “The fact is, I cannot tell it all, not and make it believ­able. Not the way I have come to believe it. Instead you will have to be satisfied with the barest essentials. The rest you can discover for yourself. There are books in the old library that tell it all — if a man has the patience to look. And if he’s capable of putting aside all matters of common knowledge, all laws of science and logic; capable of unlearning all that life has ever taught him of truth and beauty.

  “Four hundred years ago we weren’t such a race of damned sceptics. They were burning witches in these parts then, and if they had suspected of anyone what I have come to suspect of Temple House and its grounds …

  “Your mother may not have mentioned the curse — the curse of the McGilchrists. Oh, she believed in it, certainly, but it’s possible she thought that to tell of it might be to invoke the thing. That is to say, by telling you she might bring the curse down on your head. Perhaps she was right, for unless my death is seen to be entirely natural, then certainly I shall have brought it down upon myself.

  “And what of you, Nephew?

  “You have three months. Longer than that I do not deem safe, and nothing is guaranteed. Even three months might be dangerously overlong, but I pray not. Of course you are at liberty, if you so desire, simply to get the thing over and done with. In my study, in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, you will find sufficient fuses and explosive materials to bring down the wall of the defile onto the house, and the house itself into the pool, which should satisfactorily put an end to the thing.

  “But … you had an enquiring mind as a child. If you look where I have looked and read what I have read, then you shall learn what I’ve learned and know that it is neither advanced senility nor madness but my own intel­ligence which leads me to the one, inescapable conclusion — that this House of the Temple, this Temple House of the McGilchrists, is accursed. Most terribly …

  “I could flee this place, of course, but I doubt if that would save me. And if it did save me, still it would leave the final questions unanswered and the riddle unsolved. Also, I loved my brother, your father, and I saw his face when he was dead. If for nothing else, that look on your father’s dead face has been sufficient reason for me to pursue the thing thus far. I thought to seek it out, to know it, destroy it — but now …
>
  “I have never been much of a religious man, Nephew, and so it comes doubly hard for me to say what I now say: that while your father is dead these twenty years and more, I now find myself wondering if he is truly at rest! And what will be the look on my face when the thing is over, one way or the other? Ask about that, Nephew, ask how I looked when they found me.

  “Finally, as to your course of action from this point onward: do what you will, but in the last event be sure you bring about the utter dissolution of the seat of ancient evil known as Temple House. There are things hidden in the great deserts and mountains of the world, and others sunken under the deepest oceans, which never were meant to exist in any sane or ordered universe. Yes, and certain revenants of immemorial horror have even come among men. One such has anchored itself here in the Pentlands, and in a little while I may meet it face to face. If all goes well … But then you should not be reading this.

  “And so the rest is up to you, John Hamish; and if indeed man has an immortal soul, I now place mine in your hands. Do what must be done and if you are a believer, then say a prayer for me …

  Yr. Loving Uncle—

  Gavin McGilchrist.”

  I read the letter through a second time, then a third, and the shadows lengthened beyond the reach of the study’s Electric lights. Finally, I turned to the notebook — a slim, ruled, board-covered book whose like might be purchased at any stationery store — and opened it to page upon page of scrawled and at first glance seemingly unconnected jottings, references, abbreviated notes and memoranda concern­ing … Concerning what? Black magic? Witchcraft? The ‘supernatural’? But what else would you call a curse if not supernatural?

  Well, my uncle had mentioned a puzzle, a mystery, the McGilchrist curse, the thing he had tracked down almost to the finish. And here were all the pointers, the clues, the keys to his years of research. I stared at the great bookcases lining the walls, the leather spines of their contents dully agleam in the glow of the lights. Asquith had told me that my uncle brought many old books back with him from his wanderings abroad.

  I stood up and felt momentarily dizzy, and was obliged to lean on the desk until the feeling passed. The mustiness of the deserted house, I supposed, the closeness of the room and the odour of old books. Books … yes, and I moved shakily across to the nearest bookcase and ran my fingers over titles rubbed and faded with age and wear. There were works here, which seemed to stir faint memories — perhaps I had been allowed to play with those books as a child? — but others were almost tangibly strange to the place, whose titles alone would make aliens of them without ever a page being turned. These must be those volumes my uncle had discovered abroad. I frowned as I tried to make something of their less than commonplace names.

  Here were such works as the German Unter-Zee Kulten and Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon in a French edition; and here Gaston le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths and a black-bound, iron-hasped copy of the Cthdat Aquadingen, its harsh title suggestive of both German and Latin roots. Here was Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, and here the Liber Miraculorem of the Monk and Chaplain Herbert of Clairvaux. Gothic letters proclaimed of one volume that it was Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, while another purported to be the suppressed and hideously disquieting Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt — titles which seemed to leap at me as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf in a sort of disbelieving stupefaction.

  What possible connection could there be between these ancient, foreign volumes of elder madness and delirium and the solid, down-to-earth McGilchrist line of gentle­men, officers and scholars? There seemed only one way to find out. Choosing a book at random. I found it to be the Cthdat Aquadingen and returned with it to the desk. The light outside was failing now and the shadows of the hills were long and sooty. In less than an hour it would be dusk, and half an hour after that dark.

  Then there would only be Carl and I and the night. And the old house. As if in answer to unspoken thoughts, settling timbers groaned somewhere overhead. Through the window, down below in the sharp shadows of the house, the dull green glint of water caught my eye.

  Carl and I, the night and the old house—

  And the deep, dark pool.

  5. The Music

  It was almost completely dark by the time Carl returned, but in between I had at least been able to discover my uncle’s system of reference. It was quite elementary, really. In his notebook, references such as ‘CA 121/7’ simply indicated an item of interest in the Cthdat Aquadingen, page 121, the seventh paragraph. And in the work itself he had carefully underscored all such paragraphs or items of interest. At least a dozen such references concerning the Cthdat Aquadingen occurred in his notebook, and as night had drawn on I had examined each in turn.

  Most of them were meaningless to me and several were in a tongue or glyph completely beyond my comprehension, but others were in a form of old English, which I could transcribe with comparative ease. One such, which seemed a chant of sorts, had a brief annotation scrawled in the margin in my uncle’s hand. The passage I refer to, as nearly as I can remember, went like this:

  “Rise, O Nameless Ones;

  It is Thy Season

  When Thine Own of Thy Choosing,

  Through Thy Spells & Thy Magic,

  Through Dreams & Enchantry,

  May know Thou art come.

  They rush to Thy Pleasure,

  For the Love of Thy Masters —

  the Spawn of Cthulhu.”

  And the accompanying annotation queried: “Would they have used such as this to call the Thing forth, I wonder, or was it simply a blood lure? What causes it to come forth now? When will it next come?”

  It was while I was comparing references and text in this fashion that I began to get a glimmer as to just what the book was, and on further considering its title I saw that I had probably guessed correctly. ‘Cthäat’ frankly baffled me, unless it had some connection with the language or being of the pre-Nacaal Kthatans; but ‘Aquadingen’ was far less alien in its sound and formation. It meant (I believed), ‘water-things’, or ‘things of the waters’; and the — Cthdat Aquadingen was quite simply a compendium of myths and legends concerning water sprites, nymphs, demons, naiads and other supernatural creatures of lakes and oceans, and the spells or conjurations by which they might be evoked or called out of their watery haunts.

  I had just arrived at this conclusion when Carl returned, the lights of his vehicle cutting a bright swath over the dark surface of the pool as he parked in front of the porch. Laden down, he entered the house and I went down to the spacious if somewhat old-fashioned kitchen to find him filling shelves and cupboards and stocking the refrigerator with perishables. This done, bright and breezy in his en­thusiasm, he enquired about the radio.

  “Radio?” I answered. “I thought your prime concern was for peace and quiet? Why, you’ve made enough noise for ten since we got here!”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s not my noise I’m concerned about but yours. Or rather, the radio’s. I mean, you’ve obviously found one for I heard the music.”

  Carl was big, blond and blue-eyed; a Viking if ever I saw one, and quite capable of displaying a Viking’s temper. He had been laughing when he asked me where the radio was, but now he was frowning. “Are you playing games with me, John?”

  “No, of course I’m not,” I answered him. “Now what’s all this about? What music have you been hearing?”

  His face suddenly brightened and he snapped his fingers. “There’s a radio in the Range Rover,” he said. “There has to be. It must have gotten switched on, very low, and I’ve been getting Bucharest or something.” He made as if to go back outside.

  “Bucharest?” I repeated him.

  “Hmm?” he paused in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, yes — gypsyish stuff. Tambourines and chanting — and fiddles. Dancing around campfires. Look, I’d better switch it off or the battery will run down.”

  “I didn’t see a radio,” I told him, following him out through the porch and onto
the drive.

  He leaned inside the front of the vehicle, switched on the interior light and searched methodically. Finally he put the light out with an emphatic click. He turned to me and his jaw had a stubborn set to it. I looked back at him and raised my eyebrows. “No radio?”

  He shook his head. “But I heard the music.”

  “Lovers,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Lovers, out walking. A transistor radio. Perhaps they were sitting in the grass. After all, it is a beautiful summer night.”

  Again he shook his head. “No, it was right there in the air. Sweet and clear. I heard it as I approached the house. It came from the house, I thought. And you heard nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.

  “Well then — damn it to hell!” he suddenly grinned. “I’ve started hearing things, that’s all! Skip it… Come on, let’s have supper …”

  Carl stuck to his ‘studio’ bedroom but I slept upstairs in a room adjacent to the study. Even with the windows thrown wide open, the night was very warm and the atmosphere sticky, so that sleep did not come easily. Carl must have found a similar problem for on two or three occasions I awakened from a restless half-sleep to sounds of his moving about downstairs. In the morning over breakfast both of us were a little bleary-eyed, but then he led me through into his room to display the reason for his nocturnal activity.

  There on the makeshift easel, on one of a dozen old canvasses he had brought with him, Carl had started work on a picture … of sorts.

  For the present he had done little more than lightly brush in the background, which was clearly the valley of the house, but the house itself was missing from the picture and I could see that the artist did not intend to include it. The pool was there, however, with its en­circling ring of quartz columns complete and finished with lintels of a like material. The columns and lintels glowed luminously.

  In between and around the columns vague figures writhed, at present insubstantial as smoke, and in the foreground the flames of a small fire were driven on a wind that blew from across the pool. Taken as a whole and for all its sketchiness, the scene gave a vivid impression of savagery and pagan excitement — strange indeed considering that as yet there seemed to be so little in it to excite any sort of emotion whatever.