New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 10

  'I... that is, we...' Harry began.

  'Ah! - English! You are English, yes? Or perhaps American?' His heavily accented voice, clotted and guttural, sounded like the gurgling sound of a black subterranean stream. Julia thought that his throat must be full of phlegm, as she clutched at Harry's arm.

  'Tourists, eh?' the ancient continued. 'Come to see old M/~hrsen's books? Or perhaps you don't know why you've come?' He clasped his hands tightly together, threw back his head, and gave a short coughing laugh.

  'Why, we ... that is ...' Harry stumbled again, feeling foolish, wondering just why they had come.

  'Please enter,' said the old man, standing aside and ushering them deeper, irresistibly in. 'It is the books, of course it is. They all come to see M/~hrsen's books sooner or later. And of course there is the view from the tower. And the catacombs...'

  'It was the ruins,' Harry finally found his voice. 'We saw the old building from the road, and -'

  'Picturesque, eh. The ruins in the trees... Ah! - but there are other things here. You will see.'

  'Actually,' Julia choked it out, fighting with a sudden attack of nausea engendered by the noisome aspect of their host, 'we don't have much time...'

  The old man caught at their elbows, yellow eyes flashing in the gloomy interior. 'Time? No time?'

  his hideous voice grew intense in a moment. 'True, how true. Time is running out for all of us!'

  It seemed then that a draft, coming from nowhere, caught at the great door and eased it shut. As the gloom deepened Julia held all the more tightly to Harry's arm, but the shrunken custodian of the place had turned his back to guide them on with an almost peremptory: 'Follow me.'

  And follow him they did.

  Drawn silently along in his wake, like seabirds following an ocean liner through the night, they climbed stone steps, entered a wide corridor with an arched ceiling, finally arrived at a room with a padlocked door. M~hrsen unlocked the door, turned, bowed, and ushered them through.

  'My library,' he told them, 'my beautiful books.' With the opening of the door light had flooded the corridor, a beam broad as the opening in which musty motes were caught, drifting, eddying about in the disturbed air. The large room - bare except for a solitary chair, a table, and tier upon tier of volumeweighted shelves arrayed against the walls - had a massive window composed of many tiny panes.

  Outside the sun had finally won its battle with the clouds; it shone wanly afar, above the distant mountains, its autumn beam somehow penetrating the layers of grime on the small panes.

  'Dust!' cried the ancient. øl~he dust of decades - of decay! I cannot keep it down.' He turned to them.

  'But see, you must sign.'

  'Sign?' Harry questioned. 'Oh, I see. A visitors' book.' 'Indeed, for how else might I remember those who visit me here? See, look at all the names...'

  The old man had taken a leather-bound volume from the table. It was not a thick book, and as M~hrsen turned the parchment leaves they could see that each page bore a number of signatures, each signature being dated. Not one entry was less than ten years old. Harry turned back the pages to the first entry and stared at it. The ink had faded with the centuries so that he could not easily make out the ornately flourished signature. The date, on the other hand, was still quite clear:

  'Frfihling, 1611.'

  'An old book indeed,' he commented, q~ut recently, it seems, visitors have been scarce...' Though he made no mention of it, frankly he could see little point in his signing such a book.

  'Sign nevertheless,' the old man gurgled, almost as if he could read Harry's mind. 'Yes, you must, and the madam too.' Harry reluctantly took out a pen, and M~hrsen watched intently as they scribbled their signatures.

  'Ah, good, good!' he chortled, rubbing his hands together. Here we have it - two more visitors, two more names. It makes an old man happy, sometimes, to remember his visitors... And sometimes it makes him sad.'

  'Oh?' Julia said, interested despite herself. ~fay sad?'

  'Because I know that many of them who visited me here are no more, of course!' He blinked great yellow eyes at them.

  'But look, look here,' he continued, pointing a grimy sharp-nailed finger at a signature. ~his one:

  "Justin Geoffrey, 12 June, 1926." A young American peet, he was. A man of great promise. Alas, he gazed too long upon the Black Stone!'

  The Black Stone?' Harry frowned. 'But-'

  'And here, two years earlier: "Charles Dexter Ward" - another American, come to see my books.

  And here, an Englishman this time, one of your own countrymen, "John Kingsley Brown."' He let the pages flip through filthy fingers. 'And here another, but much more recently. See: "Hamilton Tharpe, November, 1959." Ah, I remember Mr Tharpe well! We shared many a rare discussion here in this very room. He aspired to the priesthood, but - ' He sighed. 'Yes, seekers after knowledge all, but many of them ill-fated, I fear...'

  'You mentioned the Black Stone,' Julia said. 'I wondered - ?'

  'Hmm? Oh, nothing. An old legend, nothing more. It is believed to be very bad luck to gaze upon the stone.'

  'Yes,' Harry nodded. 'We were told much the same thing in Stregoicavar.'

  'Ah!' M~hrsen immediately cried, snapping shut the book of names, causing his visitors to jump. 'So you, too, have seen the Black Stone?' He returned the volume to the table, then regarded them again, nodding curiously. Teeth yellow as his eyes showed as he betrayed a sly, suggestive smile.

  'Now see here -' Harry began, irrational alarm and irritation building in him, welling inside.

  M~hrsen's attitude, however, changed on the instant. 'A myth, a superstition, a fairy story!' he cried, holding out his hands in the manner of a conjurer

  who has nothing up his sleeve. 'After all, what is a stone but a stone?'

  'We'll have to be going,' Julia said in a faint voice. Harry noticed how she leaned on him, how her hand trembled as she clutched his arm.

  'Yes,' he told their wretched host, 'I'm afraid we really must go.'

  'But you have not seen the beautiful books!' M~hrsen protested. 'Look, look -' Down from a shelf he pulled a pair of massive antique tomes and opened them on the table. They were full of incredible, dazzling illuminated texts; and despite themselves, their feelings of strange revulsion, Harry and Julia handled the ancient works and admired their great beauty.

  'And this book, and this.' M5hrsen piled literary treasures before them. 'See, are they not beautiful.

  And now you are glad you came, yes?'

  'Why, yes, I suppese we are,' Harry grudgingly replied.

  'Good, good! I will be one moment - some refreshment - please look at the books. Enjoy them...'

  And M~hrsen was gone, shuffling quickly out of the door and away into gloom.

  These books,' Julia said as soon as they were alone. 'They must be worth a small fortune!'

  'And there are thousands of them,' Harry answered, his voice awed and not a little envious. 'But what do you think of the old boy?'

  'He - frightens me,' she shuddered. 'And the way he smells!'

  'Ssh? he held a finger up to his lips. 'He'll hear you. Where's he gone, anyway?'

  'He said something about refreshment. I certainly hope he doesn't think I'll eat anything he's prepared!'

  'Look here!' Harry called. He had moved over to a bookshelf near the window and was fingering the spines of a particularly musty-looking row of books. 'Do you know, I believe I recognize some of these titles? My father was always interested in the occult, and I can remember - '

  'The occult?' Julia echoed, cutting him off, her voice nervous again. He had not noticed it before, but she was starting to look her age. It always happened when her nerves became frazzled, and then all the makeup in the world could not remove the stress lines.

  'The occult, yes,' he replied. 'You know, the "Mystic Arts", the "Supernatural", and what have you.

  But what a collection! There are books here in Old German, in Latin, Dutch - and listen to some of the titles:
<
br />   'De Lapide Philosophico . . . De Vermis Mysteriis . . . Othuum Omnicia ... Liber Ivonis ...

  Necronomicon.' He gave a low whistle, then: 'I wonder what the British Museum would offer for this lot?

  They must be near priceless!'

  'They are priceless!' came a guttural gloating cry from the open door. M~hrsen entered, bearing a tray with a crystal decanter and three large crystal glasses. 'But please, I ask you not to touch them.

  They are the pride of my whole library.'

  The old man put the tray upon an uncluttered corner of the table, unstoppered the decanter, and poured liberal amounts of wine. Harry came to the table, lifted his glass, and touched it to his lips.

  The wine was deep, red, sweet. For a second he frowned, then his eyes opened in genuine appreciation. 'Excellent!' he declared.

  'The best,' MShrsen agreed, 'and almost one hundred years old. I have only six more bottles of this vintage. I keep them in the catacombs. When you are ready you shall see the catacombs, if you so desire.

  Ah, but there is something down there that you will find most interesting, compared to which my books are dull, uninteresting things.'

  'I don't really think that I care to see your - ' Julia began, but MShrsen quickly interrupted.

  'A few seconds only,' he pleaded, 'which you will remember for the rest of your lives. Let me fill your glasses.'

  The wine had warmed her, calming her treacherous nerves. She could see that Harry, despite his initial reservations, was now eager to accompany M~hrsen to the catacombs.

  'We have a little time,' Harry urged. 'Perhaps - ?' 'Of course,' the old man gurgled, 'time is not so short, eh?' He threw back his own drink and noisily smacked his lips, then shepherded his guests out of the room, mumbling as he did so: 'Come, come - this way - only a moment - no more than that.'

  And yet again they followed him, this time because there seemed little else to do; deeper into the gloom of the high-ceilinged corridor, to a place where MShrsen took candles from a recess in the wall and lit them; then on down two, three flights of stone steps into a nitrous vault deep beneath the ruins; and from there a dozen or so paces to the subterranean room in which, reclining upon a couch of faded silk cushions, MShrsen's revelation awaited them.

  The room itself was dry as dust, but the air passing gently through held the merest promise of moisture, and perhaps this rare combination had helped preserve the object on the couch. There she lay - central in her curtain-veiled cave, behind a circle of worn, vaguely patterned stone tablets reminiscent of a miniature Stonehenge - a centuried mummy-parchment figure, arms crossed over her abdomen, remote in repose. And yet somehow... unquiet.

  At her feet lay a leaden casket, a box with a hinged lid, closed, curiously like a small coffin. A design on the lid, obscure in the poor light, seemed to depict some mythic creature, half-toad, half-dog. Short tentacles or feelers fringed the thing's mouth. Harry traced the dusty raised outline of this chimera with a forefinger.

  'It is said she had a pet- a companion creaturewhich slept beside her bed in that casket,' said M/~hrsen, again anticipating Harry's question.

  Curiosity overcame Julia's natural aversion. 'Who is ... who was she?'

  The last true Priestess of the Cult,' M/ihrsen answered. 'She died over four hundred years ago.' Re Turks?' Harry asked.

  The Turks, yes. But if it had not been them... who can say? The cult has always had its opponents.'

  The cult? Don't you mean the order?' Harry looked puzzled. 'I've heard that you're - ah - a man of God.

  And if this place was once a church -'

  'A man of God?' M(ihrsen laughed low in his throat. 'No, not of your God, my friend. And this was not a church but a temple. And not an order, a cult. I am its priest, one of the last, but one day there may be more. It is a cult which can never die.' His voice, quiet now, nevertheless echoed like a warning, intensified by the acoustics of the cave.

  'I think,' said Julia, her own voice weak once more, 'that we should leave now, Harry.'

  'Yes, yes,' said M/ihrsen, 'the air down here, it does not agree with you. By all means leave - but first there is the legend.'

  'Legend?' Harry repeated him. 'Surely not another legend?'

  'It is said,' Miihrsen quickly continued, 'that if one holds her hand and makes a wish...'

  'No!' Julia cried, shrinking away from the mummy. '! couldn't touch that!'

  'Please, please,' said M/ihrsen, holding out his arms to her, 'do not be afraid. It is only a myth, nothing more.'

  Julia stumbled away from him into Harry's arms. He held her for a moment until she had regained control of herself, then turned to the old man. 'All right, how do I go about it? Let me hold her hand and make a wish - but then we must be on our way. I mean, you've been very hospitable, but -'

  'I understand,' M/~hrsen answered. 'This is not the place for a gentle, sensitive lady. But did you say that you wished to take the hand of the priestess?'

  'Yes,' Harry answered, thinking to himself: 'if that's the only way to get to hell out of here!'

  Julia stepped uncertainly, shudderingly back against the curtained wall as Harry approached the couch.

  M/~hrsen directed him to kneel; he did so, taking a leathery claw in his hand. The elbow joint of the mummy moved with suprising ease as he lifted the hand from her withered abdomen. It felt not at all dry but quite cool and firm. In his mind's eye Harry tried to look back through the centuries. He wondered who the girl had really been, what she had been like. 'I wish,' he said to himself, 'that I could know you as you were...'

  Simultaneous with the unspoken thought, as if engendered of it, Julia's bubbling shriek of terror shattered the silence of the vault, setting Harry's hair on end and causing him to leap back away from the mummy. Furthermore, it had seemed that at the instant of Julia's scream, a tingle as of an electrical charge had travelled along his arm into his body.

  Now Harry could see what had happened. As he had taken the mummy's withered claw in his hand, so Julia had been driven to clutch at the curtains for support. Those curtains had not been properly hung but merely draped over the stone surface of the cave's walls; Julia had brought them rustling down. Her scream had originated in being suddenly confronted by the hideous bas-reliefs which completely covered the walls, figures and shapes that seemed to leap and cavort in the flickering light of M~hrsen's candles.

  Now Julia sobbed and threw herself once more into Harry's arms, clinging to him as he gazed in astonishment and revulsion at the monstrous carvings. The central theme of these was an octopod creature of vast proportions - winged, tentacled, and dragonlike, and yet with a vaguely anthropomorphic outline - and around it danced all the demons of hell. Worse than this main horror itself, however, was what its attendant minions were doing to the tiny but undeniably human figures which also littered the walls. And there, too, as if directing the nightmare activities of a group of these small, horned horrors, was a girl - with a leering dog-toad abortion that cavorted gleefully about her feet!

  Hieronymus Bosch himself could scarcely have conceived such a scene of utterly depraved torture and degradation, and horror finally burst into livid rage in Harry as he turned on the exultant keeper of this nighted crypt. 'A temple, you said, you old devil! A temple to what? - to that obscenity?'

  'To Him, yes!' M~hrsen exulted, thrusting his hooknose closer to the rock-cut carvings and holding up the candles the better to illuminate them. 'To Cthulhu of the tentacled face, and to all his lesser brethren.'

  Without another word, more angry than he could ever remember being, Harry reached out and bunched up the front of the old man's coat in his clenched fist. He shook M~hrsen like a bundle of moth-eaten rags, cursing and threatening him in a manner which later he could scarcely recall.

  'God!' he finally shouted. 'It's a damn shame the Turks didn't raze this whole nest of evil right down to the ground! You... you can lead the way out of here right now, at once, or I swear I'll break your neck where you stand!'

 
'If I drop the candles,' M~hrsen answered, his voice like black gas bubbles breaking the surface of a swamp, 'we will be in complete darkness!'

  'No, please!' Julia cried. 'Just take us out of here...' 'If you value your dirty skin,' Harry added, 'you'll keep a good grip on those candles!'

  M~hrsen's eyes blazed sulphurous yellow in the candlelight and he leered hideously. Harry turned him about, gripped the back of his grimy neck, and thrust him ahead, out of the blasphemous temple. With Julia stumbling in the rear, they made their way to a flight of steps that led up into daylight, emerging some twenty-five yards from the main entrance.

  They came out through tangled cobwebs into low decaying vines and shrubbery that almost hid their exit. Julia gave one long shudder, as if shaking off a nightmare, and then hastened to the car.

  Not once did she look back.

  Harry released MShrsen who stood glaring at him, shielding his yellow eyes against the weak light.

  They confronted each other in this fashion for a few moments, until Harry turned his back on the little man to follow Julia to the car. It was then that MShrsen whispered:

  'Do not forget: I did not force you to do anything. I did not make you touch anything. You came here of your own free will.'

  When Harry turned to throw a few final harsh words at him, the old man was already disappearing down into the bowels of the ruins.

  In the car as they drove along the track through the sparsely clad trees to the road, Julia was very quiet. At last she said: 'That was quite horrible. I didn't know such people existed.'