But help arrived too late. The station was an inferno of flame that fed on the underground gasoline reservoirs, and the men had only a glimpse of a great misshapen thing that bounded from the holocaust to escape apparently unscathed amid the hail of hasty bullets that greeted its appearance.
But the proprietor of the station had, at least, died a clean death; he had been cremated, for some of his bones, unmarked by gnawing fangs, were later found among the ruins.
And that night Hartley had found monstrous tracks beneath the window of his room in Liggett’s house. When he showed them to Liggett, the farmer had stared at him with a curious light in his eyes, but had said little.
* * *
The next attack came the following night. Hartley had fled from his bedroom and slammed the door just in time to escape the thing that clawed and slobbered and bellowed at the thin panel. But before Hartley and the aroused Liggett could return with their guns it had taken fright and escaped through the shattered window.
Its tracks led into a patch of thick underbrush nearby, but to enter that tangled wilderness of shadow at night would have been sheer suicide. Liggett had spent half an hour at the telephone, arranging for the villagers to meet at his house at dawn to begin the pursuit. Then, since they could not sleep, the two men returned to Hartley’s bedroom and talked until nearly dawn.
“It’s marked you down,” Liggett said. “It’s after you, like I thought. I figgered—.” He hesitated, scratching the stubble on his chin. “I figgered that maybe we could trap it—”
Hartley caught his meaning. “Using me for bait? No!”
“What else can we do? We’ve tried to track it, but it hides in the North Swamp by day. It’s the only way, unless you want it to kill more people. You can’t keep kids indoors all the time, Hartley.”
“The National Guard—,” Hartley began, but Liggett interrupted him.
“How can they git it there in the swamp? If the thing could be got by ord’nary means we’d have done it. We’ll track it, come dawn, but it won’t do any good. Don’t you see, man, every minute counts? Even while we’re talking here the thing may be butcherin’ somebody. Don’t forgit—.” He broke off, eyeing Hartley.
"I know. You think I started it. But—God! I’ve told myself over and over that the thing’s a freak, some hellish outcome of an unnatural mating. But—”
“But you know that’s not so,” Liggett said quietly. “You know what it is.”
“No.” Hartley shook his head dully. “It can’t—”
He stopped, staring at Liggett’s face. The farmer was glaring past Hartley’s shoulder, incredulous horror in his eyes. He cried out a startled warning, sent Hartley spinning with a sudden push. The artist had a glimpse of a shining hideous countenance protruding through the window; a dreadful mask that was neither batrachoid nor human, but partook monstrously of the attributes of both. A great slit-like mouth worked loosely, and yellow, glazed eyes glared into Hartley’s; there was a choking stench of foul corruption, and the thing was in the room. Liggett’s gun blasted.
The creature seemed to twist in midair, and the farmer went down beneath the onslaught. An agonized shriek welled out, broke off abruptly. The monster, crouching over Liggett’s body, lifted a muzzle wet with fresh blood and made a gobbling sound, dreadfully reminiscent of a chuckle, deep in its throat. Sick and shaking, Hartley felt the doorknob beneath his fingers, and he flung the door open as the creature leaped.
He slammed it just in time, but a panel splintered under a terrific impact. Hartley fled along the hall as the door crashed.
Outside the house he hesitated momentarily, glancing around in an agony of indecision. In the cold grayness that precedes the dawn he saw the nearest house perhaps two hundred feet away, but as he started to race toward it the thing came bounding into view, intercepting him. It had apparently crept out through the window by which it had entered.
Hartley suddenly remembered his automatic and clawed it out, fired point blank at the creature as it came at him. There was a croaking snarl of rage, and the loose slit-mouth worked hideously; a little stream of foul black ichor began to trickle slowly from a wound on the wattled, pouchy throat of the thing.
But it did not halt, and Hartley, realizing that a creature of such monstrous size must possess tremendous vitality, turned to flee. It was between him and the village, and as though realizing its advantage the thing kept at Hartley's heels, giving him no chance to double back. The thought flashed unbidden into Hartley’s mind: The monster was herding him!
He heard a window creak up, heard a shout. Then he was running for his life back along the road over which he had fled on the first night of the horror.
At the thought, and at sight of a small lane—a rutted cart path—joining the road at right angles, he twisted aside and raced along it. His only hope lay in somehow getting back to the village. Behind him came the gasping and slobbering, the rhythmic pounding that betokened the grim pursuit.
He chanced a snap shot over his shoulder, but the hazy light of the false dawn was deceptive, and he missed. He dared waste no more bullets.
The thing was herding him! Twice he saw paths that led back to the village, and each time the pursuing monster blocked his escape, circling with great leaps to his right until the paths had been passed. And presently the fields grew wilder, and the vegetation took on a lush, unhealthy greenness. He might have attempted to scale a tree, but there was none near enough to the road, and the pursuer was too close. With a dreadful shock of realization Hartley saw that the North Swamp lay before him—the ill-omened morass about which all the ghastly legends had centered.
The ridge to the east was silhouetted against pale grayness. From far away Hartley heard a sound that sent a thrill of hope through him. The sound of an automobile motor—no, two of them! He remembered his neighbor’s shout as he had fled from Liggett’s house. The man must have gone for help, roused the village. But the snarling breathing was dreadfully close.
Once the monster paused, and Hartley glanced over his shoulder to see it clawing in hideous rage at its wounded throat. The bullet must have handicapped it in the pursuit, else Hartley would long before have fallen beneath ripping talons. He brought up his gun, but the thing, as though realizing his purpose, sprang forward, and Hartley had to sprint in order to escape the great leaps. The sound of motors grew louder in the dawn stillness.
The path wound through the swamp. It was overgrown with weeds, rutted and pitted deeply, and at times the encroaching ooze had crept up until only a narrow ribbon of dry land was left. On all sides the lush greenness of the morass spread, with occasional open spaces of repellently black water. Over all lay a curious stillness, an utter lack of motion. No wind ruffled the tops of the grass fronds, no ripples spread over the waters. The sounds of the pursuit, the roaring of the motors, seemed an incongruous invasion of this land of deathly stillness.
The end came suddenly, without warning. Green slime covered the road for a distance of a dozen yards; Hartley, splashing through the icy, ankle-deep water, felt his foot go down into a hole, and fell heavily, wrenching his ankle. Even as he fell he rolled aside desperately, felt a wind brush him as the monster’s impetus carried it beyond him.
Hartley’s arms, outthrust, were abruptly embedded in something soft and clinging, something that sucked and pulled them down inexorably. With a rasping cry he wrenched them free from the quicksand, fell back to the firmer ground of the road. He heard the sound of a shot, and, flat on his back in the ooze, saw a monstrous mask of horror incarnate looming above him. The sound of motors had increased to a roar, and a shout of encouragement came to his ears.
The monster hesitated, drew back, and Hartley, remembering his gun, jerked it from his belt. He fired point blank at the creature, and coincidentally with the report of his own gun came a volley from the cars. Lead whined above him, and he felt a stinging pain in his shoulder.
* * *
Suddenly it seemed as though the monster were a huge b
ladder, punctured in a dozen places, pouring out black and nauseous ichor. With a hoarse gasping cry it flopped aside, made a crippled, one-sided leap, and came down in the bog beside the road. Then, swiftly, it began to sink.
The quicksand took it. Its huge hindquarters, black and glistening, corded with muscle, disappeared almost immediately, and then the distended, leprously white belly. Hartley, sick and fainting, felt hands lifting him to his feet, heard questioning voices that seemed to come from a great distance.
But he had eyes only for the abysmal horror that was being engulfed a dozen yards from him, the webbed and spurred flail-like talons that were desperately beating the slime, the misshapen, hideous head that rolled from side to side in agony. From the gaping mouth of the thing came a ghastly outpouring of croaking shrieks, a monstrous bellowing that suddenly grew horribly familiar, articulate, thick and guttural: a frenzied outcry of blasphemy such as might come from the rotting tongue of a long-dead corpse.
All the men fell back, white with loathing, and Hartley dropped to his knees, retching and moaning in an agony of horror, as the thing, its mouth half choked with the hungry quicksand, bellowed:
“Awrrgh—ugh—ye—blast ye! Blast ye all! May the curse o’ Persis Winthorp rot yer flesh an’ send ye down to—”
The frightful outburst of sound gave place to a terrible gargling shriek that was abruptly choked off. There was a brief commotion in the ooze; a great bubble formed and burst—and age-old stillness brooded once more over the North Swamp.
Hydra
by Henry Kuttner
You will already be well aware of the in-joke origin of Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and its sequel, Lovecraft's “The Haunter of the Dark", and its sequel, Bloch’s “The Shadow from the Steeple. ” In the first HPL comes on stage as an erudite occultist who gets messily devoured by the avatar of Tsathoggua. In the second Bloch becomes Robert Blake and meets pretty much the same fate at the lobes of an avatar of Nyarlathotep. In the third, as Bloch himself revealed years later, Edmund Fiske is a mask for Bloch's friend and colleague Fritz Leiber. (Some have imagined Bloch himself in the role, misled by the red herring that Bloch sometimes used the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske). In “Hydra” we see the young Henry Kuttner joining the game. The character Robert Ludwig is surely Robert Bloch, the alter ego of Ludvig Prinn, while Paul Edmond must stand for Edmond Hamilton. Even though the character’s last name probably does derive from that source, a letter from Lovecraft to Bloch (December 3, 1936) reveals that the Paul Edmond character is supposed to be Kuttner himself, while Kenneth Scott is Lovecraft. All this leads us to speculate as to the origin of Kuttner’s own pseudonym: Is not Keith Hammond gematria for his early favorite and later friend Edmond Hamilton? I think so.
Note the reference to an occult volume called The Sixtystone. This is a tip of the hat to Arthur Machen and his great tale “The Novel of the Black Seal", where the eponymous “seal” is a peculiarly engraved polyhedron called Ixixar, or the Sixtystone. Kuttner had of course referred to Machen already in “The Salem Horror” and, implicitly, in "The Invaders", where the terminal devolution of Bill Mason recalls that of the expiring Helen Vaughan in Machen's “The Great God Pan. ”
Kuttner lifts the invocation “Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon” from Lovecraft, making it a summons to the goddess Cybele (whom HPL mentioned in “The Rats in the Walls”), though he had used the chant itself in “The Horror at Red Hook” and there made it the liturgy to Lilith. Originally it was neither, the words forming part of the ancient rites of Hecate instead.
Finally, the Mythos encyclopedist may pause and puzzle over the dropped name “Pharol.” Which ancient deity was this? You will find him featured prominently in some of the space adventures of Northwest Smith by Kuttner’s wife C. L. Moore, especially “Dust of the Gods” (see the collection Northwest Smith, Ace Books, 1981. Four additional Northwest Smith tales not included in that volume occur in Karl Wagner (ed.), Echoes of Valor II, TOR Books, 1989).
First publication: Weird Tales, April 1939.
* * *
Two men died; possibly three. So much is known. The tabloids ran flaming headlines telling of the mysterious mutilation and death of Kenneth Scott, noted Baltimore author and occultists, and later, they capitalized similarly on the disappearance of Robert Ludwig, whose correspondence with Scott was well known in literary circles. The equally strange and even more ghastly death of Paul Edmond, while separated from the scene of the Scott horror by the width of a continent, was clearly connected with it. This was shown by the presence of a certain much-discussed object which was found clutched in Edmond’s rigid hands — and which the credulous claim caused his death. While this solution is improbable, it is nevertheless true that Paul Edmond bled to death because his carotid artery was severed, and it is also true that thre are features about the case difficult to explain in the light of present-day science.
The tabloids made a great deal of Edmond’s diary, and even conventional papers find it difficult to handle that unusual document in a fashion that would not lay them open to the charge of yellow journalism. The Hollywood Citizen-News solved the problem for its contemporaries by quoting the least fantastic portions of the diary, and hinting plainly that Edmond had been a fiction writer, and that the man’s notes had never been intended as a truthful summary of events. The privately printed pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul, which played so important a part in the diary, seems to be of purely fictional origin. None of the local booksellers has heard of it, and Mr. Russell Hodgkins, Calofornia’s most noted bibliophile, declares that the title and the volume must have originated in the mind of the ill-fated Paul Edmond.
Yet, according to Edmond’s diary and certain other papers and letters discovered in his desk, it was this pamphlet which caused Ludwig and Edmond to undertake the disastrous experiment. Ludwig had decided to visit his California correspondent, making a leisurely voyage from New York by way of the Panama Canal. The Carnatic docked on August 15th, and Ludwig spent several hours wandering through San Pedro. It was there, in a musty “swap shop,” that he bought the pamphlet, On the Sending Out of the Soul. When the young man arrived at Edmond’s Hollywood apartment he had the booklet with him.
Both Ludwig and Edmond were deeply interested in the occult. They had dabbled in witchcraft and demonology, as a result of their acquaintance with Scott, who possessed one of the best occult libraries in America.
Scott was a strange man. Slender, sharp-eyed, and taciturn, he spent most of his time in an old brownstone house in Baltimore. His knowledge of esoteric matters was little short of phenomenal; he had read the Chhaya Ritual, and in his letters to Ludwig and Edmond had hinted at the real meanings behind the veiled hints and warnings in that half-legendary manuscript. In his great library were such names as Sinistrari, Zancherius, and the ill-famed Gougenot des Mousseau; and in his library safe he had, it was rumored, an immense scrapbook filled with excerpts copied from such fantastic sources as the Book of Karnak, the monstrous Sixtystone, and the blasphemous Elder Key, of which only two copies are reputed to exist on earth.
It was little wonder, therefore, that the two students were anxious to tear aside the veil and view the astounding mysteries of which Scott hinted so cautiously. In his diary Edmond confessed that his own curiosity was the direct cause of the tragedy.
Yet it was Ludwig who bought the booklet and pored over it with Edmond in the latter’s apartment. Certainly Edmond described the pamphlet plainly enough, and it is strange, therefore, that no bibliophile could identify it. According to the diary, it was quite small, about four by five inches, bound in coarse brown paper, and yellowed and crumbling with age. The printing — in Eighteenth Century type with the long s — was crudely done, and there was neither a date-line nor a publisher’s imprint. There were eight pages; seven of them filled with what Edmond called the usual banal sophisms of mysticism, and on the last page were the specific directions for what would nowadays be known as “projecting one’s astral.”
The general process was familiar to both students. Their researches had informed them that the soul — or in modern occult language, “astral body” — is supposed to be an ethereal double or ghost, capable of projection to a distance. But the specific directions — finding these was unusual. Nor did they seem difficult to follow. Edmond has purposely been vague about these preparations, but one gathers that the two students visited several chemists before obtaining the ingredients needed. Where they secured the cannabis indica later discovered on the scene of the tragedy is a mystery, but not, of course, one impossible of solution.
On August 15th, Ludwig, apparently without Edmond’s knowledge, wrote to Scott by air-mail, describing the pamphlet and its contents, and asking for advice.
On the night of August 18th, approximately half an hour after Kenneth Scott received Ludwig’s letter, the two young occultists undertook their disastrous experiment.
* * *
Later, Edmond blamed himself. In the diary he mentions Ludwig’s uneasiness, as though the latter sensed some hidden danger. Ludwig suggested postponing the trial for a few days, but Edmond laughed at his fears. It ended with the two placing the required ingredients in a brazier and kindling the mixture.
There were other preparations, too, but Edmond is quite vague. He makes one or two furtive references to “the seven lamps” and “the infra color,” but nothing can be made of these terms. The two had decided to attempt projection of their astral bodies across the continent; they would attempt communication with Kenneth Scott. One can detect a tinge of youthful vanity in this.
Cannabis indica formed one of the ingredients of the mixture in the brazier; that has been ascertained by analysis. It was the presence of this Indian drug which led so many to believe that the later entries in Edmond’s diary were evolved from nothing more tangible than the fantasies of an opium or hashish dream, directed along the curious channels they took merely because of the students’ preoccupation with thos things at the time. Edmond dreamed he saw Scott’s house in Baltimore. But it must be remembered that he had been staring at a photograph of that house which he had placed on the table before him; and he was consciously willing to go there. Nothing is more logical therefore, than that Edmond simply dreamed what he wanted to dream.
The Book of Iod Page 14