The Book of Iod

by Henry Kuttner

  “Morelia Godolfo was one of these creatures! The Godolfos knew much of the dark lore but used it for evil purposes—the so-called black magic. And it was, I think, through this that a sea-dweller gained power to usurp the brain and body of the woman. A transference took place. The mind of the sea-dweller took possession of Morelia Godolfo’s body and the intelligence of the original Morelia was forced into the terrible form of that creature of the abyss. In time the human body of the woman died and the usurping mind returned to its original shell. The intelligence of Morelia Godolfo was then ejected from its temporary prison and left homeless. That is true death.”

  Dean shook his head slowly as though in denial but did not speak. And inexorably Yamada kept on.

  “For years, generations, since then she has dwelt in the sea, waiting. Her power is strongest here, where she once lived. But, as I told you, only under unusual circumstances can this—transference take place. The tenants of this house might be troubled with dreams, but that would be all. The evil being had no power to steal their bodies. Your uncle knew that, or he would have insisted that the place be immediately destroyed. He did not foresee that you would ever live here.”

  The little Japanese bent forward, and his eyes were twin points of black light.

  “You do not need to tell me what you have undergone in the past month. I know. The sea-dweller has power over you. For one thing, there are bonds of blood, even though you are not directly descended from her. And your love for the ocean—your uncle spoke of that. You live here alone with your paintings and your imaginative fancies; you see no one else. You are an ideal victim, and it was easy for that sea horror to become en rapport with you. Even now you show the stigmata.”

  * * *

  Dean was silent, his face a pale shadow amidst the darker ones in the corners of the room. What was the man trying to tell him? What were these hints leading up to?

  “Remember what I have said.” Doctor Yamada’s voice was fanatically earnest. “That creature wants you for your youth—your soul. She has lured you in sleep, with visions of Poseidonis, the twilight grottoes in the deep. She has sent you beguiling visions at first, to hide what she was doing. She has drained your life forces, weakened your resistance, waiting until she is strong enough to take possession of your brain.

  “I have told you what she wants—what all these hybrid horrors raven for. She will reveal herself to you in time, and when her will is strong upon you in slumber, you will do her bidding. She will take you down into the deep, and show you the kraken- fouled gulfs where these things bide. You will go willingly, and that will be your doom. She may lure you to their feasts there— the feasts they hold upon the drowned things they find floating from wrecked ships. And you will live such madness in your sleep because she rules you. And then—then, when you have become weak enough, she will have her desire. The sea-thing will usurp your body and walk once more on earth. And you will go down into the darkness where once you dwelt in dreams, forever. Unless I am mistaken, you have already seen enough to know that I speak truth. I think that this terrible moment is not so far off, and I warn you that alone you cannot hope to resist the evil. Only with the aid of your uncle and me—”

  Doctor Yamada stood up. He moved forward and confronted the dazed youth face to face. In a low voice he asked, “In your dreams— has the thing kissed you?"

  For a heartbeat there was utter silence. Dean opened his mouth to speak, and then a curious little warning note seemed to sound in his brain. It rose, like the quiet roaring of a conch shell, and a vague nausea assailed him.

  Almost without volition, he heard himself saying, “No.”

  Dimly, as though from an incredibly far distance, he heard Yamada suck in his breath, as if surprised. Then the Japanese said, “That is good. Very good. Now listen: Your uncle will be here soon. He has chartered a special plane. Will you be my guest until he arrives?”

  The room seemed to darken before Dean’s eyes. The form of the Japanese was receding, dwindling. Through the window the surf sound came crashing, and it rolled on in waves through Dean’s brain. In its thunder a thin, insistent whispering penetrated.

  “Accept,” it murmured. “Accept!” And Dean heard his own voice accept Yamada’s invitation.

  He seemed incapable of coherent thought. This last dream haunted him—and now Doctor Yamada’s disturbing story—he was ill—that was it!—very ill. He wanted very much to sleep, now. A flood of darkness seemed to wash up and engulf him. Gratefully he allowed it to sweep through his tired head. Nothing existed but the dark, and a restless lapping of unquiet waters.

  Yet he seemed to know, in an odd way, that he was still—some outer part of him—conscious. He strangely realized that he and Doctor Yamada had left the house, were entering a car, and driving a long way. He was—with that strange, external other self—talking casually to the doctor; entering his house in San Pedro; drinking; eating. And all the while his soul, his real being, was buried in waves of blackness.

  Finally a bed. From below, the surf seemed to blend into the blackness that engulfed his brain. It spoke to him now, as he rose stealthily and clambered out of the window. The fall jarred his outer self considerably, but he was on the ground outside without injury. He kept in the shadows as he crept away down to the beach—the black, hungry shadows that were like the darkness surging through his soul.

  3. Three Dreadful Hours

  With a shock, he was himself once more—completely. The cold water had done it; the water in which he found himself swimming. He was in the ocean, borne on waves as silver as the lightning that occasionally flashed overhead. He heard thunder, felt the sting of rain. Without wondering about the sudden transition, he swam on, as though fully aware of some unplanned destination. For the first time in over a month he felt fully alive, actually himself. There was a surge of wild elation in him that defied the facts; he no longer seemed to care about his recent illness, the weird warnings of his uncle and Doctor Yamada, and the unnatural darkness that had previously shadowed his mind. In fact, he no longer had to think—it was as though he were being directed in all his movements.

  He was swimming parallel with the beach now, and with curious detachment he observed that the storm had subsided. A pale, fog-like glow hovered over the lashing waters, and it seemed to beckon.

  The air was chill, as was the water, and the waves high, yet Dean experienced neither cold nor fatigue. And when he saw the things that waited for him on the rocky beach just ahead, he lost all perception of himself in a crescendo of mounting joy.

  This was inexplicable, for they were the creatures of his last and wildest nightmares. Even now he did not see them plainly as they sported in the surf, but there were dim suggestions of past horror in their tenebrous outlines. The things were like seals: great, fish-like, bloated monsters with pulpy, shapeless heads. These heads rested on columnar necks that undulated with serpentine ease, and he observed, without any sensation other than curious familiarity, that the heads and bodies of the creatures were a sea-bleached white.

  Soon he was swimming in among them—swimming with peculiar and disturbing ease. Inwardly he marveled, with a touch of his former feeling, that he was not now horrified by the sea-beasts in the least. Instead, it was almost with a feeling of kinship that he listened to their strange low gruntings and cackles—listened and understood.

  He knew what they were saying, and he was not amazed. He was not frightened by what he heard, though the words would have sent abysmal horror through his soul in the previous dreams.

  He knew where they were going and what they meant to do when the entire group swam out into the water once more, yet he did not fear. Instead, he felt a strange hunger at the thought of what was to come, a hunger that impelled him to take the lead as the things, with undulant swiftness, glided through the inky waters to the north. They swam with incredible speed, yet it was hours before a sea coast loomed up through the murk, lit by a blinding flare of light from offshore.

  Twiligh
t deepened to true darkness over the water, but the offshore light burned brightly. It seemed to come from a huge wreck in the waves just off the coast, a great hulk floating on the waters like a crumpled beast. There were boats gathered around it, and floating flares of light that revealed the shore.

  As though by instinct, Dean, with the pack behind him, headed for the spot. Swiftly and silently they sped, their slimy heads blurred in the shadows to which they clung as they circled the boats and swam in towards the great crumpled shape. Now it was looming above him, and he could see arms flailing desperately as man after man sank below the surface. The colossal bulk from which they leaped was a wreck of twisted girders in which he could trace the warped outline of a vaguely familiar shape.

  And now, with curious disinterest, he swam lazily about, avoiding the lights bobbing over the water as he watched the actions of his companions. They were hunting their prey. Leering muzzles gaped for the drowning men, and lean talons raked bodies from the darkness. Whenever a man was glimpsed in the shadows not yet invaded by rescue boats, one of the sea-things craftily snared his victim.

  In a little while they turned and slowly swam away. But now many of the creatures clutched a grisly trophy at their squamous breasts. The pale white limbs of drowning men trailed in the water as they were dragged off into the darkness by their captors. To the accompaniment of low, carrion laughter the beasts swam away, back down the coast.

  Dean swam with the rest. His mind was again a blur of confusion. He knew what the thing in the water was, and yet he could not name it. He had watched those hateful horrors snare doomed men and drag them off to the deep, yet he had not intervened. What was wrong? Even now, as he swam with frightening agility, he felt a call he could not fully understand—a call that his body was answering.

  The hybrid things were gradually dispersing. With eerie splashings they disappeared below the surface of the gelid black waters, pulling with them the dreadfully limp bodies of the men, pulling them down to the blackness biding beneath.

  They were hungry. Dean knew it without thinking. He swam on, along the coast, impelled by his curious urge. That was it—he was hungry.

  And now he was going for food.

  * * *

  Hours of steady swimming southward. Then the familiar beach, and above it a lighted house which Dean recognized—his own house on the cliff. There were figures descending the slope now; two men with torches were coming down to the beach. He must not let them see him—why, he did not know, but they must not. He crawled along the beach, keeping close to the water’s edge. Even so, he seemed to move very swiftly.

  The men with the torches were some distance behind him now. Ahead loomed another familiar outline—a cave. He had clambered over these rocks before, it seemed. He knew the pits of shadow that speckled the cliff rock, and knew the narrow passage of stone through which he now squeezed his prostrate body.

  Was that someone shouting, far away?

  Darkness, and a lapping pool. He crawled forward, felt chill waters creep over his body. Muffled by distance came an insistent shouting from outside the cave.

  “Graham! Graham Dean!”

  Then the smell of dank sea-foulness was in his nostrils—a familiar, pleasant smell. He knew where he was, now. It was the cave where in his dream he had kissed the sea-thing. It was the cave in which—

  He remembered now. The black blur lifted from his brain, and he remembered all. His mind bridged the gap, and he once again recalled coming here earlier this very evening, before he had found himself in the water.

  Morelia Godolfo had called him here; here her dark whispers had guided him at twilight, when he had come from the bed at Doctor Yamada’s house. It was the siren song of the sea-creature that had lured him in dreams.

  He remembered how she had coiled about his feet when he entered, flung her sea-bleached body up until its inhuman head had loomed close to his own. And then the hot pulpy lips had pressed against his—the loathsome, slimy lips had kissed him again. Wet, dank, horribly avid kiss! His senses had drowned in its evil, for he knew that this second kiss meant doom.

  “The sea-dweller will take your body,” Doctor Yamada had said —and the second kiss meant doom.

  All this had happened hours ago!

  Dean shifted around in the rocky chamber to avoid wetting himself in the pool. As he did so, he glanced down at his body for the first time that night—glanced down with an undulating neck at the shape he had worn for three hours in the sea. He saw the fish-like scales, the scabrous whiteness of the slimy skin; saw the veined gills. He stared into the waters of the pool then, so that the reflection of his face was visible in the dim moonlight that filtered through fissures in the rocks.

  He saw all—

  His head rested on the long, reptilian neck. It was an anthropoid head with flat contours that were monstrously inhuman. The eyes were white and protuberant; they bulged with the glassy stare of a drowning thing. There was no nose, and the center of the face was covered with a tangle of wormy blue feelers. The mouth was the worst of all. Dean saw pale white lips in a dead face—human lips. Lips that had kissed his own. And now—they were his own!

  He was in the body of the evil sea-thing—the evil sea-thing that had once harbored the soul of Morelia Godolfo!

  At that moment Dean would gladly have welcomed death, for the stark, blasphemous horror of his discovery was too much to bear. He knew about his dreams now, and the legends; he had learned the truth, and paid a hideous price. He recalled, vividly, how he had recovered consciousness in the water and swum out to meet those—others. He recalled the great black hulk from which drowning men had been taken in boats—the shattered wreck on the water. What was it Yamada had told him? “When there is a wreck they go there, like vultures to a feast.” And now, at last, he remembered what had eluded him that night—what that familiar shape on the waters had been. It was a crashed zeppelin. He had gone swimming into the wreckage with those things, and they had taken men—. Three hours—God! Dean wanted very much to die. He was in the sea body of Morelia Godolfo, and it was too evil for further life.

  Morelia Godolfo! Where was she? And his own body, the shape of Graham Dean?

  * * *

  A rustling in the shadowy cavern behind him proclaimed the answer. Graham Dean saw himself in the moonlight—saw his body, line for line, hunching furtively past the pool in an attempt to creep away unobserved.

  Dean’s flippered fins moved swiftly. His own body turned.

  It was ghastly for Dean to see himself reflected where no mirror existed; ghastlier still to see that in his face there no longer were his eyes. The sly, mocking stare of the sea-creature peered out at him from behind their fleshy mask, and they were ancient, evil. The pseudo-human snarled at him and tried to dodge off into the darkness. Dean followed, on all fours.

  He knew what he must do. That sea-thing—Morelia—she had taken his body during that last black kiss, just as he had been forced into hers, but she had not yet recovered enough to go out into the world. That was why he had found her still in the cave. Now, however, she would leave, and his uncle Michael would never know. The world would never know, either, what horror stalked its surface—until it was too late. Dean, his own tragic form hateful to him now, knew what he must do.

  Purposefully he maneuvered the mocking body of himself into a rocky corner. There was a look of fright in those gelid eyes—

  A sound caused Dean to turn, pivoting his reptilian neck. Through glazed fish-eyes he saw the faces of Michael Leigh and Doctor Yamada. Torches in hand, they were entering the cave.

  Dean knew what they would do, and he no longer cared. He closed in on the human body that housed the soul of the sea-beast; closed in with the beast’s own flailing flippers; seized it in its own arms and menaced it with its own teeth near the creature’s white, human neck.

  From behind him he heard shouts and cries at his very back, but Dean did not care. He had a duty to perform, an atonement. Through the corner of his eye, he
saw the barrel of a revolver as it glinted in Yamada's hand.

  Then came two bursts of stabbing flame and the oblivion Dean craved. But he died happy, for he had atoned for the black kiss.

  Even as he sank into death, Graham Dean had bitten with animal fangs into his own throat, and his heart was filled with peace as, dying, he saw himself die—

  His soul mingled in the third black kiss of Death.

  The Jest of Droom-avista by Henry Kuttner

  This story is finally little more than a conventional “you can’t win in a deal with the devil” story, but it has a few points of interest vis-a-vis the Kuttner Mythos and its development. For one, Droom-avista would seem to be the prototype of Zuchequon in the later “Bells of Honor.” The first is called the Dark Shining One, the second the Dark Silent One. The advent of each is signaled by a veil of eldritch shadow. I have already suggested that “Bells of Horror” owes a debt to Lovecrafis “The Haunter of the Dark.” Another clue to this conclusion is this epithet, “the Dark Shining One”, which combines both the notions of the Shining Trapezohedron and the Haunter of the Dark.

  As for the name Droom-avista, here we see a bit of Zoroastrian influence. “Avista” is plainly derived from the title of the Zoroastrian scripture, the Avesta. In older works on Zoroastrianism this scripture was often called the Zend Avesta, because of the unique Zend language in which it is written. Kuttner has appropriated this term, too: it appears as the name of the sorcerer Zend in “Spawn of Dagon.”

  First publication: Weird Tales, August 1937.

  * * *

  There is a tale they tell of voices that called eerily by night in the marble streets of long-fallen Bel Yarnak, saying: “Evil is come to the land; doom falls on the fair city where our children’s children walk. Woe, woe unto Bel Yarnak.” Then did the dwellers in the city gather affrightedly in huddled groups, casting furtive glances at the Black Minaret that spears up gigantically from the temple gardens; for, as all men know, when doom comes to Bel Yarnak, the Black Minaret will play its part in that dreadful Ragnarok.