He repressed a shudder as he reviewed the fine script, covering several sheets, which he had written with his fountain pen: the draft of the shard’s contents. He remembered reading how, some forty- four years before, the first examiners of the Shards, Doctors Dalton and Woodford, had announced them to be untranslatable. He recalled their published statements disparaging the importance of the discovery; and the odd haste with which the specimens had been shunted to this obscure museum and locked away. And, thinking of how completely these fragments had been forgotten by scientific men, he wondered if enough could have been deciphered of the halfobliterated symbols to provide a hint of the appalling nature of the meaning — enough to make the translators guess at the authorship of these elaborately worked tablets found in a geologic stratum deposited long before man’s anthropoid ancestors had evolved from lower orders. He had never seriously suspected that the Shards had been deliberately discarded because of their contents, for he attributed his own success with them to certain recondite documents that had suggested the key. But now he wondered.
When he resumed work in his study, he had deciphered enough to know that the portion of writing enclosed in a sort of cartouche effect near the bottom of the shard was a formula of evocation which, according to the preceding text, would call the “Warder” to the presence of whomever would recite it. While this formula appeared complete, as evidenced by the enclosing oblong, the cloven edge of the tablet was directly beneath; a circumstance which suggested that the complementary formula of dismissal, universally met with in ancient spells, had been on the missing fragment.
The evocation proved very different from its prologue. It was purely phonetic in nature, and there was no slightest clue to its meaning. Associated with the preceding inscription, or indeed with any material familiar to Whitney, it was nothing but characters which, when pronounced, would result in a jumble of meaningless sounds. But unquestionably the correct utterance of these sounds was all that was theoretically necessary to call the “Warder.” Whether or not the person pronouncing them understood their significance had nothing to do with their efficacy. This would depend, according to all he had read in other sources, entirely on the faithfulness with which the evocator was able to reproduce the intended sound waves, to which the written formula occupied the relation of a quasi-musical score.
Whitney devoted the greatest care to these phonetics, checking and rechecking his work. When he was satisfied with this, he again went over the prologue, amplifying and refining his original draft. As he progressed, the sinister nature of the supposed entity and the dubious results attendant on summoning it became more and more disquieting. He gathered — assuming his translation to be fairly accurate — that the “Warder” had been considered the custodian or guardian of all knowledge of every description. But much of the reference was almost meaningless, making a singularly alien impression — and he was impelled, as he had been years before, to the belief that a genuine understanding of the Shards would require a background of culture and tradition profoundly at variance to any he had ever encountered. Yet there seemed no doubt of the malign character of the entity, and the undefined risk involved in summoning it. Even in the heat of enthusiasm which had carried him through fifteen hours of arduous effort, Whitney was shocked at the inferences which his interpretation disclosed. He recalled the dire and incredible tales of the fabled elder gods in the Book of Eibon and the frightful allusions in the Necronomicon. Dread Cthulhu, the unspeakable practices of the Tsathoggua cult, and the revolting habits of fiendish Avaloth — of which latter, the fifth Shard had treated at some length- returned vividly to mind and made the mythical era in which the elder gods had walked the earth and bent all things to a callous, inhuman purpose seem unpleasantly real. A bleak, uneasy sense of foreboding settled on his spirits. He sensibly attributed this to the natural reaction from the strain of his work and went to bed, planning to review it all on the following day.
In the morning he told Mrs. Huessman, his housekeeper, that he was not to be disturbed, and retired to his study. Part of the day was given to an exhaustive checking and revision of the translation. He finally made a copy of this on his antiquated typewriter, much in the spirit of a man who cleans up every possible detail before attacking a distasteful task. For much of the time, especially during the grey, dismal afternoon, was spent in mental preparation for an act from which he recoiled with instinctive dread. At times the incubus of impending disaster weighed so heavily on him that he half resolved to dabble no further in the unholy revelations of the Shards, but to burn the translation and banish forever the purpose of evoking the entity. But at this, a revulsion set in, and the idea of abandoning his dream of omniscience struck so keenly at his heart that any risk seemed preferable to accepting it. The early dusk found him tired from the mental strife, but calm. He had decided.
After his dinner he would read the spell aloud and await the result. After all, it was almost certainly nothing but an impotent superstition, ancient of course, but no more effective because of its age. The likelihood of anything at all responding to the summons seemed utterly remote; yet he felt that he could not resign himself to defeat without being satisfied that his last possibility was definitely hopeless. He passed to the dining room with a calm and confident stride.
It was a wild November night, just such a night as that on which his earlier excursion into occult studies had ended, with a raw wind shrilling, and whipping the tall, cone-shaped poplars that grew about the house. After serving his dinner, Mrs. Huessman had left for the night, and Whitney was alone. He lingered over his coffee longer than usual; then lit a second cigarette and returned to the study. He touched a match to the wood piled ready in the fireplace, and paced slowly back and forth as the room warmed.
Presently he seated himself at the old walnut desk which had been the companion of so many years of study. He cast a long look around the dim-lit room, lined by row on row of varied volumes, letting his eyes dwell on each cabinet and table and massive leather chair. Now that the moment had come he could no longer minimize the danger in calling to his presence this shadowy being that stalked, grisly and menacing, through the annals of an elder world. His mind dwelt fleetingly on the folly of it all.
Successful, honored, economically secure — why was he meddling with forces so dark and sinister that fellow scientists had shrunk from them aghast? For a moment his resolution wavered; then he had shaken off the fearsome doubts once more.
What was life, if he could not achieve his long-sought goal? A few more years like those of the past; then life and career would be ended, with all his hopes and dreams and restless longings unfulfilled for want of a moment’s stiffening courage, if he failed to act now. He knew he would not nerve himself to the ordeal a second time.
He began the evocation.
He did not rise and wave his arms and chant; nor light censers, nor enclose himself in a pentacle. He was attempting to draw to his presence an entity from so far back in the dawn of existence that these questionable appurtenances of later wizardry would have been meaningless to it. He was dealing in the crudely forceful elements of all theurgy, stripped of latter day trappings and embellishments.
The formula lay before him, but the grotesque gutturals were burnt indelibly into his brain. He could never forget them, unless through some hiatus of memory akin to the nervous stage-fright of an actor or public speaker. Nevertheless, he took no chances, but kept his eyes on the manuscript.