by John Shirley
Those in the East Bay who remembered Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith were like to smirk at the supposed “campiness” of the old Weird Tales writers; the bookstores specializing in fantasy were prone to selling stuffed Cthulhu dolls, and the fake, mass-produced Necronomicon some enterprising oaf had concocted. To them it was all a joke.
The fatal day of transfiguration would come. The mockers would have their comeuppance. Uncle Jonathan had told Rodney so. As unwholesome and half mad as the old man had been, Rodney had never known him to be wrong. Uncle Jonathan had reverently showed him the yellowed “Clue Books,” as he called them: decaying, pulp-fragrant magazines in which the Hidden Magicians had carefully inserted trace clues, had tucked away their prolix encryptions: the keys to the hidden realms; to Uzuldaroum and Commorium and other morbidly magical abodes in long-frozen Hyperborea.
Uncle Jonathan, on his death bed, had given Rodney a sickly yellow-toothed grin and said, “Employment, Rodney! Yes, a job awaits you in Commoriom! You shall count the treasure, the riches of Eriphodes of Commoriom will glitter under your hands, if you come to this house, this very house, on the appointed day and at the appointed hour! Riches await, and destiny!”
This...this was the appointed day. And very nearly the appointed hour. It didn’t matter that The Dolts were trailing along behind him. Let them come and have their share of the golden destiny.
No one had ever mattered to Rodney—not since his father had stormed across the living room, kicking toys aside; had shaken the floor with his footsteps as he stalked to the door that day, years ago, when Rodney was but eight years old. Rodney had tried to block his drunken, brawny father from the door, for he’d heard him vow to walk out and never return. For all his father’s faults, Rodney loved him. The boy stepped into his father’s path and cried out, “No, Daddy! No!”
In an icy fury, then, his father picked him up and hurled him across the room. Rodney had struck the hearth in just the wrong way—as if the Fates, with cruel glee, had arranged for his left leg to shatter in three critical places; had seen to it that he splintered his left knee. Bone had to be removed; cartilage was liberally excised. There was no money for special surgical reconstruction. Rodney was lucky the county had given him the steel leg brace.
Soon after that day, Rodney’s Great-Uncle Jonathan had asked his weary, despair-ridden mother if he could watch the boy while she was at work. “Uncle Creepy,” his sister called Jonathan. But after all, he was an older relative who wanted to give Rodney some care, so Mom was for it.
Soon after Rodney arrived at the old man’s creaking Victorian house—where not even his father had been admitted—Great-Uncle Jonathan took him by the wrist and led him through mold-reeking hallways into a dusty, untidy library.
Now, boy, your education begins, Uncle Jonathan had said. First, the Clue Books. Then...the decryptions! And the fragments of the true Book of Summoning...
Rodney had at first thought the scrawny, white-haired man raving. Clue Books? Summonings? Jonathan was the elderly father of Dad’s uncle; his hands were gnarled with arthritis; his eyes as yellow as his teeth; as yellow as his wrinkled suit, with its padded shoulders. “I am king here, in this house!” Jonathan cackled. Then he’d chortle to himself, almost inaudibly: “The King in Yellow! The King! In yellow!” And indeed, most of his clothing was yellow.
Rodney had learned to read at two years old; at nine he was already bookish, and more drawn to the company of a decaying volume of The Red Fairy Book, or The Arabian Nights, than the companionship of other children. So he had turned eagerly to Jonathan’s strange old volumes, some of them gawdy pulps, some hoarily ancient tomes bound in a peculiar pinkish-brown leather.
The old man’s ravings had turned out to be founded on reality—or perhaps, on realities. Jonathan had been right: the dead four-coned volcano Mount Voormithadreth indeed still looms over the obsidian peaks of the Eiglophian; and somewhere in mountain range’s labyrinth of lava tunnels the Spider God Atlach-Nacha, wrapt in its own white silken bedding, lies dozing yet—waiting for the return of worshippers long since perished. Even now,in Commoriom, one of the last surviving sorcerers brooded, kept alive these long ages by his arcane arts and the devotion of his servant. A servant, however, who had been lost to him...
And so it was, that when Rodney discussed the Hyperborean cycle of Clark Ashton Smith with his English teacher, Mrs. Gamble, in his second year of community college, he told the bemused woman, “Clark’s Hyperborea was real! Commoriom itself is real! Oh, to be sure not every tale he imagined taking place there was true. But much of it was true: it was transmitted to his imagination by a sorcerer whose name I cannot speak aloud. I tell you, Mrs. Gamble, riches and freedom await me there, in ancient, brooding Commoriom...”
Mrs. Gamble had smiled condescendingly and looked at the costume-shop cape Rodney wore to school. “Is this a rehearsal for some of that cosplay stuff I heard about, Rodney, where fantasy fans get costumed up and play roles?”
“Just as you like,” Rodney told her coldly, his voice ringing with unspoken portent. “Just as you like, madame.”
“Madame?” that blonde in the class laughed, hearing that. Melissa, that was the blonde’s name--she sat beside the staring dolt Hezza. She slapped her forehead like someone from a sitcom and said, “You don’t have to always come off so nerdy scrub, Rodney, I mean, God, take a chill pill.”
Rodney turned to the eye-rolling blonde and calmly informed her. “The Judgment of Yhoundeh will be upon this world, and upon the like of you, girl,” he said. “The Elk Goddess is displeased with the poisoning of the natural realm. The time of punishment will come soon enough, and consume you all in choking heat...”
Mrs. Gamble sighed. “That kind of rant kept you out of the universities, Rodney. It sounds threatening! Ease up, please, if you don’t want to be excluded from here too.”
“Threatening”? They had threatened him! And now The Dolts supposed themselves a threat too. But, according to the old pewter pocket watch Great Uncle Jonathan had given him, the time was almost upon him. Any moment now...
Then--the first wave of transfiguration struck. So far, it affected only Rodney’s perceptions. He walked painfully along past the tenements, trudging with his usual difficulty—and yet he began to feel noticeably lighter. And now there was a glow, an unnatural gleam to things. The telephone poles, that rusty old mail box, the stoops, the parked cars—they seemed to shimmer. Then, up ahead, they became ghostly—and were replaced by another vantage, another scene entirely.
Commoriom!
Up before him rose the crumbling terraces, the soaring cracked spires of ancient Commoriom, bathed in a strange light—a diffuse blue light that came through a distant ceiling of ice. For this was Commoriom today, in the twenty-first century—almost deserted, hidden beneath a camouflaging sheath of ice in the far North. The ice was gradually melting, as the planet warmed—-Greenland’s hidden landscape, and unknown cityscapes, would eventually be revealed. The long lost capitol city of Hyperborea would be invaded by outsiders, modern archeologists and tourists—unless the sorcerer Eriphodes could prevent it. Though steeped in the lore of countless centuries of study, Eriphodes would need help to keep Commoriom’s secrets.
What was that ahead? Cast in some unknown metal stood a titanic statue of a warrior, sword in hand, slashing down at a cringing beast-man. The massive statue of the warrior and his cowering enemy towered over an ice-puddled square. Judging by illustrations Rodney had glimpsed in his grand-uncle’s books, the statue showed some forgotten warrior king of Commoriom slaying the chieftain of the Voormi—a king who led an army that drove the Yeti-like creatures to their hiding places in the most remote fastnesses of Hyperborea.
It has begun. Rodney was being given a vision of Hyperborea.
Rodney knew that, however, that physically he was still hunching along in Oakland, California, on a misty autumn night; past liquor stores and a shuffling wino. He could discern the ghostly outlines of the
city block beyond the luminous loom of Commoriom—so far, he was only being granted sight of his goal. But he knew that soon enough, when he reached his great uncle’s house, the final transfiguration would happen, and he would be given all that he hoped for.
~*~
“What the fuck is he staring at?” Skroggy wondered aloud. “Scoping around all over like he’s on acid and never saw a liquor store before, bluh.”
“Man’s crazy,” Hezza said. “We knew that. His uncle was crazy too. But story is, the old man squirreled away a big stash o’ cash in that old house of his. So Crazy Like a Fox Oddney, here, is gonna sniff it out for us.”
It seemed to Hezza, then, that Oddney Rodney looked back at him and Skroggy, for just a moment, with a knowing sneer on his face.
“You think he’s wise to us?” Skroggy asked.
“Hell, Skrog, he don’t know if we’re just walking the same direction as him. Anyway another three blocks and we get into that old part of town with all the Victorian houses and shit. And that’s where his uncle’s place is. We could follow him and walk past like we were going somewhere else, just let him go in, then go back and follow his crazy ass inside...And take whatever he’s dug up in there.”
“If there is anything much. Maybe it’s just full of old junk.”
“No fucking way, dude. Remember what he said-—riches. Treasure! It’s gotta be there.”
~*~
The gray lineaments of Oakland seemed more and more ethereal as Rodney made his aching way to the old house, whereas the soaring towers, the crusted battlements, the shadow-haunted doorways of old Commoriom seemed increasingly solid, quickly becoming far more corporeal than the city in which Rodney had grown up.
But had he indeed grown up here? Oh in this body, yes; but in fact his true genesis, his true arising, had been in another body, and in another place long ago. Centuries ago. He only remembered it in a scrappy way, now, but he knew he had been Pnom, loyal scribe and factotum to Eriphodes the Arch Sorcerer of Commoriom. He and Eriphodes, and the wizard’s bestial retinue, were amongst the few who stayed while all others fled the capitol city for decadent Uzuldaroum; they had fled for fear of the vicious thugs commanded by the brutal Knygathin Zhaum, and as a result of dreadful auguries, the bleak portents suggesting that Tsathoggua would arise once more; would arise to demand sacrifices in the thousands. Your newborns will the Toad God feed upon...
But Eriphodes had sent Pnom to the city’s enemies, with a mere rat in a bag; the rat’s fleas carried a sickness, a plague that struck down Knygathin Zhaum and his men; while the supposed portents of the return of Tsathoggua were the cunning sorcerer’s own invention. He was glad to have Commoriom to himself. Its gold, its silver and gems, rising in dusty but precious piles like a dragon’s hoard, were his to savor—long had the love of treasure been his weakness.
And so centuries passed as the ice advanced over Commoriom, and as Eriphodes enslaved ever more shades, more of the elementals and demons who thronged the outer darkness, making them his servants too. But the time came, long after most residents of Hyperborea were dead, when the restless shades of the outer darkness demanded payment.
Rodney remembered it all, now. As the transfiguration proceeded, the memories came flooding back: Pnom had been sent by the sorcerer Eriphodes on a mission, about a century earlier, to misdirect a certain great ship into an iceberg. The Titanic struck the iceberg just as the sorcerer intended—as his dark servants had arranged—and hundreds of passengers took to lifeboats. Some passengers were rescued but, as Eriphodes had planned, two lifeboats were drawn by the minions of Dagon farther north and west. Those who survived the journey were summoned to the icy shore by Pnom—who now knew himself as Rodney. The castaways followed the light of a swinging lantern, made it ashore, and willingly accompanied Pnom to what they hoped would be warmth and succor. Instead, they were taken through a tunnel of ice that curved and twisted down into the bone-strewn galleries under Commoriom.
Here they were seized by the half-men whom Eriphodes had bred from Voormi and human women. Some of the lost survivors of the Titanic were dragged by the half-men to the Chamber of Sating, so that certain demons might be fed in return for their allegiance to the ancient sorcerer. Other survivors, a few handy maintenance men and several women, were kept for Eriphodes’ special purposes. The men would be set to work; the women...
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Pnom had done well in procuring this fresh flesh, and expected to be rewarded with another thousand years of life as the sorcerer had promised.
Then––Pnom made a mistake. He failed to watch the prisoners closely enough. One of the men, doughtier than the rest, had caught up a flame-sword, and used it to fight his way out. Pnom rushed to stop him...much as Rodney had rushed to stop his father...
And Pnom had been struck down by the sword-wielding bravo. He had died, with fire consuming his heart.
Pnom’s spirit, unwillingly released, went howling up in confusion, mad with fear, lost to Eriphodes, at least for a time.
Pnom’s spirit wandered the upper airs for decades until, suddenly, it was reincarnated into an ill-fated fetus, a boy born in 1993: one Rodney Lasalle.
Rodney had forgotten it all—until Eriphodes, magically foreseeing Pnom’s predestined incarnation, prepared a return for him. Working through suggestible writers like Smith and Lovecraft, the sorcerer had planted hints and secrets in certain publications favored by young Jonathan Lasalle. Most of these hints and secrets were for none other than Pnom himself. Deciphered, they explained themselves, and they indicated a time, and a place. They led...
Here.
Rodney stood in front of the wind-scoured Victorian house, with its broken porch posts, its darkened windows. He could scarcely see the teetering old Victorian itself—he saw, instead, its parallel: the entrance to a temple, its facade shaped rather like this old house, but in stone, and windowless; the temple yet stood, somewhere in Commoriom.
The door of the temple stood open, inviting; just as the door of the house swung open for him now...
I have opened both doors for you, came the familiar intonations of the sorcerer. Eriphodes spoke in a language that Rodney Lasalle had never heard. But Pnom knew it, and Rodney understood it now.
Two there are who have followed me here, Rodney warned, in his mind.
Do not be concerned, Pnom! I have summoned them here. I have planted certain enticing ideas in the mind of the one capable of holding ideas.
Rodney nodded, and struggled up the creaking old steps, walked to the open front door, and stepped within...
Suddenly he felt as if he were walking through thick, gelatinous fire. And with each step the fire was eating away at the impure body he’d been trapped in all this time: The body of Rodney Lasalle. The corrosive spell was killing Rodney’s body--so that the trapped soul of Pnom could be set free.
Rodney had to force himself to take the last few steps. The pain was unspeakable, the resistance gigantic...
He staggered to the basement door which awaited him, just behind the stairs. He opened it and looked not at the basement stairs--they were there, but he couldn’t see them. He saw only the secret shaft within the temple, in Commoriom. The stone shaft that led down into the depths under the temple. He saw, now, only the temple...the house of his uncle had quite vanished. He couldn’t see the basement stairs.
Pain fountained up in him, consumed him. He could no longer stand. Rodney collapsed--and died.
~*~
“Whoa, Oddney’s all collapsed,” Skroggy said, as they stepped through the open front door. “Maybe he’s drunk or stoned or something.”
“Maybe,” Hezza muttered. “Maybe that’s why he was looking at stuff that wasn’t there.”
Inside the thickly musty old house, illuminated in the streetlight shine spilling through the open door, Rodney Lasalle’s body lay half sprawled down the cellar steps.
“Help me with this...” Hezza reached down and pulled Rodney’s ankle, Skroggy to
ok the other one, and they dragged him into the light near the door, and turned him on his back. Motionless, Oddney Rodney was staring...and grinning. But his eyes...
His eyes had been burnt from his head. Only blackened sockets remained.
“That’s majorly fucked up, man!” Skroggy burst out. “Where are his eyes?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he ran into an exposed wire or some shit.” Hezza felt Rodney’s wrists, then tried the neck. No pulse. He shook his head. “The guy’s dead! Flat out dead!”
“Hezza--maybe we oughta get the fuck outta here!”
“We didn’t kill him, dude. Anyway...” Hezza got up and looked through the door at the street outside. There was no one nearby, on the street. He quietly closed the door. “...He was trying to get down those basement steps. Makes sense that’s where the money is. Down there somewhere.” He reached into his pocket, took out a little keychain flshlight. “Come on.”
“Wait--what about the electrical wire shit?”
“We’ll watch for it. Gotta be careful. We’re not going to be stupid like he was.”
Hezza led the way to the basement door, started slowly down the stairs, flashing the light down the unpainted wooden stairs. Looked like an ordinary old basement, down there, mostly stacked with yellowing magazines of some kind. Thrilling Wonder Stories, stuff like that.
They were halfway down the steps—and the flashlight sparked, jumping from his hand. “Ow!” He sucked a burnt thumb.
Then a flaring blue light coalesced around them, spinning like water going down a drain.
Suddenly the basement stairs vanished under their feet--and they felt themselves falling into the spinning light...which soon became darkness. Screaming, they plunged into a tunnel in space.
Hezza expected to hit the basement floor. He never did hit the floor. Not that one.