by Brian Lumley
“You really do feel it, don’t you?” he said, excitedly taking my arm. “I can see it in your face.”
“I…I feel it, yes,” I answered. “It’s a very…powerful piece of work.” Then, to fill the gap, I added: “Where did you dream it up?”
“Right first time,” he answered. “A dream—I think. Something left over from a nightmare. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The heat, I guess.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s too damned hot. Will you be doing any more tonight?”
He shook his head, his eyes still on the painting. “Not in this light. I don’t want to foul it up. No, I’m for bed. Besides, I have a headache.”
“What?” I said, glad now that I had made no wild accusation. “You?—a strapping great Viking like you, with a headache?”
“Viking?” he frowned. “You’ve called me that before. My looks must be deceptive. No, my ancestors came out of Hungary—a place called Stregoicavar. And I can tell you they burned more witches there than you ever did in Scotland!”
• • •
There was little sleep for me that night, though toward morning I did finally drop off, slumped across the great desk, drowsing fitfully in the soft glow of my desk light. Prior to that, however, in the silence of the night—driven on by a feeling of impending…something—I had delved deeper into the old books and documents amassed by my uncle, slowly but surely fitting together that great jigsaw whose pieces he had spent so many years collecting.
The work was more difficult now, his notes less coherent, his writing barely legible; but at least the material was or should be more familiar to me. Namely, I was studying the long line of McGilchrists gone before me, whose seat had been Temple House since its construction two hundred and forty years ago. And as I worked so my eyes would return again and again, almost involuntarily, to the dark pool with its ring of broken columns. Those stumps were white in the silver moonlight—as white as the columns in Carl’s picture—and so my thoughts returned to Carl.
By now he must be well asleep, but this new mystery filled my mind through the small hours. Carl Earlman…It certainly sounded Hungarian, German at any rate, and I wondered what the old family name had been. Ehrlichman, perhaps? Arlmann? And not Carl but Karl.
And his family hailed from Stregoicavar. That was a name I remembered from a glance into Von Junzt’s Unspeakable Cults, I was sure. Stregoicavar: it had stayed in my mind because of its meaning, which is “witch-town.” Certain of Chorazos’s order of pagan priests had been Hungarian. Was it possible that some dim ancestral memory lingered over in Carl’s mind, and that the pool with its quartz stumps had awakened that in his blood which harkened back to older times? And what of the gypsy music he had sworn to hearing on our first night in this old house? Young and strong he was certainly, but beneath an often brash exterior he had all the sensitivity of an artist born.
According to my uncle’s research my own great-grandfather, Robert Allan McGilchrist, had been just such a man. Sensitive, a dreamer, prone to hearing things in the dead of night which no one else could hear. Indeed, his wife had left him for his peculiar ways. She had taken her two sons with her; and so for many years the old man had lived here alone, writing and studying. He had been well known for his paper on the Lambton Worm legend of Northumberland: of a great worm or dragon that lived in a well and emerged at night to devour “bairns and beasties and foolhardy wanderers in the dark.” He had also published a pamphlet on the naiads of the lochs of Inverness; and his limited edition book, Notes on Nessie—the Secrets of Loch Ness had caused a minor sensation when first it saw print.
It was Robert Allan McGilchrist, too, who restored the old floodgate in the dam, so that the water level in the pool could be controlled; but that had been his last work. A shepherd had found him one morning slumped across the gate, one hand still grasping the wheel which controlled its elevation, his upper body floating face-down in the water. He must have slipped and fallen, and his heart had given out. But the look on his face had been a fearful thing; and since the embalmers had been unable to do anything with him, they had buried him immediately.
And as I studied this or that old record or consulted this or that musty book, so my eyes would return to the dam, the pool with its fanged columns, the old floodgate—rusted now and fixed firmly in place—and the growing sensation of an onrushing doom gnawed inside me until it became a knot of fear in my chest. If only the heat would let up, just for one day, and if only I could finish my research and solve the riddle once and for all.
It was then, as the first flush of dawn showed above the eastern hills, that I determined what I must do. The fact of the matter was that Temple House frightened me, as I suspected it had frightened many people before me. Well, I had neither the stamina nor the dedication of my uncle. He had resolved to track the thing down to the end, and something—sheer hard work, the “curse,” failing health, something—had killed him.
But his legacy to me had been a choice: continue his work or put an end to the puzzle for all time and blow Temple House to hell. So be it, that was what I would do. A day or two more—only a day or two, to let Carl finish his damnable painting—and then I would do what Gavin McGilchrist had ordered done. And with that resolution uppermost in my mind, relieved that at last I had made the decision, so I fell asleep where I sprawled at the desk.
The sound of splashing aroused me; that and my name called from below. The sun was just up and I felt dreadful, as if suffering from a hangover. For a long time I simply lay sprawled out. Then I stood up and eased my cramped limbs, and finally I turned to the open window. There was Carl, dressed only in his shorts, stretched out flat on a wide, thick plank, paddling out toward the middle of the pool!
“Carl!” I called down, my voice harsh with my own instinctive fear of the water. “Man, that’s dangerous—you can’t swim!”
He turned his head, craned his neck and grinned up at me. “Safe as houses,” he called, “so long as I hang on to the plank. And it’s cool, John, so wonderfully cool. This feels like the first time I’ve been cool in weeks!”
By now he had reached roughly the pool’s centre and there he stopped paddling and simply let his hands trail in green depths. The level of the water had gone down appreciably during the night and the streamlet which fed the pool was now quite dry. The plentiful weed of the pool, becoming concentrated as the water evaporated, seemed thicker than ever I remembered it. So void of life, that water, with never a fish or frog to cause a ripple on the morass-green of its surface.
And suddenly that tight knot of fear was back in my chest, making my voice a croak as I tried to call out: “Carl, get out of there!”
“What?” he faintly called back, but he didn’t turn his head. He was staring down into the water, staring intently at something he saw there. His hand brushed aside weed—
“Carl!” I found my voice. “For God’s sake get out of it!”
He started then, his head and limbs jerking as if scalded, setting the plank to rocking so that he half slid off it. Then—a scrambling back to safety and a frantic splashing and paddling; and galvanized into activity I sprang from the window and raced breakneck downstairs. And Carl laughing shakily as I stumbled knee-deep in hated water to drag him physically from the plank, both of us trembling despite the burning rays of the new-risen sun and the furnace heat of the air.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“I thought I saw something,” he answered. “In the pool. A reflection, that’s all, but it startled me.”
“What did you see?” I demanded, my back damp with cold sweat.
“Why, what would I see?” he answered, but his voice trembled for all that he tried to grin. “A face, of course—my own face framed by the weeds. But it didn’t look like me, that’s all…”
8. The Dweller
Looking back now in the light of what I already knew—certainly of what I should have guessed at that time—it must seem that I was guilty of an almost sui
cidal negligence in spending the rest of that day upstairs on my bed, tossing in nightmares brought on by the nervous exhaustion which beset me immediately after the incident at the pool. On the other hand, I had had little sleep the night before and Carl’s adventure had given me a terrific jolt; and so my failure to recognize the danger—how close it had drawn—may perhaps be forgiven.
In any event, I forced myself to wakefulness in the early evening, went downstairs and had coffee and a frugal meal of biscuits, and briefly visited Carl in his studio. He was busy—frantically busy, dripping with sweat and brushing away at his canvas—working on his loathsome painting, which he did not want me to see. That suited me perfectly for I had already seen more than enough of the thing. I did take time enough to tell him, though, that he should finish his work in the next two days; for on Friday or at the very latest Saturday morning I intended to blow the place sky high.
Then I went back upstairs, washed and shaved, and as the light began to fail so I returned to my uncle’s notebook. There were only three or four pages left unread, the first dated only days before his demise, but they were such a hodge-podge of scrambled and near-illegible miscellanea that I had the greatest difficulty making anything of them. Only that feeling of a burgeoning terror drove me on, though by now I had almost completely lost faith in making anything whatever of the puzzle.
As for my uncle’s notes: a basically orderly nature had kept me from leafing at random through his book, or perhaps I should have understood earlier. As it is, the notebook is lost forever, but as best I can I shall copy down what I remember of those last few pages. After that—and after I relate the remaining facts of the occurrences of that fateful hideous night—the reader must rely upon his own judgement. The notes then, or what little I remember of them:
“Levi’s or Mirandola’s invocation: “Dasmass Jeschet Boene Doess Efar Duvema Enit Marous.” If I could get the pronunciation right, perhaps…But what will the Thing be? And will it succumb to a double-barrelled blast? That remains to be seen. But if what I suspect is firmly founded…Is it a tick-thing, such as Von Junzt states inhabits the globular mantle of Yogg-Sothoth? (Unaussprechlichen Kulten, 78/16)—fearful hints—monstrous pantheon…And this merely a parasite to one of Them!
“The Cult of Cthulhu…immemorial horror spanning all the ages. The Johansen Narrative and the Pnakotic Manuscript. And the Innsmouth Raid of 1928; much was made of that, and yet nothing known for sure. Deep Ones, but…different again from this Thing.
“Entire myth-cycle…So many sources. Pure myth and legend? I think not. Too deep, interconnected, even plausible. According to Carter in SR, (AH ’59) p. 250-51, They were driven into this part of the universe (or into this time-dimension) by “Elder Gods” as punishment for a rebellion. Hastur the Unspeakable prisoned in Lake of Hali (again the lake or pool motif) in Carcosa; Great Cthulhu in R’lyeh, where he slumbers still in his death-sleep; Ithaqua sealed away behind icy Arctic barriers, and so on. But Yogg-Sothoth was sent outside, into a parallel place, conterminous with all space and time. Since YS is everywhere and when, if a man knew the gate he could call Him out…
“Did Chorazos and his acolytes, for some dark reason of their own, attempt thus to call Him out? And did they get this dweller in Him instead? And I believe I understand the reason for the pool. Grandfather knew. His interest in Nessie, the Lambton Worm, the Kraken of olden legend, naiads, Cthulhu…Wendy Smith’s burrowers feared water; and the sheer weight of the mighty Pacific helps keep C. prisoned in his place in R’lyeh—thank God! Water subdues these things…
“But if water confines It, why does It return to the water? And how may It leave the pool if not deliberately called out? No McGilchrist ever called it out, I’m sure, not willingly; though some may have suspected that something was here. No swimmers in the family—not a one—and I think I know why. It is an instinctive, an ancestral fear of the pool! No, of the unknown Thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…”
The thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…
Clammy with the heat, and with a debilitating terror springing from these words on the written page—these scribbled thought-fragments which, I was now sure, were anything but demented ravings—I sat at the old desk and read on. And as the house grew dark and quiet, as on the previous night, again I found my eyes drawn to gaze down through the open window to the surface of the still pool.
Except that the surface was no longer still!
Ripples were spreading in concentric rings from the pool’s dark centre, tiny mobile wavelets caused by—by what? Some disturbance beneath the surface? The water level was well down now and tendrils of mist drifted from the pool to lie soft, luminous and undulating in the moonlight, curling like the tentacles of some great plastic beast over the dam, across the drive to the foot of the house.
A sort of paralysis settled over me then, a dreadful lassitude, a mental and physical malaise brought on by excessive morbid study, culminating in this latest phenomenon of the old house and the aura of evil which now seemed to saturate its very stones. I should have done something—something to break the spell, anything rather than sit there and merely wait for what was happening to happen—and yet I was incapable of positive action.
Slowly I returned my eyes to the written page; and there I sat shivering and sweating, my skin crawling as I read on by the light of my desk lamp. But so deep my trancelike state that it was as much as I could do to force my eyes from one word to the next. I had no volition, no will of my own with which to fight that fatalistic spell; and the physical heat of the night was that of a furnace as sweat dripped from my forehead onto the pages of the notebook.
“…I have checked my findings and can’t believe my previous blindness! It should have been obvious. It happens when the water level falls below a certain point. It has happened every time there has been extremely hot weather—when the pool has started to dry up! The Thing needn’t be called out at all! As to why it returns to the pool after taking a victim: it must return before daylight. It is a fly-the-light. A haunter of the dark. A wampyre!…but not blood..Nowhere can I find mention of blood sacrifices. And no punctures or mutilations. What, then are Its “needs?” Did Dee know? Kelly knew, I’m sure, but his writings are lost…
“Eager now to try the invocation, but I wish that first I might know the true nature of the Thing. It takes the life of Its victim—but what else?”
“I have it!—God, I know—and I wish I did not know! But that look on my poor brother’s face…Andrew, Andrew…I know now why you looked that way. But if I can free you, you shall be freed. If I wondered at the nature of the Thing, then I wonder no longer. The answers are all there, in the Cthäat A. and Hydrophinnae, if only I had known exactly where to look. Yibb-Tstll is one such; Bugg-Shash, too. Yes, and the pool-thing is another…
“There have been a number down the centuries—the horror that dwelled in the mirror of Nitocris; the sucking, hunting thing that Count Magnus kept; the red, hairy slime used by Julian Scortz—familiars of the Great Old Ones, parasites that lived on Them as lice live on men. Or rather, on their life-force! This one has survived the ages, at least until now. It does not take the blood but the very essence of Its victim. It is a soul-eater!
“I can wait no longer. Tonight, when the sun goes down and the hills are in darkness…But if I succeed, and if the Thing comes for me…We’ll see how It faces up to my shotgun!”
My eyes were half-closed by the time I had finally scanned all that was written, of which the above is only a small part; and even having read it I had not fully taken it in. Rather, I had absorbed it automatically, without reading any immediate meaning into it. But as I re-read those last few lines, so I heard something which roused me up from my lassitude and snapped me alertly awake in an instant.
It was music: the faint but unmistakable strains of a whirling pagan tune that seemed to reach out to me from a time beyond time, from a hell beyond all known hells…
9. The Horror
&n
bsp; Shocked back to mental alertness, still my limbs were stiff as a result of several hours crouched over the desk. Thus, as I sprang or attempted to spring to my feet, a cramp attacked both of my calves and threw me down by the window. I grabbed at the sill…and whatever I had been about to do was at once forgotten.
I gazed out the open window on a scene straight out of madness or nightmare. The broken columns where they now stood up from bases draped with weed seemed to glow with an inner light; and to my straining eyes it appeared that this haze of light extended uniformly upwards, so that I saw a revenant of the temple as it had once been. Through the light-haze I could also see the centre of the pool, from which the ripples spread outward with a rapidly increasing agitation.
There was a shape there now, a dark oblong illuminated both by the clean moonlight and by that supernatural glow; and even as I gazed, so the water slopping above the oblong seemed pushed aside and the slab showed its stained marble surface to the air. The music grew louder then, soaring wildly, and it seemed to me in my shocked and frightened condition that dim figures reeled and writhed around the perimeter of the pool.
Then—horror of horrors!—in one mad moment the slab tilted to reveal a black hole going down under the pool, like the entrance to some sunken tomb. There came an outpouring of miasmal gasps, visible in the eerie glow, and then—
Even before the thing emerged I knew what it would be; how it would look. It was that horror on Carl’s canvas, the soft-tentacled, mushroom-domed terror he had painted under the ancient, evil influence of this damned, doomed place. It was the dweller, the familiar, the tick-thing, the star-born wampyre…it was the curse of the McGilchrists. Except I understood now that this was not merely a curse on the McGilchrists but on the entire world. Of course it had seemed to plague the McGilchrists as a personal curse—but only because they had chosen to build Temple House here on the edge of its pool. They had been victims by virtue of their availability, for I was sure that the pool-thing was not naturally discriminative.