Looking back now in the light of what I already knew—certainly of what I should have guessed at that time—it must seem that I was guilty of an almost suicidal negligence in spending the rest of that day upstairs on my bed, tossing in nightmares brought on by the nervous exhaustion which beset me immediately after the incident at the pool. On the other hand, I had had little sleep the night before and Carl’s adventure had given me a terrific jolt; and so my failure to recognize the danger—how close it had drawn—may perhaps be forgiven.
In any event, I forced myself to wakefulness in the early evening, went downstairs and had coffee and a frugal meal of biscuits, and briefly visited Carl in his studio. He was busy—frantically busy, dripping with sweat and brushing away at his canvas—working on his loathsome painting, which he did not want me to see. That suited me perfectly for I had already seen more than enough of the thing. I did take time enough to tell him, though, that he should finish his work in the next two days; for on Friday or at the very latest Saturday morning I intended to blow the place sky high.
Then I went back upstairs, washed and shaved, and as the light began to fail so I returned to my uncle’s notebook. There were only three or four pages left unread, the first dated only days before his demise, but they were such a hodge-podge of scrambled and near-illegible miscellanea that I had the greatest difficulty making anything of them. Only that feeling of a burgeoning terror drove me on, though by now I had almost completely lost faith in making anything whatever of the puzzle.
As for my uncle’s notes: a basically orderly nature had kept me from leafing at random through his book, or perhaps I should have understood earlier. As it is, the notebook is lost forever, but as best I can I shall copy down what I remember of those last few pages. After that—and after I relate the remaining facts of the occurrences of that fateful hideous night—the reader must rely upon his own judgement. The notes then, or what little I remember of them:
“Levi’s or Mirandola’s invocation: “
Dasmass Jeschet Boene Doess Efar Duvema Enit Marous
.” If I could get the pronunciation right, perhaps…But what will the Thing be? And will it succumb to a double-barrelled blast? That remains to be seen. But if what I suspect is firmly founded…Is it a tick-thing, such as Von Junzt states inhabits the globular mantle of Yogg-Sothoth? (
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
, 78/16)—fearful hints—monstrous pantheon…And this merely a parasite to one of Them!
“The Cult of Cthulhu…immemorial horror spanning all the ages. The
Johansen Narrative
and the
Pnakotic Manuscript
. And the Innsmouth Raid of 1928; much was made of that, and yet nothing known for sure. Deep Ones, but…different again from this Thing.
“Entire myth-cycle…So many sources. Pure myth and legend? I think not. Too deep, interconnected, even plausible. According to Carter in SR, (AH ’59) p. 250-51,
They
were driven into this part of the universe (or into this time-dimension) by “Elder Gods” as punishment for a rebellion. Hastur the Unspeakable prisoned in Lake of Hali (again the lake or pool motif) in Carcosa; Great Cthulhu in R’lyeh, where he slumbers still in his death-sleep; Ithaqua sealed away behind icy Arctic barriers, and so on. But Yogg-Sothoth was sent
outside
, into a parallel place, conterminous with all space and time. Since YS is everywhere and when, if a man knew the gate he could call Him out…
“Did Chorazos and his acolytes, for some dark reason of their own, attempt thus to call Him out? And did they get this dweller in Him instead? And I believe I understand the reason for the pool. Grandfather knew. His interest in Nessie, the Lambton Worm, the Kraken of olden legend, naiads, Cthulhu…Wendy Smith’s burrowers feared water; and the sheer weight of the mighty Pacific helps keep C. prisoned in his place in R’lyeh—thank God! Water subdues these things…
“But if water confines It, why does It return to the water? And how may It leave the pool if not deliberately called out? No McGilchrist ever called it out, I’m sure, not willingly; though some may have suspected that something was here. No swimmers in the family—not a one—and I think I know why. It is an instinctive, an ancestral fear of the pool! No, of the unknown Thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…”
The thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…
Clammy with the heat, and with a debilitating terror springing from these words on the written page—these scribbled thought-fragments which, I was now sure, were anything but demented ravings—I sat at the old desk and read on. And as the house grew dark and quiet, as on the previous night, again I found my eyes drawn to gaze down through the open window to the surface of the still pool.
Except that the surface was no longer still!
Ripples were spreading in concentric rings from the pool’s dark centre, tiny mobile wavelets caused by—by what? Some disturbance beneath the surface? The water level was well down now and tendrils of mist drifted from the pool to lie soft, luminous and undulating in the moonlight, curling like the tentacles of some great plastic beast over the dam, across the drive to the foot of the house.
A sort of paralysis settled over me then, a dreadful lassitude, a mental and physical malaise brought on by excessive morbid study, culminating in this latest phenomenon of the old house and the aura of evil which now seemed to saturate its very stones. I should have done something—something to break the spell, anything rather than sit there and merely wait for what was happening to happen—and yet I was incapable of positive action.
Slowly I returned my eyes to the written page; and there I sat shivering and sweating, my skin crawling as I read on by the light of my desk lamp. But so deep my trancelike state that it was as much as I could do to force my eyes from one word to the next. I had no volition, no will of my own with which to fight that fatalistic spell; and the physical heat of the night was that of a furnace as sweat dripped from my forehead onto the pages of the notebook.
“…I have checked my findings and can’t believe my previous blindness! It should have been obvious. It happens when the water level falls below a certain point. It
has
happened every time there has been extremely hot weather—when the pool has started to
dry up
! The Thing needn’t be called out at all! As to why it returns to the pool after taking a victim: it must return before daylight. It is a fly-the-light. A haunter of the dark. A wampyre!…but not blood..Nowhere can I find mention of blood sacrifices. And no punctures or mutilations. What, then are Its “needs?” Did Dee know? Kelly knew, I’m sure, but his writings are lost…
“Eager now to try the invocation, but I wish that first I might know the true nature of the Thing. It takes the life of Its victim—but what else?”
“I have it!—God, I know—and I wish I did not know! But that
look
on my poor brother’s face…Andrew, Andrew…I know now why you looked that way. But if I can free you, you shall be freed. If I wondered at the nature of the Thing, then I wonder no longer. The answers are all there, in the
Cthäat A
. and
Hydrophinnae
, if only I had known exactly where to look. Yibb-Tstll is one such; Bugg-Shash, too. Yes, and the pool-thing is another…
“There have been a number down the centuries—the horror that dwelled in the mirror of Nitocris; the sucking, hunting thing that Count Magnus kept; the red, hairy slime used by Julian Scortz—familiars of the Great Old Ones, parasites that lived on
Them