by Brian Lumley
Their 'magic,' according to Gedney, had been simply the inconceivable science of alien abysses, the knowledge of dark dimensions beyond the powers of men even to perceive; and yet something of their weird science had found its way down all the eons.
That would seem, on the surface, purely impossible; but Gedney had an answer for that, too. The CCD
were not dead, he had claimed. Men must not forget Alhazred's conjectural couplet:
'That is not dead which can forever lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.'
— and Teh Atht's much less cryptic fragment:
`Where weirdly angled ramparts loom,
Gaunt sentinels whose shadows gloom
Upon an undead hell-beasts tomb —
And gods and mortals fear to tread;
Where gateways to forbidden spheres
And times are closed, but monstrous fears
Await the passing of strange years —
When that will wake which is not dead . .
- in which the reference was surely to Cthulhu himself, dreaming but undead in his house in R'lyeh, ocean-buried in vast and pressured vaults of the mighty Pacific. Something had happened in those eon-hidden prehistoric times, some intervention perhaps of Nature, perhaps of alien races more powerful yet, whose result had been a suppression or sundering of the CCD; and they had either fled or been 'banished' into exile from a world already budding with life of its own.
The regions in which the 'gods' of the cycle had interred themselves or had been 'prisoned' (they could never really die) had been varied as the forms they themselves had taken. Cthulhu was locked in sunken R'lyeh; Hastur in the star-distant deeps of Hali; Ithaqua the Wind-Walker confined to icy Arctic wastes where, in five-year cycles, to this very day he is still known to make monstrous incursions; and so on.
Yet others of the cycle had been dealt with more harshly: the Tind'losi Hounds now dwelled beyond Times darkest angles, locked out from the three sane dimensions; and Yog-Sothoth had been encapsulated in a place bordering all time and space but impinging into neither facet of the continuum — except should some foolhardy wizard call him out! And Yibb-Tstll, too — he also had his place . . .
But if these gods or demons of the conjectural Cthulhu Mythology were largely inaccessible to men, certain manifestations of them were not. Masters of telepathy, the CCD had long discovered the vulnerable minds of men and insinuated themselves into the dreams of men. On occasion such dreamers would be 'rewarded', granted powers over lesser mortals or even elevated to the priesthood of the CCD. In ancient times, even as now, they would become great wizards and warlocks. And James Gedney had been one such, who had collected all the works of wizards gone before and learned them, -or as much of them as he might. Titus Crow- had been another, but where Gedney's magic had been black, Crow's had been white.
Looking back now, Gifford could see that it had been inevitable that the two must clash. Clash they had, and Darkness had lost to Light. And- for a little while the world had been a cleaner place ...
'Do you remember how it all came to a head?' Gifford asked. 'Crow and Gedney, I mean?'
The moon was fully up now, its disk silvering distant spires, turning the path to a night-white ribbon winding its way across the heath. And the path itself had grown narrower, warning that perhaps the two had chosen the wrong route, which might well peter out into tangles of gorse- and briar. But they made no effort to turn back.
`I remember,' said Arnold. 'Gedney had discovered a way to call an avatar of Yibb-Tstll up from hell. "The Black," he called it: putrid black blood of Yibb-Tstll, which would settle upon the victim like black snow, thicker and thicker, suffocating, destroying — and leaving not only a lifeless but a soulless shell behind. For the demon was a soul-eater, a wampir of psyche, of id!' He shuddered, and this time not alone from the chill of the night air. And his eyes were hooded where they glowed for a moment upon the other's dark silhouette where it strolled beside him. And in his mind he repeated certain strange words or sounds, a conjuration, ensuring that he had the rune right.
'Your memory serves you well,' said Gifford. 'He'd found a way to call The Black, all right — and he'd used it. I saw Symonds die that way, and I knew there had been others before him. People who'd crossed Gedney; and of course The Black was a perfect murder weapon.'
Arnold nodded in the moonlight. 'Yes, it was .. And to himself: . . . And will be again!
'Do you recall the actual machinery of the thing?' Gifford asked.
Careful — something warned Arnold — careful! He shrugged. 'Something of it. Not much.'
'Oh, come now!' Gifford chided. 'Eight years as leader of your coven, and far more powerful now than Gedney ever was, and you'd tell me you never bothered to look into the thing? Hah!' And to himself: Ah, no, friend Arnold. You'll have to do better than that. Squirm, my treacherous little worm, squirm!
'Something of it!' Arnold snapped. 'It involves a card, inscribed with Ptetholite runes. That was the lure, the scent by which The Black would track its victim,
Gedney's sacrifice. The card was passed to the victim, and then . . . then ..
'Then Gedney would say the words of the invocation,' Gifford finished it for him. 'And The Black would come, appearing out of nowhere, black snowflakes settling on the sacrifice, smothering, drowning, sucking out life and soul!'
Arnold nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes . .
They had come to the end of the path, a bank that descended to a broad, moonlit expanse of water rippled by the light wind. 'Hah!' Gifford grunted. 'A lake! Well, we'll just have to retrace our steps, that's all. A waste of time — but still, it allowed us a little privacy and gave us the chance to talk. A lot has happened, after all, since I went off to America to start a coven there, and you stayed here to carry on.'
They turned back. 'A lot, yes,' Arnold agreed. 'And as you say, I am far more powerful now than ever Gedney was. But what of you? I've heard that you, too, have had your successes.'
'Oh, you know well enough that I've prospered,' Gifford answered. 'My coven is strong — stronger, I suspect, than yours. But then again, I am its leader.' He quickly held up a hand to ward off protests. 'That was not said to slight you, Arnold. But facts speak for themselves. It wasn't idle chance that took me abroad. I went because of what I knew I'd find there. Oh, we divided Gedney's knowledge, you and I — his books — but I knew of others. And more than mere books. There are survivals even now in old New England, Arnold, if a man knows where to seek them out. Cults and covens beyond even my belief when I first went there And all of them integrated now — under me! Loosely as yet, it's true, but time will change all that.'
'And you'd integrate us, too, eh?' the smaller man half-snarled, rounding on his companion. 'And you even had the nerve to come here and tell me it to my face! Well, your American influence can't help you here in England, Gifford. You were a fool to come alone!'
'Alone?' the other's voice was dangerously low. 'I am never alone. And you are the fool, my friend, not I.'
In their arguing the two had strayed from the path. They stumbled on awhile in rough, damp turf and through glossy-leaved shrubbery — until once more the stack of an old chimney loomed naked against the moon. And now that they had their bearings once more, both men reached a simultaneous decision — that it must end here and now
'Here,' said Arnold, 'right here is where Gedney died. He gave Crow one of his cards, called The Black and loosed it upon the man.'
'Oh, Crow had set up certain protections about his house,' Gifford continued the tale, 'but they were useless against this. In the end he had to resort to a little devilishness of his own.'
'Aye, a clever man, Crow,' said Arnold. 'He knew what was writ on Geph's broken columns. The Ptetholites had known and used Yibb-Tstll's black blood, and they'd furnished the clue, too.'
'Indeed,' Gifford mocked, 'and now it appears you know far more than you, pretended, eh?' And in a low tone he chanted:
'Let him who calls
The Black Be aware of the danger —
His victim may be protected By the spell of running water,
And turn the called-up darkness
Against the very caller…’
Arnold listened, smiled grimly and nodded. 'I looked into it later, he informed. 'Crow kept records of all of his cases, you know? An amazing man. When he found himself under attack he heeded a certain passage from the Necronomicon. This passage:
' " . . . from the space which is not space, into any time when the Words are spoken, can the holder of the Knowledge summon The Black, blood of Yibb-Tstll that which Iiveth apart from him and eateth souls, that which smothers and is called Drowner. Only in water can one escape the drowning; that which is in water drowneth not . . ."
'It was easy' Arnold continued, for a man with nerves of steel! While yet The Black settled on him in an ever thickening layer, he simply stepped into his shower and turned on the water!'
Backing away from Arnold, Gifford opened his mouth and bayed like a great hound. 'Oh, yes!' he laughed. 'Yes! Can't you just picture it? The great James Gedney cheated like that! And how he must have fought to get into the shower with Crow, eh? For of course Crow must have given him his card back, turning The Black "against the very caller . . ." And Crow fighting him off, keeping him out of the streaming water until The Black finished its work and carried Gedney's soul back to Yibb-Tstll in his place. Ah! — what an irony!'
Arnold too had backed away, and now the modern magicians faced each other across the rubble of Blowne House.
'But no running water here tonight, my friend,'
Arnold's grin was ferocious, his face a white mask in the moonlight.
'What?' Gifford's huge body quaked with awful mirth. 'A threat? You wouldn't dare!'
'Wouldn't I? Your left-hand coat pocket, Gifford —that's where it is!'
And as Gifford drew out the rune-inscribed card, so Arnold commenced to gabble out loud that nightmarish invocation to, summon Yibb-Tstll's poisoned blood from a space beyond all known spaces. That demented, droning, cacophonous explosion of sounds so well rehearsed, whose effect as its final crescendo reverberated on the heath's chill night air immediately began to make itself apparent — but in no wise as Arnold had anticipated!
'Fool, I named you,' Gifford taunted across the rubble of Blowne House, 'and great fool you are! Did you think I would ignore a power strong enough to snuff out a man like Gedney?' As he spoke his voice grew louder and even deeper, at the last resembling nothing so much as a deep bass croaking. And weird energies were at work, drawing mist from the earth to smoke upward in spiralling, wreaths, so that the tumbled remains of the house between the two men now resembled the scene of a recent explosion.
Arnold backed away more yet, turned to run, tripped over moss-grown bricks and fell. He scrambled to his feet, looked back — and froze!
Gifford was still baying his awful laughter, but he had thrown off his overcoat and was even now tearing his jacket and shirt free and tossing them to the reeking earth. Beneath those garments —
— The gross body of the man was black!
Not a Negroid black, not even the jet of ink or deepest ebony or purest onyx. Black as the spaces between the farthest stars — black as the black blood of Yibb-Tstll himself!
'Oh, yes, Arnold,' Gifford boomed, his feet in writhing mist while his upper torso commenced to quiver, a slithering blot on normal space. 'Oh, yes! Did you think I'd be satisfied merely to skim the surface of a mystery? I had to go deeper! Control The Black? Man, I am The Black! Yibb-Tstll's priest on Earth — his High-Priest, Arnold! No longer born of the dark spaces, of alien dimensions, but of me! I am the host body! And you dare call The Black? So be it . . And he tore in pieces the rune-written card and pointed at the other across the smoking ruins.
It seemed then that darkness peeled from Gifford, that his upper body erupted in a myriad fragments of night which hovered for a moment like a swarm of midnight bees — then split into two streams which moved in concert around the outlines of the ruins.
Geoffrey Arnold saw this and had time, even in his extreme of utter terror, to wonder at it. But time only for that.- In the next moment, converging, those great pythons of alien matter reared up, swept upon him and layered him like lacquer where he stood and screamed. Quickly he turned black as the stuff thickened on him, and his shrill screams were soon shut off as the horror closed over his face.
Then he danced — a terrible dance of agony — and finally fell, a bloated blot, to the mist-tortured earth. For long seconds he jerked, writhed-and twisted, and at last lay still.
Benjamin Gifford had watched all of this, and yet for all that he was a devotee of evil had gained little pleasure from it. Wizard and necromancer though he was, still he knew that there were far greater sources of evil. And for Great Evil there is always Great Good. The balance is ever maintained.
Now Gifford stopped laughing, his mouth slowly closing, the short hairs rising at the back of his neck. He sniffed like a hound at some suspicious odour; he sensed that things were far from right; he questioned what had happened or rather, the way it had happened — and he grew afraid. His body, naked now and slenderer far than when The Black shrouded him, shivered in the spiralling mists.
Those mists, for example: he had thought them part of Arnold's conjuring, a curious side-effect. But no, for Arnold was finished and still the reeking, strangely twisting mists poured upward from the ruins of the old house. The ruins of Titus Crow's old house .. .
And why had The Black chosen to split and deflect around that smoking perimeter of ruin? Unless —
'No!' Gifford croaked, the dark iron vanished now from his voice. 'No, that can't be!' It could not be . . . could it
No slightest vestige of life remained in Arnold now The Black lifted en masse from his body where it lay contorted in death's rigors, lifted like a jagged hole torn in normal space and paused, hovering at the edge of the ruins of Blowne House. And slowly that cloud of living evil formed into two serpents, and slowly they retraced their paths around the ruins.
Menacing they were, in their slow, sentient approach. And at last Gifford thought he knew why. Crow was long gone but the protections he had placed about Blowne House remained even now, would stay here until time itself was extinct and all magics — black and white —gone forever. The place was a focal point for good, genius loci for all the great benevolent powers which through all the ages men have called God! And those powers had not waned with Crow's passing but had fastened upon this place and waxed ever stronger.
To have called The Black here, now, in this place was a blasphemy, and the caller had paid in full. But to have brought The Black here — to have worn it like a mantle, to have been Yibb-Tstll's priest — that were greater blasphemy far. This place was sacrosanct, and it would remain that way.
'No!' Gifford croaked one last time, an instant before The Black fell upon him. Priest no more, be was borne under...
***
When the mists ceased their strange spiralling the ruins of Blowne House lay as before, silvered under a cleansing moon. Except that now there were corpses in the night. Pitiful shapes crumpled under the moon, where morning would find them chill as the earth where they lay.
But the earth would have a soul . . .