"Haven't you ever seen it?" I asked. “Living so close to our uncle, all these years ...."
He grimaced. “Unde Hiram didn’t get along with my dad any better than he got along with the rest of the family, I guess! Anyway, I never got invited down. Queer old bird he must have been, but not a bad sort, after all. By the way—I didn’t get around to mentioning it before—did you know that you and I are his beneficiaries?"
I blinked, fairly thunderstruck. “Do you mean it?”
He grinned, nodding. “Everything but the money, I'm afraid! That goes to some sort of foundation. But we can split the house, the library and furnishings. Reckon you’ll be most interested in the books ... I understand our uncle had quite a library. Well, come on; let’s wash up and get something to eat.”
III.
THE events of the following morning I will pass over without comment.
There were only a few people at the services, a couple of our uncle’s old servants and a curiosity-seeker or two. The burial was done rather hastily, and I noticed it was a closed-casket service, for some reason.
After lunch, we motored down the coast. It was a brisk, bright day, and Brian drove with the top down. I could tell Brian had some news for me—he was fairly bursting with it. Finally, I asked him what was up. He gave me a mischievous sidewise glance.
"Remember, when you wrote you were coming, you asked me to find out anything I could about that 'Ponape figurine' affair?" he asked. I nodded. "Well, I got together some newspaper clippings for you—give them to you later. But I discovered something positively weird while looking into the matter ..."
And he mentioned the name of the late Professor Harold Hadley Copeland. Time was, what with all the newspaper sensationalism connected with that name, it would instantly have been familiar to the reader of Sunday supplements. Bur how swiftly yesterday’s news becomes ancient history! I suppose few people would even recognize the name nowadays, although his death in a San Francisco mental institution was only some-seven years ago.
It had been Professor Copeland who had discovered the notorious Ponape figurine, which formed the nexus about which so many strange and baffling mysteries had centered. The figurine had been part of the collection of rare Pacific antiquities and books which Copeland had left to the Sanbourne Institute in 1928. It seems that the figurine was in some way connected to an ancient, little-known cult which worshiped "Great Old Ones from the stars", whose myths and legends were presumably recorded in a number of old, seldom-found books. Several of these books Copeland had left to the Sanbourne institute, as they bore upon the matter of his research. What I now learned from the lips of my cousin thoroughly astounded me.
"The old prof had a copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, did you know?" asked Brian, teasingly, playing with my curiosity.
I nodded. The book, by a German scholar named von Junzt, was a principal rext in the study of the cult.
"And some pages from the Yuggya Chants" he added, “and a copy of something called the R’lyeh Text—”
“Yes, I know all about that," I said impatiently. “Get on with it, won’t you?"
"Well, Win, where do you suppose Professor Copeland got these rare books from in the first place?"
I shrugged, irritably. "How the devil should I know?"
Still smiling, Brian dropped his bombshell. “He bought them from Uncle Hiram."
I’m sure my jaw must have dropped, making me look ludicrous, for after another sidewise glance, Brian began chuckling.
“Great Scott.” I murmured, "what a coincidence! D'you mean to say our uncle was interested in occultism—in this Alhazredic demonology?"
He frowned, not recognizing the term. "’Alhazredic’—?”
“After the Arabic demonologist, Abdul Alhazred. author of the celebrated Necronomicon, one of the rarest books in the world. We have a copy back at Miskatonic, kept under lock and key. The only one in the western hemisphere.”
He confessed that he had no idea about our uncle’s interests, scholarly or otherwise. "Bur Uncle Hiram made a fortune, you know ... and he went in for book-collecting in a big way ... anything old and rare and obscure and hard to find was just his meat. He had purchasing agents all over the world working for him ... say, bet that sounds good to you, since you’ve inherited your pick of his books!"
I didn’t say anything, feeling a bit uncomfortable. While my Uncle Hiram’s death had meant nothing at all to me personally, there is something a trifle ghoulish about profiting from another man's demise. I changed the subject.
The long drive down to Durnham Beach took us by a scenic route which disclosed frequent glimpses of the rugged, rocky coast, with the smiling blue Pacific lazing beyond under clear sunlight. But, as we approached the town, the highway turned inland, and the scenery became by gradual stages oddly drab and even depressing. We passed acres of scrub pine and mud flats full of stagnant, scummed water. Then followed, for dreary miles, abandoned farms and fields where the raw, unhealthy earth, eroded by the salt breeze from the ocean, exposed beneath pitifully thin layers of topsoil nothing but dead and sterile sand. Sea birds honked and cried mournfully, as if to fit the mood of uneasy depression that had fallen over us both. Even the clear sunlight seemed vitiated and dull, although the skies were as clear as ever.
I said something about this to my cousin, and he nodded soberly.
“It’s not a very healthy place,” he remarked. "Town’s been going downhill as far back as I can remember—especially when they started to close down the canneries and people were out of jobs. I can remember when all these farms were going strong, lots of orange groves, truck gardening ... some communities thrive and grow, and others just sort of crumble and go rotten at the heart ...."
We passed a roadsign and the name on it seemed vaguely familiar to me, like something I half-remembered reading years ago in the newspapers. I asked Brian about it. He looked grim.
“Hubble’s Field? Sure, you must have read about it—ten or fifteen years ago, something like that. They found all those bodies buried there—hundreds, I think it was.”
His remark sent a shiver of cold apprehension through me. Of course, I remembered the Hubble’s Field atrocity—who could forget it? The county was putting in a pipeline for some reason, and when they came to excavate a certain stretch of condemned property, they began to dig up the remains of human bodies, literally hundreds, as Brian said, although from the way the bodies were dismembered and jumbled together, it was never possible to ascertain an accurate count. Somebody on the radio at the rime remarked that if you took all of the mass murderers in history and put them together, you wouldn’t have half as many corpses as those found buried in Hubble’s Field ... oddly gruesome thing to remember! Or to think about.
"Yes, I remember something about it now," I murmured. “They never did find out who did it, or why, did they?”
Brian uttered a harsh little bark of laughter. "No, they didn't." he said shortly. “What they did find out, was that it had been going on for one hell of a long time ... the further down they dug, they began to find scraps of homespun and tanned leather and old bottles from the early settlers ... deeper down, bits and pieces of old Spanish armor were found mixed in with the skeletons ... and beneath that—”
He broke off, saying nothing. I nudged him.