The gum-chewing waitress leaned over the counter and said something to one of the locals couldn’t make out her whining tones, something about “ol’ Stokely place” and “Hubble’s Field,” but he grumbled something in reply that sounded like “Damned lotta nerve, comin’ in here.”
“…Git back where they came from,” muttered another. A third gave a surly nod of agreement.
“Now it’s gonna start all over again, I bet!” he growled.
More disapproving, even menacing looks were directed at us. Brian noticed it, too. “We seem to be distinctly unpopular, Win,” he observed. I nodded quickly.
“We do, indeed. Let’s finish up and get out of here before there’s trouble.”
“Good idea,” he agreed. We left and drove back through the wet, saying little, each busy with his own thoughts.
* * * *
That evening Brian was browsing through one of the old books while I tried to concentrate on cataloguing the contents of the house. My mind seemed unable to focus on business, being obscurely troubled.
“Here’s something odd, Win,” Brian spoke up. Something in his tones made me look up sharply.
“What’s that you’re reading?”
“The Necronomicon…listen to this! Hm, let’s see—here it is:…‘and the Mi-Go that are the minions of His Half-Brother, Lord Hastur, come down but rarely to the,’ no, a little further on: ‘and likewise is it with the fearsome Yuggs that are the servitors of Zoth-Ommog and His Brother, Ythogtha, and that are led in That Service by Ubb, Father of Worms, they slither but seldom from the moist and fetid burrows beneath the fields where they make their loathsome lair’…wasn’t that Ponape Figurine you people were so concerned about supposed to be an image of Zoth-Ommog?”
I felt a queer foreboding. “It was. Is there any more?”
“Plenty. Listen to this. ‘But all such as these, aye, and the Night-Gaunts, too, that be in the service of Nyarlathotep under their leader, Yegg-ha the Faceless Thing, and the Dholes of Yaddith, and the Nug-Soth, that serve the Mighty Mother’—I’ll skip down the page—‘they fret and fumble ever at the fetters of the Elder Sign, the which doth bind their Masters, and they strive ever to do That which should set Them free, even unto the Red Offering. And in this dreadful Cause they have full many times ere this seduced and bought the hearts and souls of mortal men, selecting such as be frail and vain, venal or avaricious, and thereby easily corrupted by the thirst for knowledge, or the lust for gold, or the madness for power that is man’s deepest and most direful sin…”
We stared at each other for a moment. Then I got up and crossed to where my cousin was sitting, and examined the page over his shoulder.
I read: “Such men as these, I say, they whisper to of night, and lure into their toils with Promises most often unfulfilled. For men they need, and that hungrily: for ’tis the hand of mortal men alone can dislodge the Elder Sign and undo the mighty ensorcellments stamped upon the prisons of the Old Ones by the Elder Gods…”
“Look at the next passage,” he said in low, troubled tones.
I read on: “In particular it be those of the minions that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth’s crust that lure men to their dreadful service through promise of wealth; for all the ore and riches of the world be theirs to dispense, aye, mines of gold and great heaps of inestimable gems. Of these, the Yuggs, whose name the Scribe rendereth as the Worms of the Earth, are by far the most to be feared, for it is said that there be many a rich and wealthy man bestriding the proud ways of the world today, the secret of whose wealth lies in accursed treasure brought to his feet by the immense and loathsome, the white and slimy Yuggs, whereby to purchase his service to their Cause, to the utter and most damnable betrayal, of humankind, and the imperilment of the very Earth.”
Brian’s face was drawn, his eyes haunted by a fearful surmise. “Remember we wondered where Uncle Hiram’s fortune came from,” he whispered.
I flinched away from his stare. “What are you suggesting?” I cried, protestingly. “That’s absolutely crazy—madness!”
“Is it?…remember that queer term, the ‘Red Offering’…and all those bodies out in Hubble’s Field…?”
“What are you…trying to say?” I scoffed, but my voice was shaky and I knew that Brian could read the doubt in my eyes.
“Hubble’s Field,” he murmured somberly, “Ubb, Father of Worms…the Worms of the Earth…‘those that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth’s crust that lure men to their service through promise of wealth’…Hubble’s Field…E-choc-tah, ‘The Place of Worms’…”
“…Ubb’s Field,” I gasped. He nodded grimly.
“Come on,” said Brian briefly, springing up and heading for the secret chamber. I paused only long enough to snatch up my electric torch. Then I followed him into the Unknown…
Chapter VII
The beam of my torch flashed about the plaster walls of the cramped, airless little room sending enormous shadows leaping crazily. Brian was running his hands over the walls as if searching for something. I asked him in a rather breathless voice what it was he was looking for. He shook his head numbly.
“Damned if I know,” he confessed. “Another secret panel, I guess, leading maybe to another hidden room beyond this one.”
At my suggestion we dragged the huge Medieval adumbry away from the wall. As the only piece of furniture in the hidden chamber, it might conceal another door, if door there was.
And there was…
Brian’s searching fingers found and pressed a button set flush into the plaster. Some mechanism concealed behind the wall squealed rustily, protesting. A black opening appeared. I shone my light within the opening, and we saw crudely-hewn stone steps going down into darkness.
“That’s it!” Brian breathed triumphantly.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Probably just lead to the basement.”
“This is Southern California,” he reminded me. “Houses don’t have cellars or basements like they do back East. Just hot water heaters out in back…come on! And hold that light steady.”
Propping the sliding panel open with one of the brass implements from the top shelf of the adumbry, we started down the steps, Brian leading the way.
The stone stair wound down into the depths in a spiral; air blew up from below us, sickening with the stench of mould and rot and mildew, sweetish with the smells of raw wet soil. And over all the other stenches, strangely, the salt smell of the sea.
“My God! There! Look—”
Strewn on the lichen-crusted steps beneath us gems glimmered and flashed in the light of the torch. Some were cut into facets and set in antique gold or silver settings, others were raw and neither cut nor polished. Interspersed among the jewels were lumps of gold ore, and silver, and worked pieces of precious metals. There were many coins scattered down the steps: I bent, picked one up, examined it, peering with dread surmise at noble Spanish profiles of ancient kings.
“No wonder he was so rich, damn him!” breathed Brian, his eyes gleaming wildly in the electric glare of the torch. “No wonder they bought his ‘service’ so easily…my God! The ‘Red Offerings!’”
“You still don’t have any real proof,” I protested. But my words rang hollowly, even to my hearing.
“There’s all the proof I need,” raged Brian, kicking with his shoe at the surface of the mould-crusted step. Gems and coins scattered, clattering. And it seemed to me that something stirred in the darkness beneath where we stood.
“Come on, let’s follow this thing to the end of it.” Without waiting for me to follow, he plunged recklessly down the coiling stair, rubies and sapphires crunching and squealing under his tread. While I lingered, hesitating just a little, he vanished from my sight.
Then I heard him cry out in a wrathful roar.
“Th
ere’s someone down here, Win! You, there, stop—”
A moment of dead silence. The stench became overpowering, sickening. Something huge and wet and glistening white surged in the gloom beneath where I stood hesitating.
Then Brian screamed…a raw shriek of ultimate horror such as I have never heard before from human lips, and hope and pray never to hear again. A scream such as that could rip and tear the lining of a man’s throat—
Calling his name out, I plunged and stumbled and half-fell down the steps, slipping in the slimy muck that coated the stones.
I reached the bottom of the stair, but Brian was not there. There was nothing at all to be seen, no side-passages, no doorways: nothing.
The coiling stone stair did not end, but it vanished into a black pool of slimy liquid mud which completely filled the bottom of the stairwell. Something died within me as I shone my light across that black pool. The agitated ripples that crawled from edge to edge of the pool, as if something heavy had just fallen in…
Fallen, or been dragged.
* * * *
I did not stay very much longer in the huge old house so near, so fearfully near to Hubble’s Field. Once the police had taken my wild and incoherent statement—which doubtless they dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic—I returned to Brian’s apartment in Santiago.
I brought with me the old books. It was—it is—my firm intention to give them to some suitable, scholarly collection; I shall most likely donate them to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities, which already has Copeland’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Zanthu Tablets. For some reason, I linger on here; and I do not think I shall go back to my place of employment at Miskatonic. After all, with the wealth of my heritance from Uncle Hiram’s estate, I need no longer work for a living and may indulge my whims.
Every night, as I hover on the brink of sleep, the Voices come—whispering, whispering. Wealth and power and forbidden knowledge they promise me, over and over…now that I have already performed the Red Offering, I may enjoy the fruits of my—sacrifice.
In vain I protest that it was not I that flung or felled or drove Brian down into that horrible pool of black, liquescent mud at the bottom of the secret stair. The stair of which I said nothing to the police.
But the Voices say it does not matter: the Red Offering has been made. And it must be made, again, and again, and again.
Is that what the loutish workman in the diner meant when he predicted, “now it’s gonna start all over again?” Perhaps. From the hundreds of corpses the authorities found buried in Hubble’ Field, it has been going on for a very long time already.
Oh, they know too well how easy it is to seduce weak and fallible men, curse them!
The Voices whisper to me how easy it is to make the Sign of Koth which will take me beyond the Dream-Gates where the Night-Gaunts and the Ghouls, and the Ghasts of Zin, wait to welcome me; from thence the great winged Byakhee that serve Hastur in the dark spaces between the stars linger upon my coming, to fly me to the dark star amidst the Hyades, to Carcosa beside the cloudy shores of Lake Hali, to the very foot of the Elder Throne where the King in Yellow—even He, Yhtill the Timeless One—will receive my Vow, and where I will receive the penultimate guerdon of my service, and will at length glimpse That which is hidden behind the Pallid Mask…soon…soon…
I have been reading the Necronomicon a lot, these empty days, waiting for the nights to come and the Voices to begin.
I think I will move back to Uncle Hiram’s house In Durnham Beach soon. After all, it belongs to me, now.
It, too, is part of the Winfield heritance.
THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND, by Multiple Authors
A collaborative work by C.L. Moore, Abraham Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long.
[C. L. Moore]
George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were vacation’s most delightful moments, after all—rest, after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.
Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before him—freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom from—
Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.
But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays upon the thing he held.
All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow—he could not guess the method—it had been wrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.
But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.
George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice—and wedge-shaped cuneiforms—yes, didn’t that sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history’s remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth’s geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere but beat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.
And yet—that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it—
Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.
But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.
He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.
[A. Merritt]
He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert…and intent upon him.
Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch. Close to one o’clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.
There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger…the markings shifting shapes…the cube was growing…was it illusion brought about by the tiny lightnings.…
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® Page 52