Mysteries of the Worm

by Robert Bloch

  Adrienne eyes the bottles dubiously, but before she could object, Thornwald took over. “Glasses,” he demanded. “And a corkscrew, if you please.”

  “But—”

  “It’s to be a surprise,” Thornwald assured her. And he meant it.

  Adrienne, he knew, could never resist surprises. And this particular one she could resist least of all. He didn’t tell her about the third bottle—the tiny one—which he carried concealed in his pocket. He waited until she brought in the glasses and the corkscrew and an ice bucket.

  “I’ll open the bottle,” he said. “Man’s work.” He winked at her. “Meanwhile, why don’t you slip into that party dress of yours, so that we can give Charles a proper welcome?”

  Adrienne nodded and left the room. It was then that Thornwald opened the champagne, poured it, and added just the merest drop of the love philtre to the contents of her glass.

  He finished just in time, dropping the little vial back into his pocket just as Adrienne blossomed into the room. His hand trembled, not with apprehension but with anticipation.

  Obsession or no, Adrienne was a beautiful woman in her own right; slim, shapely, and quite probably a natural redhead. Thornwald determined to satisfy himself on this latter point the moment Adrienne downed her drink.

  She swept over to him, proffering his glass and raising her own as he turned away until he could control his shaking fingers. Now was the time for self-control. In a moment, he felt certain, it could be abandoned.

  Thornwald raised his champagne glass.

  “To tonight,” he said. And sipped tentatively.

  Adrienne nodded, bent her shapely wrist, brought the edge of the glass to her lips, and hesitated.

  “Now that we seemed to be friends again,” she murmured, “suppose we seal our relationship in a friendly gesture?”

  “Such as?”

  “Let us take each other’s glasses.”

  Thornwald gulped. “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “Believe it or not, I have a cold.”

  “Very well.” Again, Adrienne paused.

  “Drink up, my dear,” Thornwald urged. “Here’s to surprises.”

  “Surprises,” Adrienne echoed. And drank.

  Thornwald tossed off the champagne. His hands were trembling again. How long would he have to wait?

  Not very long, apparently. For it seemed but a moment before the change came.

  Adrienne moved quite close and her voice, like her smile, was soft and caressing.

  “I don’t know what you put in my drink,” she murmured. “But you did put something in. That’s why you wouldn’t switch glasses with me, isn’t it?”

  Thornwald noted the warmth in her voice and felt it was now safe to nod.

  “Good,” Adrienne said. “I thought as much. Which is why I switched glasses before I made the suggestion—when I handed you your drink.”

  Thornwald blinked. And then the philtre took effect and he knew it worked, knew that if the merest drop would transform a woman into a bitch in heat, it was equally potent when administered to a male.

  All he could do was tremble and watch the room swirl and listen to Adrienne’s laughter. If only she could understand his motivations, if only she realized he’s acted out of genuine affection! Thornwald knew he had to tell her, so he took a deep breath and opened his mouth.

  “I love you,” he barked.

  Afterword

  In July, 1934, I lucked out.

  That’s when I sold my first story to Weird Tales magazine. To a 17-year-old youngster, just graduated from high school in the depths of the Great Depression, this seemed like a miracle. And in a way it was, for “The Secret in the Tomb” barely qualified as a story at all. Editor Farnsworth Wright must have had an off-day when he decided to accept the tale.

  But it was a great day to me, and thus encouraged I immediately wrote and submitted another story, “The Feast in the Abbey”. It too was accepted, and I lucked out again.

  For in accordance with some mysterious editorial decision, it was this second effort which was the first to actually appear in print, on November first, in an issue predated January, 1935.

  “Feast” wasn’t exactly a masterpiece either, but it was a good cut above the earlier effort and had a last line which readers seemed to remember.

  Which is more than can be said for “Secret”, or many of the stories that I wrote and sold subsequently. “The Suicide in the Study”, “The Dark Demon”, “The Grinning Ghoul”, and “The Faceless God” were experiments, poorly conceived and poorly executed by a teen-aged amateur who deserved to be executed himself. My references to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos in these efforts clearly indicated that I was under the influence of my literary mentor, H. P Lovecraft—though the less charitable might also suspect I wrote them under the influence of some hallucinogenic drug.

  Such, however, was not the case. And every once in a while a genuine story notion would come my way.

  For example, I conceived the notion of killing off Mr. Lovecraft in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion—with his permission, of course. With characteristic generosity he not only granted me that liberty, but set it down in a document signed in four languages. And thus I wrote “The Shambler From The Stars”, dedicated to HPL—whereupon he returned the courtesy in a sequel, “The Haunter Of The Dark”, with myself as dedicatee and victim.

  Other experimental ventures—conscious attempts to move away from Lovecraft’s literary turf, if not his influence—were my series of Egyptological or Egyptillogical tales, several of which are included in this collection. And occasionally I came up with an offbeat idea, as in “The Mannikin”—though at the time I was blissfully unaware that Henry S. Whitehead had utilized a somewhat similar concept in his story “Cassius”.

  Rereading these pieces today—some of which have rightfully (and mercifully) remained out of print for forty-odd years—I find myself reiterating a recurrent regret. Why couldn’t some of those ideas have waited to occur to me later, when I’d have been better prepared to do justice to them?

  Truth to tell, I didn’t really begin to write properly for nearly a decade following that first sale. Not that I was necessarily any great shakes at it even then, but at least I’d begun to diversify my style and divest it of some annoying mannerisms.

  “The Shadow from the Steeple”—the sequel which I eventually added to HPL’s “Haunter”—is deliberately written in the mood and mode of its predecessors and utilizes the same milieu. It is, however, more disciplined and coherent than “Shambler”, if not necessarily as much fun. And while “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” is a throwback to HPL-influenced tales, it bears little stylistic resemblance to those earlier works with their ponderous and pretentious polysyllabification and pseudo-scholarly references.

  But these tales, of course, are assembled here together for the first time, because of a common denominator. All of them have some connection with H. R Lovecraft’s Mythos.

  They are not, I hasten to assure you, stories which were revised or written by HPL. As a matter of record, although it was Lovecraft who suggested I turn my hand to writing weird fiction and offered to read and criticize my early efforts, he actually saw only a half-dozen or so of them all told. And of these, several never actually appeared in print.

  Those that I did inflict on him he praised rather than criticized—and his suggestions involved minor changes. Gently he corrected errata in spelling or references, but at all times took pains to reassure me that I was a writer rather than an egregious nerd. In a word, he lied like a gentleman.

  And it was HPL who, when I came up with another imaginary book of sorcery to take its place alongside his famous Necronomicon, conferred upon my Mysteries of the Worm its Latin title—and offered me Latin phrases for use as invocations.

  I’ve been asked if the name I bestowed on the book’s author—Ludvig Prinn—was derived from that of Hester Prynne, heroine of The Scarlet Letter. If so, the association was an unconscious one, for I had yet to read H
awthorne’s novel at the time, and didn’t see the silent film version until two years ago. Even if I had been familiar with the character I doubt I’d form any special connection between an adulteress in colonial New England and a European devotee of Black Magic.

  Oddly enough, Lovecraft’s greatest direct contribution to my work consisted of his suggestions—and some lines of actual rewriting and rephrasing—incorporated into “Satan’s Servants”. This is not a Mythos tale and is not included herein: as a matter of record, I put it aside following his inspection and didn’t complete the story until many years after Lovecraft’s death.

  Lovecraft’s death.

  I hadn’t intended to write that phrase, though even today, more than forty years after the event, it carries a tragic connotation. Until I reflect upon the fact that H. R Lovecraft—like his creation, Cthulhu—never truly died. He and his influence live on, in the work of so many of us who were his friends and acolytes. Today we have reason for rejoicing in the widespread revival of his own canon.

  And if a volume such as this has any justification for its existence, it’s because Lovecraft’s readers continue to search out stories which reflect his contribution to the field of fantasy. With that in mind, there’s no need for further apologia. These tales, poor as some of them may be, nevertheless represent a lifelong homage to HPL which recently culminated in the publication of my novel, Strange Eons. Taken in that spirit, I hope you’ll accept them for what they were and are—a labor of love.

  —Robert Bloch, 1981.

  Demon-Dreaded Lore:

  Robert Bloch’s Contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos

  by Lin Carter

  When Robert Bloch was a boy of fifteen, back in 1933, he began to correspond with H. P. Lovecraft, becoming one of the youngest of the members of the Lovecraft Circle, that band of aspiring or seasoned writers scattered across the country whose common links were their enthusiasm for macabre fiction in general and Weird Tales in particular, and their friendship with Lovecraft. Some, like Clark Ashton Smith, were professionals; others, like very young Bloch, raw amateurs. Over the years, some lasted, becoming popular Weird Tales contributors, and others faded into the background.

  Bloch, of course, lasted. From his first published short story (“The Feast in the Abbey”, Weird Tales, January 1935), he went on to sell a grand total of eighty-five yarns to that magazine and competitors like Strange Stories. Some stories were written with one or another collaborator, a few were written under a pen name (Tarleton Fiske), but, as his last appearance in WT was in the issue dated January 1952, I submit that he had become a seasoned professional. After all, eighty-five stories in only seventeen years—!

  With his very second appearance in Weird (“The Secret in the Tomb, May 1935), Bloch joined his new friends Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard in writing stories laid against the connected (but invented) background lore-system of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. He went on later, of course, to find more modern settings and themes better suited to his individual personality—he went on, in fact, to become a widely successful author of scripts for radio, television and the movies (and it’s one of the ironies of his fine career that he was not given the chance to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho—the most successful black-and-white movie ever made—since he wrote the novel on which the scenario was, and very closely, based); but it is as a contributor to the Mythos that I must deal with him here.

  The Cthulhu Mythos is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, a few novels, poems, sonnet-sequences, and other miscellaneous things, held together by a commonly shared system of information. A mythology, if you will. All right, a demonology, then. The authors who contributed to it—the authors who are still contributing to it, for the Mythos is by no means dead—play the game more or less according to the rules laid down by Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard, who were the first to get in on the fun. The rules are that each writer should invent a demon-god or two, and a crumbling tome of blasphemous eldritch lore, and, as often as not, a milieu—generally a decaying backwater of old towns slouching into desuetude, with an omnipresent aura of ancient witchcraft and obscure cults in their past . . . and generally their present, too.

  Lovecraft invented Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and that shuddersome Bible of the Mythos, the unmentionable Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. Smith invented Ubbo-Sathla, Tsathoggua, and Abhoth, and the legendary Book of Eibon. Howard invented Golgoroth, Koth (sometimes, rather confusingly, described as a city, a mysterious Sign on a tower, and a demon-thing), and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. Derleth invented, or borrowed from Bierce, rather, Hastur, Cthugha, the Celaeno Fragments, and the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Lovecraft set most of his tales, but by no means all, in an imaginary region of coastal Massachusetts; Smith laid his in prehistoric Hyperborea or Medieval Averoign. And so on; you get the idea. Come to think of it, you probably already know the idea, or you wouldn’t have bothered to pick this book off the rack . . .

  With his second story, “The Secret of the Tomb”, Bloch made some rather tentative contributions to that library-full of mouldering volumes of forbidden lore, mentioning the Cabala of Saboth, and the Occultus of Hieriarchus, and “Prinn”. Prinn was the only one he developed to any particular extent, although in subsequent stories he added the Black Rites of mad Luveh-Keraph, priest of “cryptic Bast”, and a number of books and tales by imaginary authors such as Simon Maglore and Edgar Henquist Gordon.

  It was the Flemish wizard, Ludvig Prinn, and his hellish book, De Vermis Mysteriis or Mysteries of the Worm, that became and that remains Robert Bloch’s major contribution to the lore of the Mythos. In his story “The Shambler from the Stars”—which, incidentally, he dedicated to Lovecraft—he builds upon Prinn’s life and history and reveals as much as he ever wished to pass on to us of the contents and theme of that ghoulish tome. I refer you to the tale in question: The volume certainly belongs on the same dusty shelf with Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Livre d’Ivonis.

  I can no longer refrain from informing you of the hideous truth: Robert Bloch has a sense of humor. Humor and horror have never been so inextricably mixed as in the career of Robert Bloch. If H.P.L. hadn’t encouraged him to contribute to Weird Tales, I have no doubt but that he would have gone on to write material for Fred Allen, Sid Caesar or Bob Hope.

  Now, the boys in the Lovecraft Circle did not, repeat: not, treat their work with any great solemnity. In fact, they delighted in playing jokes on each other in their stories. The “Comte d’Erlette”, who is the author of Derleth’s Cultes des Goules, is a Lovecraftian pun on Derleth’s own surname, for example. (Bloch paid him back, on Derleth’s behalf, by making the author of his own Black Rites one “Luveh-Keraph”, adding with {presumably} a straight face that the mad Egyptian was a “priest of Bast”. To catch that one, you have to know that Lovecraft was crazy about cats.) Similarly, Lovecraft inserted into another story a reference to “the Commoriom myth-cycle of the Atlantean high priest, Klarkash-Ton”; since Clark Ashton Smith wrote tales set in Commoriom, capital of his Hyperborea, the joke is obvious.

  Well, in 1935, Bloch wrote to Lovecraft asking him if he minded being used as a character (who would come to a sticky end) in a story he was thinking about, later published as “The Shambler from the Stars”. Lovecraft replied with a document of formal permission, countersigned by Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon, Gaspard du Nord, translator of the Book of Eibon, the “Tcho-Tcho lama of Leng”, etc. Bloch thereupon wrote of a struggling young writer, aspiring to make his mark on weird fiction (obviously, although tongue-in-cheek, an autobiographical reference), who, in his midwestern isolation, enters into correspondence with a “hermit in the western hills” (Smith), a “savant in the northern wilds” (Derleth, or Donald Wandrei), and “a mystic dreamer in New England” (You Know Who). The narrator and said mystic dreamer get embroiled in trying out one of the rituals in the Mysteries of the Worm, and it is the dreamer who
gets sort of eaten alive by an invisible Thing in midair.

  A while later, Lovecraft retaliated with “The Haunter of the Dark”, in which a lonely young writer from the Midwest, one “Robert Blake”, (not “Bloch”: Blake), comes to an even stickier end while visiting in Providence, Rhode Island (where Lovecraft lived). (Blake was struck dead with horror after one good look at Nyarlathotep; the coroner ascribed it to being hit by lightning . . . but we know!) Unable to resist, Bloch later followed “Haunter of the Dark” with another story in which Nyarlathotep gets his comeuppance, more or less, from one Edmund Fiske, a pal of the late Blake. Need I remind you that Bloch used “Fiske” as a pen name on a few stories?

  By the time the story appeared, Lovecraft had died at an untimely age, and quite suddenly: that is, none of his correspondents had even known he was seriously ill. As Bloch put it once, in a letter to me: “All the fun went out of the game, after that.” And there were no more Cthulhu Mythos stories for a long time from his hand.

  Besides inventing a tome of shuddersome lore, the Mythos writers liked making up new devil-gods for the Cthulhoid pantheon. Frank Belknap Long, another member of the Circle, contributed the repulsive, elephant-headed Chaugnar Faugn, and Henry Kuttner added Vorvadoss, and so on.

  Bloch never developed any of his gods much, a few references to “dark Han and serpent-bearded Byatis” in stories like “The Shambler from the Stars”, and that’s about it. (Ramsey Campbell later picked up Byatis for further development.) The fact seems to have been that Bloch was very interested in ancient Egypt—he made that ancient land the scene of tales like “The Faceless God” and “Fane of the Black Pharaoh,” and Egyptian religion and superstition enter very largely into “The Secret of Sebek” and some of his non-Mythos stories, like “The Eyes of the Mummy”. In the person of the aforementioned Nyarlathotep, who has sinister, shadowy connections with the ancient Nile, Bloch found a perfect instrument to play with his hobby. In tale after tale, he developed the myth of Nyarlathotep, adding much new lore to our knowledge of the monster.