A gaunt and desiccated thing it was, for many centuries had passed since last the face of Iraan had looked upon the day, but I cared naught for that, for there, clasped in bony talons against its naked ribs, the hands of the ancient conjurer clenched to its bosom the Black Seal of unknown metal brought down from the stars when the Earth was but newly formed.
A shrill wailing came from our slaves, where they huddled some distance away, for in truth had the sorcerer Ygoth warned that his dead master guarded for all time the Seal. Even as Kuth and I bent to wrest the Black Seal from its grasp, the dried lids of Iraan flew open and eyes of red fire glared awfully into our own. Those claw-like hands flew up to close about the very throat of Kuth, who gave voice to a cry of unutterable terror, and locked his own brawny hands about those skeletal wrists, striving to break their merciless grip.
Strong and young was my tall brother, but the withered horror in the tomb possessed preternatural vigor; his eyes popped, his tongue lolled, and his face blackened. He cast me an imploring look from eyes bright with terror. But the mummy had released the Seal in order to battle against the desecrators who had disturbed its rest, so I prudently snatched up the sigil and bore it to a place of safety amidst our baggage, some distance apart, where the hairy submen grovelled and whined. There I lingered for a little time, striving to master my fears and to still my labouring heart.
When I cautiously drew near the tomb again. Kuth was dead, crushed to gory ruin against the bony ribs of the mummy, whose crimson-soaked remains had already begun to crumble into dust beneath the merciless rays of the sun, and which was sustained no longer by that unnatural animation.
We hastily buried my brother’s corpse beneath the sands of Voor, and fled from that accursed place, returning to the city; and my heart was filled with a cruel and bitter joy: for I had made the Red Offering, and now the hierophantic throne was mine.
And so was the maiden Yeena ...
IN an early page of notes for "the Ythogtha Tales", Lin Career called chis story “The Inhabitant of the Crypt.” For its planned appearance as part of the episodic novel The Terror Out of Time he had intended to change the title to "Zanthu." I have chosen to stick with the title borne by the story in its only publication thus far, in the 1971 Arkham House anthology Dark Things, where it was called "The Dweller in the Tomb." It is likely enough that Lin borrowed the title for this story from one of Robert E. Howard’s Conrad and Kirowan stories, "The Dwellers under the Tombs" (included in the 1978 Berkley collection Black Canaan).
On the other hand, it is an obvious choice from the paradigm of possible Lovecraft/Weird Tales horror titles, all constructed on the same syntagmic scheme: a participial noun followed by a spacial preposition, followed in turn by an ominous-sounding location. It’s easy, just like that old Mad magazine gag inviting you to write your own Bob Dylan song by picking one cliche Dylan term from column A, another from column B, a third from column C, etc., since all the songs were so much alike that the words were nearly interchangeable. First, pick your noun: the Horror, the Lurker, the Haunter, the Whisperer, the Colour, the Shadow, the Dweller, the Inhabitant. Next, choose your preposition: at, on, over, under, out of, in. Next, your location: Red Hook, Warrendown, the Graveyard, Time, Space, the Ages, the Aeons, Darkness, the Dark, the Threshold, the Tomb, the Lake, Innsmouth, the Gulf. Presto! You’re a Mythos writer!
This story, and the four others that with it were intended to be The Terror Out of Time are being published in this book with Lin’s intended revisions. These revised versions appear in print for the first time.
The Dweller in the Tomb
by Lin Carter
NOTE by Henry Stephenson Blaine, Ph.D., curator of the Manuscripts Collection of the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities in Santiago, California:
THE following extract from the journals of the Copeland-Ellington expedition to central Asia (1913), made by Harold Hadley Copeland, the expedition's only survivor, were discovered during a routine inventory of Professor Copeland’s papers, which were bequeathed by his estate to the Sanbourne Institute in April 1928. It is hardly necessary for me to remark that Professor Copeland’s is a very distinguished name in the field of Pacific archaeology. His great text. Prehistory in the Pacific: A Preliminary Investigation with Reference to the Myth Patterns of Southeast Asia (1902), remains the standard classic in its field and has been an inspiration to at least two generations of scholars who have followed in his footsteps—myself but the least among many. Even his Polynesian Mythology, with a Note on the Cthulhu Legend Cycle (1906), although it reflects his unfortunate and growing enthusiasm for questionable occult “theories”, which led to the regrettable erosion of his scholarly reputation and is perhaps indicative of the mental aberrations which dominated his declining years, remains to this day a massive work of scientific research. It is even possible, I think, to admire the monumental scholarship that went into his The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture (1911), although even the kindest critic cannot bur regret that Professor Copeland's developing mania led him to accept too readily flimsy theories of a bygone Pacific civilization of absurdly remote antiquity based insecurely on doubtful documents and the lore of obscure cult survivals a presumably ancient and highly advanced civilization, of which the enigmatic Easter Island images and the megalithic ruined cities of Ponape and Nan-Matal are assumed mere vestiges.
The reader of this issue of the Journal of Pacific Antiquities in which the directors have seen fit to include the following excerpta, must be aware that the publication of that particular work in 1911 led to a rather hasty prejudging of Professor Copeland’s admitted aberration and to his being requested to resign from the Pacific Area Archaeological Association, of which he was a cofounder and a past president.
In all his colorful career, however, no episode is more controversial than the central Asian expedition of 1915 and the discovery of the so-called “Zanthu Tablets”, reputedly in the stone tomb of a prehistoric wizard in the mountain country north of the Tsang plateau region. The expedition was lost, Ellington having died of red-water fever only a few days our from the advance station at Sangup-Koy; Copeland himself was near death when, three months later, emaciated from advanced starvation and in a raving, incoherent state due to hysteria and deprivation, he was discovered in the dunes beyond the Russian meteorological outpost at Kovortny on the borders of the Chian province of Mongolia. Slowly recovering his health, Professor Copeland unfortunately published, in a privately printed brochure issued in 1916, a conjectural and fragmentary translation of the Zanthu Tablets. The edition contained material so shocking, chaotic, and revolutionary, so thoroughly at odds with even the most imaginative theories yet set forth on early Pacific civilizations, that not only was the booklet officially suppressed, but the resultant public outcry, from press and pulpit alike, occasioned the final extinction of what little remained of his scientific reputation.
Amid the widespread publicity surrounding the discovery and translation of the debatable and blasphemous Zanthu Tablets, no reasonably authentic account has been published to this day concerning the course of the ill-fated expedition itself, nor of the peculiar circumstances precedent and subsequent to the opening of the famous tomb of the prehistoric Central Asian shaman. Professor Copeland’s own account, from his unedited journals, herewith follows. Some will see in these disjointed passages only the psychotic spewings of a diseased brain; others, perhaps more deeply versed in certain obscure texts of ancient lore and in the surviving myth patterns of little-known Pacific and Asian cults, may find troubling hints of a primordial and frightening truth.