Haggopian and Other Stories (70 page)

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 a while 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 liveth 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 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, he 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…

The Sorcerer’s Dream

If you read my introductory note to “The Black Recalled”, then here in respect of publishing data we have a similar situation. “The Sorcerer’s Dream” is a Primal Land story, the first of which (“The House of Cthulhu”,) had been the lead story in Stuart Schiff’s
Whispers
’ initial issue back in 1973. So,
“
The Sorcerer’s Dream” being the intended fade-out tale in some future Primal Lands volume, it seemed only right I should sell it to Schiff who had published the first one. Er, are we okay so far? Anyway, he did indeed buy and publish it in “Whispers No. 13/14” (a double issue) in October 1979. But let me reiterate: when I wrote “Dream” in February 1976, I never intended it to be the last Primal Lands story, only that it would be the final tale in the foreseen and/or hoped for, above mentioned, eventual, Primal Lands volume…(Phew!) Which is exactly how it worked out: I would write several Primal Lands tales in the following years, which eventually my good friend and publisher W. Paul Ganley (wouldn’t you just know it would be him?) would join up into one of Weirdbook Press’s fastest-selling titles. Namely,
The House of Cthulhu & Others
. And exactly as I had foreseen it, “Dream” was the last story in the book—just as it is here, at the very end…

As translated by Thelred Gustau, from Teh Atht’s Legends of the Olden Runes

I, Teh Atht, have dreamed a dream; and now, before dawn’s light may steal it from my old mind—while yet Gleeth the blind God of the Moon rides the skies over Klühn and the stars of night peep and leer hideously—I write it down in the pages of my rune-book, wherein all the olden runes are as legends unfolded. For I have pondered the great mysteries of time and space, have solved certain of the riddles of the Ancients themselves, and all such knowledge is writ in my rune-book for the fathoming of sorcerers as yet unborn.

As to why I dreamed this dream, plumbing the Great Abyss of future time to the very END itself, where only the gaunt black Tomb of the Universe gapes wide and empty, my reasons were many. They were born in mummy-dust sifting down to me through the centuries; in the writings of mages ancient when the world was still young; in cipherless hieroglyphs graven in the stone of Geph’s broken columns; aye, and in the vilest nightmares of shrieking madmen, whose visions had driven them mad. And such as these reasons were they drew me as the morning sun draws up the ocean mists on Theem’hdra’s bright strand, for I cannot suffer a mystery to go undiscovered.

The mystery was this: that oft and again over the years I had heard whispers of a monstrous alien God who seeped down from the stars when the world was an inchoate infant—whose name, Cthulhu, was clouded with timeless legends and obscured in half-forgotten myths and nameless lore—and such whispers as I had heard troubled me greatly…