“Delightful,” said Lovecraft, leaning back comfortably into exactly the sort of leather wing chair I had hoped he’d have. “And now that we’re sated, thanks to the efforts of Klarkash-Ton and his foreign baker friend, I think it’s time we quit this lovely, sunny Georgian parlor and give Edwardius a little tour of the premises.”
We rose and Lovecraft headed for one of the tall white doors with me in his wake, but Smith produced the silver tray and began collecting cups and saucers.
“I think I’ll stay behind and tidy up,” he said. “Am I to assume you won’t be giving our young friend the usual restricted and misleading tour?”
“He shall see every trapdoor and secret panel,” said Lovecraft, smiling. “Events have proceeded rather more quickly than I’d planned, thanks to Edwardius’s astute perceptions and flexibility, so things are ahead of schedule. I believe the time has well and truly arrived to enlighten him as fully as possible about his present company. I’ll begin the job in the library, rather than putting it off for a final treat, since I believe its atmosphere and impressive contents will go a long way toward lending credence to the admittedly implausible information I plan to impart.”
Smith, nodding, said no more, and as he bent to sorting china with his usual mild but interested bemusement, I followed Lovecraft through the door and soon found myself being led down a handsome hallway which, like so much of the house, was lined with paintings associated with my host’s works. These, however, were far more disturbing than the ones I’d seen heretofore, since they were all depictions of various fabulous monsters described in his tales.
“I’m quite pleased with myself for coming up with the idea of hanging these huge oils in such a constricted area,” said Lovecraft, grinning at me over his shoulder and casually indicating a remarkably horrific visualization of what—from its fanged, vertical mouth and jutting pink eyes—could only be one of the gigantic, ever-ravenous Gugs which prowled the pages of his Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. “It renders them particularly overpowering, does it not? And forces one into a threatening intimacy with the creatures which the timid viewer could avoid in the space provided by a room.”
I glanced—a little nervously, I’m not ashamed to admit—this side and that at the looming horrors that towered so very oppressively near to us as we passed, and I freely confess that I actually started and drew back when the sleeve of my jacket accidentally brushed against an almost fiendishly well-executed painting of that shifting conglomeration of iridescent globes which is Yog-Sothoth, one of the most puissant and awful gods in Lovecraft’s mythos.
Eventually he paused before a large, elaborately paneled door made of almost ebon teak and, producing a heavy gold chain loaded with formidable-looking keys, operated no less than three locks before turning a huge brass knob sculpted to resemble an unwinking octopoid eye framed with undulating tentacles, and pushed the portal open.
“My library,” he said simply, but with obvious pride, and led the way inside.
Of course I had realized some time ago that everything about this house far surpassed all aspects of that one owned by Whipple Van Buren Phillips, but I felt certain nothing about this dream version of Lovecraft’s favorite childhood home would have awed his grandfather more than the library which I now found myself entering.
There were shelves upon shelves of books, two full stories of them. Outside of the space taken up by the three tall windows on the side of the room facing the entrance, absolutely every available inch of wall above and below the encircling balcony was filled with books, and there were piles more of them on the two long tables, and on the high-backed chairs, and stacks more yet were on the floor and heaped in the corners. It was a collector’s wonder, a scholar’s marvel, and I burned to feel the bindings and turn the pages and read the words.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said my host. “I fancy it is by far the best collection in the entire world of volumes dealing with the macabre and the fantastic. Over there, for instance, under that Grecian niche containing a pallid bust of Pallas, is the sort of marvelous accumulation of first editions and manuscripts—along with other, rather more exotic artifacts—of Poe which I had never dared even hope to see, let alone touch, let alone own, back in the days of my obscurity.”
He walked slowly down the long room, pointing his cane toward this or that fabulous rarity and contentedly describing their queer particulars and complex histories, and I stumbled after him in a sort of daze, gaping with increasing astonishment at all these legendary treasures, astounded to see books by giants such as Arthur Machen and Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Conan Doyle which I, a specialist in the field, did not even know existed.
Eventually we reached the far wall of the room, and standing by one of the curling steel stairways leading to the balcony, Lovecraft placed his hand carefully on the head of a tiny gargoyle carved into the shelving beside him and regarded me with an extremely solemn and serious expression on his long, lean face.
“You must promise me, most earnestly,” he said, speaking quite severely with all trace of banter gone from his voice, “that you will never reveal anything of what you are about to see next unless you have my clear permission to do so.”
I studied him for some sign which would indicate that this sudden extreme sternness was some sort of amusing pose, but then I realized he really was, indeed, deadly serious and nodded my head affirmatively.
“I’m afraid I need more than a nod on this,” he said, with no trace of humor in his voice.
“I promise I’ll keep secret whatever you’re going to show me,” I said. “I do, really.”
He searched my face for a long moment, then smiled, gave the little gargoyle a precise poke on its nose, and—without a whisper of sound—the shelving slid smoothly aside to reveal an even deeper layer of rows and rows of books hidden a yard or two behind. There was a smaller—and, I could tell it at once, far more sinister—second library hidden craftily within the first!
“These books, too, are related to the macabre fantastic,” observed Lovecraft, entering into this mysteriously revealed little room with something of a saunter. He still preserved traces of that new solemnity, but with his much more familiar tone of underlying mockery once again apparent. “The essential event is that we have now passed beyond the fiction department of my little collection and have moved into that portion concerned with fact, and though a great many of its facts would be vehemently denied by this world’s contemporary wisdom, there is much here which would be approved of by the staidest investigators.”
He waved his fingers at the section of newer-looking books which nearly filled one side wall, and a quick scan of them revealed a multitude of names well known to anyone pretending to the slightest familiarity with modern physics.
“Of course even in this supposedly safer area I have a number of items which might very seriously disturb the present scientific community,” he said. “The formulae scrawled in that little notebook of Einstein’s just in front of your nose, for instance. But I think that a scholar of your particular tastes, Edwardius, will be more interested in having a look at those volumes over there.”
I stared at the far side of the room which he had indicated and was puzzled because it seemed to me that there was something very strange and wrong about the sight of it. I could not quite pin down what it was save to say that the whole area seemed oddly dark, as if it were somehow veiled—a distasteful and highly disturbing image of horribly sticky spiderwebs out of focus floated into my mind—and it seemed, in some weird fashion, as if that corner of the little library was disproportionately far away. I had the most peculiar notion that I would never be able to walk the whole distance if I spent hours or even weeks at it, and that I would very likely die under hideous circumstances somewhere along the journey if I undertook to try it.
But obviously none of this made sense, so I pulled myself together and had taken a step toward the shelves Lovecraft had indicated when he laid a hand gently on my arm to stop me, then sidled
past me and—with his back turned scrupulously in my direction so as to block my view—he appeared neatly and efficiently to execute a brief series of ritualistic gestures before standing aside, almost with a little bow, and indicating I should pass. I looked at the corner again and had to smile at all my previous imaginings because now there was no sign of any odd darkness there at all, and if there ever had been that strange spatial distortion and I hadn’t fantasized it completely, it had entirely disappeared.
But as I approached those shelves and began to be able to read some of the titles of the books resting on them, I felt my smile vanishing rapidly. I reached out with a hand gone suddenly clammy, plucked a worm-eaten volume from the shelf before me, and nervously turned several of its pages—which were not paper, but something disgustingly thick, almost flabby, which seemed to flop mockingly from my fingertips with a life quite their own—before total revulsion overcame me completely and I hurriedly stuffed it back into its place with a violent shudder. I turned to Lovecraft and saw that he was leaning forward on his cane with both hands and smiling at me with the air of one who has pulled off a marvelous jest.
“It can’t be,” I gasped, and then I swallowed and seemed to understand. “I see … you’re smiling because you’ve fooled me, because the thing’s a wonderful forgery and you’ve frightened me with it!”
“No, not at all,” he said, still grinning. “I smile because it’s real, because your fear is well founded, because you remind me so much of myself and my horror when I first came across that book.”
“But—De Vermis Mysteriis!” I cried. “There isn’t any such book! It was made up by Robert Bloch in the mid-thirties for a story in Weird Tales when you and he and all those other authors were playing that wonderful literary game of making up a world of monsters and their cults. The book was just a black-magical prop for his fictitious magicians. You even helped Bloch create it when you wrote him a letter and told him how to Latinize the title!”
Lovecraft nodded solemnly, but the grin never left his face.
“True, all true,” he said. “And in my letters I often addressed Robert as Ludvig, after Ludvig Prinn, the bizarre scholar who authored the grimoire, and Robert and I and all of us firmly believed he’d made the old boy up out of whole wool.”
Lovecraft leaned back and laughed, and the echoes of his laughter whispered back, bounced off the spines of all those books.
“Oh, we were all taken in, Edwardius, it’s really quite amusing. We all thought we knew so much, but we were only cocky, clever children toying with Yog-Sothothery—your old Grandpa included—and it turned out we didn’t know a thing.”
Then he paused and actually cackled.
“But we were right!” he said, looking up at me, twinkling. “Somehow, all along—we were right!”
Then he paused, took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and I saw him visibly gather himself before he continued.
“Edwardius, you are truly—as Klarkash-Ton observed—a formidable scholar of that small group of macabre writers with whom Smith and I are proud to be associated. You know much of all our histories, including my own particular, personal history, but I must tell you now that there are many turnings of considerable importance in that latter history which you do not know for the very good reason that I have gone to great lengths, and employed many ingenious stratagems, to keep them carefully hidden.”
He made his way out of the small library, and we sat on opposite sides of the nearest table in the larger room. Lovecraft shoved aside a jumble of stuff including a battered metal box, some yellowed newspaper clippings, and a dusty slab of dried clay to clear the space between us, and then he leaned forward on his elbows, settled himself, and began to talk.
“You know of my severe illness in 1937. I had been pursued by an increasingly distressing digestive trouble for years which I had stoically and foolishly ignored, but by degrees I apprehended the seriousness of my condition, and in February of that year I had very little doubt that I was dying. My diagnosis was confirmed by a specialist in March, and I soon found myself full of morphine in Jane Brown Memorial Hospital with nothing to do but write up my symptoms in the faint hope it might be of help to my physician.
“Sometime during the dark hours of the thirteenth the pain woke me in spite of my medication, and as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling and trying to isolate myself from the agony in my gut, a part of my mind, which had been almost entirely repressed for my life’s whole duration until that moment, suddenly loosened its bindings and began to speak to the rest of me with such eager intensity and desperate emphasis that it almost seemed I could actually hear it whispering in my ear, whispering so distinctly that I began to grow concerned that the nurses might hear it and somehow shush it, and I didn’t want that to happen, as it was telling me some remarkably interesting things.”
He paused and looked at me, and in the darkening shadows of the library he seemed to be positively glowing with an air of excitement which made him look even younger than he’d seemed before.
“What if those awesome entities I had spent my whole life conjuring up and writing about—all those terrifying ancient monsters who’d wandered in from other planets and dimensions and whose powers were so vast and overwhelming—what if they were real? Suppose my minutely detailed, precise visualizations of all their horrendous particulars down to their last tentacle and claw, had not been my creation at all, but a slow unveiling of actual, existing beings?
“It’s a matter of record that I had toyed with such notions before, but only as teasing, intellectual diversions. However, I think I must have known even then—though I surely would have denied it most righteously if pressed—that they spoke to something very deep within me, for they never failed to give me a profound and highly satisfactory ghoulish frisson. Could it be that I had been using talents and abilities which this sly whispering part of my mind had been aware of all along, but which my poor, straitlaced conscious mind, so pleased with limitations, had studiously—no doubt affrightedly—ignored? Had I all unknowing groped through the barriers which separated Them from us and made an opening in the time and space between our different worlds?”
He leaned forward, rattling the clay slab slightly on the table, and stared at me intently as if judging whether or not I was ready for what he was about to tell me next.
“I undertook a little experiment, Edwardius,” he said. “A rather gaudy one for a quiet, reclusive author fond of his aunts, I’ll admit, but, after all, I was dying. I wouldn’t have another chance.
“I located a thin, spidery crack running in the ceiling over my bed, and I stared and stared at that crack as hard as I could until I saw its central edges start to bulge. Then I found I was able to stare harder yet, and I saw those same central edges begin to separate, and then, incredibly, but with an odd feeling of relief which I cannot even possibly begin to describe, I observed two delicate black tentacles writhe out and pull the crack open just a little bit wider so that a small chunk of the ceiling dislodged and I felt it land with a soft little plunk on the coverlet over my chest.
“Now the whisperer within me employed my whole mind to speak to that Entity above, commanding it with the certain confidence of an experienced wizard, and I was aware of an enormous stirring behind the entire ceiling and extending down along the upper portions of the walls. Faint scratchings and brushings—something like the scurryings of a thousand furtive rats and something like the coilings of a vast multitude of swollen worms—seemed to sound from every point, and now the crack in the ceiling widened even farther, and oozing out from between those smaller tentacles emerged a long, serpentine appendage terminating in a complex swirl of undulating filaments. As I stared with bulging eyes, it swayed lower and I observed the filaments sink smoothly through my coverings and glide inside my flesh.
“I watched my cancer leave me, Edwardius, I saw it being taken away, sucked up through that living tube in a steady, bloody stream, and only when it was entirely gone, every last molecul
e of it—and I knew it was gone, Edwardius!—did that remarkable thing detach itself from my body and glide up again and vanish.
“As I stared up into the crack after it I saw, hovering in the darkness behind the ceiling, a glowing red eye with a slit pupil, and it winked at me, and I winked at it, and the small tentacles curled back in again, out of sight, exactly like inhaled smoke, and the crack closed almost as tight shut as it was before my little experiment, but not quite.”
He paused a long moment, and then he grinned and chuckled softly.
“It was all such an exactly perfect, hilarious travesty of a fresco by Giotto—the bony, dying author on his staid Memorial Hospital bed staring up with glistening eyes at a vision of a portion of Shub-Niggurath emerging from on high—that I began to laugh, Edwardius. Quietly at first, then louder and louder, and soon the ward seemed full of puzzled nurses brushing plaster off of Mr. Lovecraft and wishing he would shut up, and I wouldn’t or couldn’t because ever since I’d been a child I’d burned to play with jinns and dryads and now, only barely in the nick of time, the whisperer had shown me how to do it!”
He sighed happily, let himself sag back into his chair, and gave an expansive wave with both arms at the library about us.
“It’s helped me build and buy this house, too,” he said, “since I could have in no way afforded it—could have afforded none of this—save for the great, the astounding success my small literary efforts have had, in themselves and in the films and the extraordinary variety of other enterprises, worthwhile and puerile, which have spun off from them. I think it’s fair to say that that dreadful Saturday morning animated television program for children which the network has loathsomely entitled Cthulhu Kiddies alone covers our ordinary daily expenses. All of that success has occurred since my recovery on that most eventful night, and its origins trace back clearly to the contract I made on that occasion.”
I stared at him, my mind in a whirl, and stuttered out the burning question.
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