Selected Stories Read online

  He fished a small bag out of his pocket, and shed the grayish powder in it on the Vaeyen, murmuring: “I conjure you now, Great Adonai, by Johavam, Agla, Tagla, Almouzin, Arios, Membrot, Aqua, Etituamus, Zariatnatmik...”

  Rather in the classic tradition, he thought, satisfied. He threw the rest of the powder on the mixture in the tripod, and placed the upper part of a skull on top of it. The skull was very big, and the eye sockets were strangely shaped. A strong odor assaulted his nostrils as the mixture of the chemicals took fire, burning with a sizzling light, hidden inside the skull. Only small shreds of thin bluish smoke drifted out of the eye holes, as if the skull were breathing.

  “Aglon, Tetagram, Yaycheon, Stimulatamathon Erohares.... Ratragsmahon Clyorian Icion... Hear me, Hastur and Zhar, Ithaqua and Lloigor; listen to my voice, Great Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth, Nyogtha and The Hidden Watchers...”

  The fires around the crowd lit up brightly now, and Herbert stopped his own silently spoken incantations to watch. Their fires threw red gloomy shadows at the darkness surrounding them. The high priest and the woman were now standing in the middle of the triangle of stones. The man spread his arms in a mocking simulation of crucification, as his voice thundered against the hill.

  “Hear my humble voice, Thou, Lord of the Dark Hill, Thou Who Waits in Darkness, Great Lord of the Caves, Great Cyäegha, hear my voice and accept my tribute, and the tribute of my people, of Your people, so that Thou may rest in Your Darkness, Sleep in Your Mountain of Darkness...”

  He continued in this vein for some time, the crowd repeating his very words after each sentence. Then he made a sign, and two men stepped out of the group, and took the silver chain and the robe of the girl. Completely nude now, she stepped forward, turned and kneeled before the high priest. She touched his feet before going to the last stone of the triangle, and there spread herself upon it, lying down on her back. The living altar was formed. The two men who had taken her robe now kneeled, one at her feet and one at her head, their faces almost down in the earth. The priest turned toward the group, and made an X cross in the air.

  “Benedicat vos omnipotens" he said, and then turned back to the altar. Herbert noticed the stiffness of the girl’s body. She was drugged, he thought, or even more likely in a state of self-hypnosis or auto-suggestion.

  “Dominus vobiscum,” the priest said, and the crowd answered, “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

  Indeed, the Lord be with you, Herbert thought, but not the Lord for whom those words originally were intended. The high priest now took a bowl from below his robe, and through his binoculars Herbert saw the curled-up mountain snake lying inside it, probably dead.

  “Ece Agnus Dei, ecce, qui tollit peccata mundi...” He lifted the bowl, and then gently deposited the snake’s body on the abdomen of the girl. “Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni testamenti; mysterium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in reminissionen peccatorum.” He bent down, kissing the breasts and the belly of the girl. “Hoc est enim Corpus meum...”

  With a melodramatic gesture, he rose, touching the eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and nipples of the girl, and then throwing his arms wide open. "Great Lord Cyäegha, The One Who Waits in His Eternal Darkness, The One Who Slumbers through aeons of unnamed time. Dweller in the Dark Hill, Master of Time, Master of Life, Master of Death, hear me speak in the name of my people, of Thy people, accept our offer, our humble unworthy offer, accept our prayers, our humble unworthy prayers, absorb them into Your Darkness, and forgive us The Signs, forgive us The Vaeyens for You know that we need them. Forgive us because we cannot share in Your Darkness, forgive us our ignorance of Your Ways because we are only human and cannot be like You, cannot share with You...”

  Ignorant peasant, Herbert thought, stupid fools! An unsuspected aura of self-confidence had come over him as he listened to their words, which were no more than a variant of the Black Mass. Did these idiots really think that they could offer prayers to Cyäegha? They feared him, and they didn’t know very much. They thought they could keep him inside the hill because of the power of their Vaeyens, and the words they had retained from the priest who had imprisoned The Waiting Dark. But that priest was long dead, killed by the very power he had used, and what they had retained of his words was useless, because now they lacked one of their precious Vaeyens.

  Herbert spread his fingers, and touched the now hot skull bone. It burned his fingertips, but he didn’t take them away.

  “Onera Erasyn Moyn Meffias Soter... Emmanual Saboth Adonai, Your Names are Turned, Your Image has been changed but It is, It was, It always will be! The Time is Now, the Time is This, the Time is Past, the Time is Future, and All are You! Iä, Iä, Cyäegha! The Snake has eaten its Tail and formed the circle of Bones! The Star has been broken, the Elder Sign has lost its tip!”

  There was a short flash of rationalism and he thought, This is madness. I’m no more sane than they, I too am speaking words without meaning, words fit only for the insane. Then why do I continue? And he knew the answer: Because I have to. Because the time is now, and I have been through this before, though I don’t know when or where, and I will have to go through this again and again. The time is past, and the time is future, and the Circle of Bones has opened into now.

  "Mn’gwayii, Cbyorgä! Open to me now, oh Lord of the Dark, oh Lord of the Waiting Dark, oh Lord of the Patient Waiting Dark! Ph’ngläyä ft'gglhnayn! N’cryastaepecioggl’ n bggn’th flwaägor!

  He had never suspected to be able to memorize the words from the old manuscripts, far less pronounce them, yet now they rolled from his tongue, torturing his mouth and ears, almost as if someone else spoke the alien words in his place, using his voice.

  “So here you are, murderer!” a voice said behind him. His back froze, as he slowly turned his head around without moving his body. The vicar was a dark blurred shape behind him, yet the gun he pointed at Herbert’s back glittered in the soft light his protected fire threw around him.

  “So you’ve finally managed to climb the hill, Vicar,” Herbert said, “but of course, the protection is incomplete now that they’re missing one of the Vaeyens. There was nothing to stop you from coming now.”

  “You... beast! Why? I don’t understand it. I see what you’re doing here, yet why are you not with them over there? Why did you have to... murder Julien? Why?”

  “You really think I killed him, Vicar?” Herbert’s voice tittered. “You should know better. Perhaps you recognize this ritual, the Vach-Viraj Ritual and its incantations, and the looped cross drawn on the skull. Of course I’m not using it as it was intended; every ritual can be turned backward, every exorcising ritual can be reversed. And of course I’m not with them; you should know by now that I’m not one of them. If you don’t believe me, keep pointing that gun at me, but take my binoculars and have a good look at what they are doing. Go on. You and I want the same thing: to stop them. So take a good look...”

  Slowly, without making a suspicious movement, he offered his binoculars to the vicar. Hesitatingly the vicar accepted them and looked, but the muzzle of the gun remained pointed at Herbert. Then the vicar made a gasping sound; he dropped the gun and the binoculars, turned away, and vomited.

  Herbert took up the field glasses and looked himself. He had known in advance what he would see. The high priest took the severed head of Julien from below his robe, holding it above the rigid body of the girl, before he split the skull with a stroke of his sacrificial knife! The brains dripped down on the living but unmoving altar.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’afhn Cthulhu R'lyehhgandgah’ln fhtgagn... Yr et Dho-Hna Ephrai Nmagl’n nagoghnath, Iä Shub-Niggura’pwai Feyadia gnl! Accept our offer, Great Old One, Ancient Slumberer in the Caves of Darkness, Nameless One from Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Stalker between timeless stars and the dark spaces between the stars, Dreamer of the second night, Rgth’ll R’Liyuhai tec djivvai! By the Names of Tyr-Fharle and The Thing with Three Faces, accept our humble gift and sleep, oh Thou Gr
eat One, slumber in the Hill of Darkness and let us be, protected by the five Vaeyens from Your wrath, hear us, Waiting Dark, and let us be, by the Black Light and the White Fire, by the White Dark which is blacker than night, and the Green Moon and the Winged Woman!”

  The vicar’s face was very close now, his eyes glowing pinpoints. “They’re mad,” he whimpered, “they’re mad!” He wasn’t paying any attention to Herbert anymore, but suddenly stood up and crashed through the protecting wall of bushes. “Murderers!” he yelled. “You bunch of dirty heathen assassins!”

  There was a moment of petrified silence, then the crowd moved as the vicar ran at them, brandishing his gun.

  Herbert stood up now and took the skull off the plate. The flames of the burning chemicals rose, emitting a sharp, stinging smoke.

  “Open to me now, oh Lord,” he screamed with a voice which no longer seemed his own. “Phlegethor k’yarnak, Cyäegha kn’aa stell’hsna, nilgh’re kadishtu na Ya!"

  He reached down and took the Vaeyen, lifting it with both hands above his head. His hands too no longer were his own; an unimaginable power seemed to run through his veins and muscles, burning his brain with the coldness of space. He broke the statuette in two, then crumbled the pieces into dust between his fingers.

  A sudden gust of wind whirled around him, and suddenly the bushes were full of sound and movement, as if many small things hurried away in all directions. The part of him which still thought as Herbert was a frightened frozen entity somewhere in the depths of his brain, a madly shrieking being which tried to hold on to its own knowledge, its own reality.

  “Open to me, oh Great Cyäegha, oh Father!” his voice shrieked.

  IX. No-Time

  The darkness became a rigid reality, slipping into his body, freezing it and taking his mind with it. His careless feet disturbed the pentagram, broke through the protecting three circles. During a shard of a second he fell through reality and was part of the vacuum, the space between reality and time. During an abominable second he was part of the Thing which slept in its submerged city below the Pacific Ocean, he was one with the unnamed being which walked the African jungle, hiding in those caves no man had yet set foot into, and part of the hideous shape which stalked the Himalayas.

  The valley was changing. A green mist was clouding the moon, and the earth of the hill was turning a purple-black, filled with deep clefts. And through the hill, where the hill had been, the temple stood, hideous in its alien architecture. The entrance was black, a waiting dark mouth. On top of the building an alien fire was burning, sending small streamers of flame upward to the green moon.

  He went forward, no more seeing the frozen crowd of worshipers, passing through them as if they were immaterial ghosts of a dead past. He went into the temple, where his feet threw no echoes, passing along the aisle with its abominable statues and inscriptions till he stood in front of the image. He didn’t lift his head and look It in Its face, but his hands reached out and took the book which was lying opened at the clawed feet of the image. His whole being rebelled at the touch of the book, yet his fingers caressed it as he turned the pages. His eyes stared down at formulas and words which he knew his tongue wasn’t meant to utter, yet his mouth moved and he began speaking.

  “Tec djivvaiga nicoigh’Inadaeyi... micaroigghlrihde...”

  Throw it away, his mind screamed at his body. Drop it and run! But his mind was a prisoner inside his own skull, his body no longer obeyed the commands of his brain; and suddenly he realized that in fact his body had seemingly been acting on its own for some time. He tried to close his eyes, but in vain. His lips continued their forming of alien words, speaking them loudly, and the most horrible thing was that he also understood them and knew what he was doing.

  “Ggh’lgha djecai Cyäegha pfh'gai d’whoggl, micaroi tec..."

  His hands closed the book and he spread his arms, for the first time looking up at the hideous face of the titanic statue.

  “Tec Cyäegha djiwaigh! Tec Cyäegha fht’hgain!” he screamed, and the walls of the temple took his words and repeated them in an endlessly continuing alien gibbering.

  The walls shuddered, and then the earth below his feet moved sluggishly as if an enormous fat worm were trying to get out. Outside there was confused screaming, but then there came a scream so loud that it seemed to tear his eardrums, and a maniacal mindless cackle whose pitch rose higher and higher, a horrible wordless sound of triumph and hate. Cracks appeared in the walls of the temple, and small but growing streams of dust began to fall down. The statues collapsed and broke as they crashed on the ground. Above his head, great cracks spiderwebbed with lightning’s speed across the ceiling; great chunks of stone came loose and fell down, but turned into the dust before they reached the ground. Herbert fell down on his knees, burying his face in the dirt, and frantically held his hands over his ears trying in vain to stop the sound.

  Then suddenly the sounds diminished, and an alien silence fell on the hill. Slowly he looked up. The temple was gone, and he was sitting on top of the Dark Hill. All around him, people were lying on the ground in varied positions. Some were still squirming, their fingers eating into the sides of their heads, their faces distorted, painful masks of agony. Others too were rising, their staring eyes frightened orbits in their faces, redly lit by the still burning fires. They looked up at the moon, the great green moon above the valley and the hill.

  Then there came a faint but quickly accelerating sound of howling laughter, a high-pitched shrieking and gasping sound as no human throat could produce. The air began moving around the moon, as if the moon were the center of a great black cloud, just before membranous veils lifted from the moon and they saw that it was a gigantic eye staring down at them. Around the eye, the sky split; deep clefts opened through which darkness began to ooze, a darkness blacker than the night, which crawled down as a set of slimy tentacles, taking on more form, more definite shape.

  Then finally something was standing, outlined against the black sky, something which had tentacles of darkness and a green-glowing eye, something which just laughed at them, an insane laughter.

  Herbert turned and ran, and so did the others. The Thing didn’t follow them; it didn’t need to. Its shadow was everywhere over the valley.

  Through Its own layers of reality, Cyäegha looked down on the miniature valley, and at the same time It looked upward through the hill from below and inside, where parts of Its gigantic body were lying, buried in subterranean depths. Yet it did not matter now what body was which, because finally the barrier was crumbling, the realities were shifting and flowing together into one Being which was Cyäegha. And It hated with the power and strength of aeons of cultivating that hatred. It had no eyes as such, but It tasted reality with all the feelers of Its multiple body, and so It also watched the crumbling of the temple where these idiot beings had been worshiping for centuries an image which didn’t look like Cyaegha at all, because Its shape changed as Its own reality. These idiot beings had maintained Its imprisonment by keeping the guardians, but now the five-pointed star had lost one of its points; the Elder Sign was gone. It did not matter that the idiot beings had done this all through stupidity, even the revenge It had been waiting for was devoid of any real emotion, except hatred. Revenge demands a reason, and It had no need for a reason. It was only hatred.

  Herbert realized all this as he was stumbling and falling down the Dark Hill, fighting his way through the darkness. His feet slipped as the earth trembled again under him. Falling, he turned around and saw the hill move, as if something big were worming its way out of the earth, a colossal molehill, spitting earth, rocks, and vegetation in all directions. Then the top of the hill split wide open, and from inside the hill they came, crawling awkwardly on their clawed legs, shifting their bloated leathery bodies: the Nagaae, beings like those he had seen in his all too real nightmares. A continuing stream of the toad-like monstrosities rose from the depths of the hill, pale and eyeless, adapted to the hideous life in tunnels and subte
rranean caves of darkness. And after them, something else came, a shape throwing its gelatin tentacles upward where they met the dark essence of the moon-eyed shadow, and they fused, flowed together and became one hideous abomination, an affront to all laws of Earthly nature.

  Whimpering and screaming men and women hurried past Herbert, pushing each other in their hurry to get away. Some fell and remained on the ground, trying to bury their faces into the earth to escape the glances of the green eye.

  This must be madness, a small part whimpered in Herbert’s brain. Surely this can’t be really happening. It’s all rubbish after all, a crazy experiment in pseudo-science, just some old formulas and incantations. I’m having a nightmare, and I must wake up. God, I must awake, I must awake before I go mad too!

  His skull imploded, bones seeming to wring their shards into his brain, and then he knew that it was real. Something wriggled itself out of the deep caverns of his mind, something very cold and slimy, and very frightening because it was known yet unknown to his waking mind. As he slowly stood up, he felt his body going numb, the blood becoming thicker in his veins and then stopping to run altogether. There was a brief white flash in the back of his head as his heart stopped. He brought up his hands and saw dark spots beginning to appear on their backs, as the body tissues quickly degenerated below the skin. The soft skin layers, flesh, muscles, and sinews became fluid, an amoeba-like mass. His curled-up tongue dried in his mouth, a piece of hard leather pushing against his teeth, before it crumbled into dust choking his throat. His body was swaying as he felt his mind changing, trying to save itself while the body died with him still inside it. There was a fleeting sense of movement, of well defined searching for something which his mind knew to be there, a meeting point somewhere in the senseless void through which he drifted aimlessly, and then he...