• • •
I do not know where my muscles found the strength to carry my tottering and mazed body out of that house. Sanity did not drive me, I admit that, for I was quite insane. I wanted to stand beneath the stabbing lightning and scream at those awful, rain-blurred stars. I wanted to bound, to float in my madness through eldritch depths of unhallowed black blood. I wanted to cling to the writhing breasts of Yibb-Tstll. Insane—insane, I tell you, I gibbered and moaned, staggering through the thunder-crazed streets until, with a roar and a crash, sanity-invoking lightning smashed me down…
You know the rest. I awoke to this world of white sheets; to you, the police psychiatrist, with your soft voice…Why must you insist that I keep telling my story? Do you honestly think to make me change it? It’s true, I tell you! I admit to killing my brother’s body—but it wasn’t his mind that I burned out! You stand there babbling of awful eye diseases. Julian had no eye disease! D’you really imagine that the other eye, the unburnt one which you found in that body—in my brother’s face—was his? And what of the pool of slime in the cellar and the stink? Are you stupid or something? You’ve asked for a statement, and here it is! Watch, damn you, watch while I scribble it down…you damn great crimson eye…always watching me…who would have thought that the lips of Bugg-Shash could suck like that? Watch, you redness you…and look out for the Scarlet Feaster! No, don’t take the paper away…
NOTE:
Sir,
Dr. Stewart was contacted as you suggested, and after seeing Haughtree he gave his expert opinion that the man was madder than his brother ever had been. He also pointed out the possibility that the disease of Julian Haughtree’s eyes had started soon after his partial mental recovery—probably brought on by constantly wearing dark spectacles. After Dr. Stewart left the police ward, Haughtree became very indignant and wrote the above statement.
Davies, our specialist, examined the body in the cellar himself and is convinced that the younger brother must, indeed, have been suffering from a particularly horrible and unknown ocular disease.
It is appreciated that there are one or two remarkable coincidences in the wild fancies of both brothers in relation to certain recent factual events—but these are, surely, only coincidences. One such event is the rise of the volcanic island of Surtsey. Haughtree must somehow have heard of Surtsey after being taken under observation. He asked to be allowed to read the following newspaper account, afterwards yelling very loudly and repeatedly: “By God! They’ve named it after the wrong mythos!” Thereafter he was put into a straitjacket of the arm-restricting type:
—BIRTH OF AN ISLAND—
Yesterday morning, the 16th November, the sun rose on a long, narrow island of tephra, lying in the sea to the north of Scotland. at latitude 63° 18’ North and longitude 20° 361⁄2?’ West. Surtsey, which was born on the 15th November, was then 130 feet high and growing all the time. The fantastic “birth” of the island was witnessed by the crew of the fishing vessel Isleifer II, which was lying west of Geirfuglasker, southernmost of the Vestmann Islands. Considerable disturbance of the sea—which hindered clear observation—was noticed, and the phenomena, the result of submarine volcanic activity, involved such awe-inspiring sights as columns of smoke reaching to two and a half miles high, fantastic lightning storms, and the hurling of lava-bombs over a wide area of the ocean. Surtsey has been named after the giant Surter, who—in Norse Mythology—“Came from the South with Fire to fight the God Freyr at Ragnarok,” which battle preceded the end of the world and the Twilight of the Gods. More details and pictures inside…
Still in the “jacket,” Haughtree finally calmed himself and begged that further interesting items in the paper be read to him. Dr. Davies did the reading, and when he reached the following report Haughtree grew very excited:
—BEACHES FOULED—
Garvin Bay, on the extreme North coast, was found this morning to be horribly fouled. For a quarter of a mile deposits of some slimy, black grease were left by the tide along the sands. The stench was so great from these unrecognizable deposits that fishermen were unable to put to sea. Scientific analysis has already shown the stuff to be of an organic base, and it is thought to be some type of oil. Local shipping experts are bewildered, as no known tankers have been in the area for over three months. The tremendous variety of dead and rotting fish also washed up has caused the people of nearby Belloch to take strong sanitary precautions. It is hoped that tonight’s tide will clear the affected area…
At the end of the reading Haughtree said: “Julian said they wouldn’t take him alive.” Then, still encased in the jacket, he somehow got off the bed and flung himself through the third-story window of his room in the police ward. His rush at the window was of such tremendous ferocity and strength that he took the bars and frame with him. It all happened so quickly there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.
Submitted as an appendix to my original report.
Sgt. J.T. Muir
23 November 1963.
Glasgow City Police
Lord of the Worms
Lord of the Worms
is another one of those stories that escapes Lovecraft’s influence, with the usual caveat in respect of its backdrop, of course. For how may one write a Mythos story without its customary theme? Well, whether or not, I did my best to do just that. In 1982, a year after leaving the Army following twenty-two years of service, and after Kirby McCauley had found himself more or less obliged to concentrate his agenting skills rather more exclusively on behalf of his most successful client (someone called Stephen King?), I sent Paul Ganley of Weirdbook Press—a semi-professional small press: basically a one-man-show—a copy of this novella. Paul’s reaction was immediate; he loved the story and bought it word for word after one reading. Later it dawned on me that I might have tried it first on “F&SF”, the magazine that had published
Born of the Winds
some six years earlier; it was that sort of story. “F&SF” would have paid somewhat better and I certainly needed the money, but Paul and his “Weirdbook Magazine” had been accepting and publishing my stories for quite some time and we had become firm friends. Another one of my personal favourites, LOTW features the occult investigator Titus Crow as a young man shortly after World War Two, long before he became involved with the Burrowers Beneath or suffered his Transition. The story made its debut in “Weirdbook 17,” 1983, and has seen its most recent reprint in my TOR collection, “Harry Keogh: Necroscope & Other Weird Heroes.”
Twenty-two is the Number of the Master! A 22 may only be described in glowing terms, for he is the Great Man. Respected, admired by all who know him, he has the Intellect and the Power and he has the Magic! Aye, he is the Master Magician. But a word of warning: just as there are Day and Night, so are there two sorts of Magic—White, and Black!
—Grossmann’s Numerology
VIENNA, 1776
I
The war was well over. Christmas 1945 had gone by and the New Year festivities were still simmering, and Titus Crow was out of a job. A young man whose bent for the dark and mysterious side of life had early steeped him in obscure occult and esoteric matters, his work for the War Department had moved in two seemingly unconnected, highly secretive directions. On the one hand he had advised the ministry in respect of certain of Der Führer’s supernatural interests, and on the other he had used the skills of the numerologist and cryptographer to crack the codes of his goose-stepping war machine. In both endeavors there had been a deal of success, but now the thing was finished and Titus Crow’s talents were superfluous. Now he was at a loss how best to employ himself. Not yet known as one of the world’s foremost occultists, nor even suspecting the brilliance he was yet to achieve in many diverse fields of study and learning—and yet fully conscious of the fact that there was much to be done and a course to be run—for the moment he felt without a purpose, a feeling not much to his liking. And this after living and working in bomb-ravaged London through the war years, with the fever and stress of that conflict still bottled inside him.