Carstairs led Crow through the coven’s ring and pointed to the circle with the white-painted ascending node. “Stand there, Titus Crow,” he commanded. “And have no fear.”
Doing as he was instructed, Crow was glad for the cellar’s flickering lighting and its fume-heavy atmosphere, which made faces ruddy and mobile and his trembling barely noticeable. And now he stood there, his feet in the mouth of the ascending node, as Carstairs took up his own position in the adjoining circle. Between them, in the “eye” where the circles interlocked, a large hourglass trickled black sand from one almost empty globe into another which was very nearly full.
Watching the hourglass and seeing that the sands had nearly run out, now Carstairs threw back his cowl and commanded: “Look at me, Titus Crow, and heed the Wisdom of the Worm!” Crow stared at the man’s eyes, at his face and cassocked body.
The chanting of the acolytes grew loud once more, but their massed voice no longer formed Crow’s name. Now they called on the Eater of Men himself, the loathsome master of this loathsome rituaclass="underline"
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!
“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi—”
And the sand in the hourglass ran out!
“Worm!” Carstairs cried as the others fell silent. “Worm, I command thee—come out!”
Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow’s lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man’s mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.
And out of that mouth—out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head—there now appeared a writhing white flood of maggots, grave worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!
“Now, Titus Crow, now!” cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. “Take my hand!” And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.
“No!” said Titus Crow. “No, I will not!”
Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried, “What?” His cassock billowed with hideous movement. “Give me your hand—I command it!”
“Do your worst, wizard,” Crow yelled. back through gritted teeth.
“But…I have your Number! You must obey!”
“Not my Number, wizard,” said Crow, shaking his head, and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of terror filling the cellar.
“You lied!” Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. “You…cheated! No matter—a small thing.” In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. “Worm, he is yours. I command you—take him!”
Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor—and drew back from Crow’s circle as from a ring of fire. “Go on!” Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. “Who is he? What does he know? I command you!”
“I know many things,” said Crow. “They do not want me—they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916—on second December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr. Carstairs!”
The 2nd December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes. “A Master!” Crow heard the whisper. “A twenty-two!”
“No!” Carstairs fell to his knees. “No!”
He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. “Durrell, to me!” His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.
“Not me!” shrieked Durrell, flinging off his cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. “Not me!” Wildly he clambered from sight—and eleven like him hot on his heels.
“No!” Carstairs gurgled once more.
Crow stared at him, still unable to avert his eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final—the first!—dark, Arab visage of his origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer’s face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.
Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:
“For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs…”
• • •
Later, in his right mind but changed forever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they crawled. Crow barely noticed them.
The tires of his car paid them no heed whatever.
The House of the Temple
Let’s step hack a year or two from Lord of the Worms. In April 1980, while serving out my last year at the Training Centre of the Royal Military Police, I mistakenly sent out two copies of The House of the Temple…a genuine error on my part—in no way my usual practice—as double submissions of that sort are much frowned upon. However, one copy went to editor Lin Carter who was editing a line of newly revived, mass market paperback issues of “Weird Tales” under the Zebra imprint, and the other to my then good friend Francesco Cova in Genoa, Italy. Cova was looking for quality stories for his exceptional Italian/English-language semi-pro “Kadath” magazine, and I had promised to do my very best for him. This novella is one of my best, I fancy, not least because both Carter and Cova bought it and brought it out uncomfortably close together in respectively, “Weird Tales” vol. 48, No. 3, and “Kadath” vol. 1, No. 3—the latter being in fact the true first in November 1980. This last quarter century has seen the story reprinted more than once, most notably in my Fedogan & Bremer collection “A Coven of Vampires.”
(Incidentally, when that last-mentioned collection went out of print very quickly after publication, it became Fedogan & Bremer’s fastest selling hook. While there’s no direct association, F&B picked up the Best Small press award at the very next World Fantasy Convention.)
I. The Summons
I suppose under the circumstances it is only natural that the police should require this belated written statement from me; and I further suppose it to be in recognition of my present highly nervous condition and my totally unwarranted confinement in this place that they are allowing me to draw the thing up without supervision. But while every kindness has been shown me, still I most strongly protest my continued detainment here. Knowing what I now know, I would voice the same protest in respect of detention in any prison or institute anywhere in Scotland…anywhere in the entire British Isles.
Before I begin, let me clearly make the point that, since no charges have been levelled against me, I make this statement of my own free will, fully knowing that in so doing I may well extend my stay in this detestable place. I can only hope that upon its reading, it will be seen that I had no alternative but to follow the action I describe.