In that very hour I left forever the ancient castle of my ancestors, and fled to London, vowing never to return to that haunt of horror where I had rashly and imprudently dared the ultimate blasphemy of striving to pierce the Veil that separates our sane and mundane sphere from regions of unguessable loathsomeness that lie beyond, yet dreadfully near to hand. I am glad that I burnt the Necnnomicon, and you should do the same, young Williams, for there are things men were not meant to know and sights of the very Pit upon which no sane man should dare to gaze. And still I shriek and cower when the church bells chance to ring, and ever are my dreams and my every waking hour rendered unspeakable by that last sight I had in the crypt, when the undying thing reared its fleshless head to peer with blinded eyes into my own, and I saw—and knew—those heavy brow ridges, those jutting cheekbones. that harsh and angular jaw and severely aquiline nose ... the very features that heredity has stamped upon every member of my line since time immemorial and the days of my remotest ancestors!
NOW that you've been introduced co Winfield Phillips, Hiram Stokely, and Anton Zarnak, I suppose you're ready for the following gloss on the Xothic cycle. If Lin Carter himself liked to write new Mythos tales to plug gaps in the system of the Mythos, some of us find it irresistible to write them to plug gaps left by writers like Lin himself. If he implied a sequel but did not provide one, then, well, it may be a dirty job, but some ill-omened acolyte has to do it.
Where is the Oriental Quarter, the stomping grounds of Dr. Anton Zarnak? You will note that in “Perchance to Dream” Lin Career placed it in New York. He borrowed the locale from Robert E. Howard’s Steve Harrison detective stories. Where did Howard envision River Street, China Alley etc.? It's hard to say! In "The Mystery of Taannernoe Lodge", River Street seems to be in New York City, but in "The Silver Heel" we are told that a character who had left the city might be in New York instead, while another character is said to have recently relocated from San Francisco, as if it were perhaps nearby. The West Coast has always seemed to me the most natural setting for the adventures of Steve Harrison and Anton Zarnak, and so it is in the present story.
The first appearance of "The Soul of the Devil-Bought" was in Cthulhu Cultus #5. 1996.
The Soul of the Devil-Bought
by Robert M. Price
THE telephone rang with a sound one does not typically expect telephones to make. This one sounded like a gong, and was in fact attached, in an arcane manner recalling the hammer and tympanum arrangement of the human ear, to a medium-sized brass gong somewhere in the surprisingly vast interior of the apartment. Muffled as it was by the many Oriental rugs and elaborate tapestries that insulated nearly the whole layout of the place, the mellow depth of the sound still managed to penetrate every inch of the strange domain. There would be but a single ring in any case, but this time a dusky hand reached out to the dumbbell-like receiver in a second flat, as the giant possessor of the hand, a turbaned and taciturn Sikh, had been standing like a posted guard next to the intricately carved teakwood pillar-table on which the telephone sat like a museum antiquity. Akbar Singh spoke the monosyllable with something suggesting imperious urgency: "Yes?" Then, “What is your business with my Master?”
The statuesque Sikh stood apparently alone in the book-lined study, as if he were a cigar-store Indian included among the exotic collection of antiques, curiosities, and finely bound books crowding the place. It was not his own sanctum sanctorum, and yet he seemed alone in it—till all at once the high-backed leather swivel chair behind the great mahogany desk spun around to face him. The face he saw was an accustomed one for all its peculiarity in the eyes of most of the few who had seen it. His subtle Eurasian face remained as passive as the Buddha's, yet his obliquely slanted eyes beneath a high, unfurrowed brow seemed to smolder with adventurous expectancy. It was almost as if he were following the telephone conversation telepathically, as perhaps he was.
Dr. Ancon Zarnak rose and reached across the cluttered desk top to receive the telephone from his servant. His eyes closed as he listened, as if meditating, as if seeking to pick up signals from his caller that the other was not intentionally sending. The silver-white lightning zigzag that mounted up from his widow’s peak to disperse through his otherwise jet-black hair might have suggested the drawing of psychic forces to his magnet-like brain.
"Yes, Mr. Maitland ... soon to be Dr. Maitland, is it not? Yes, I thought so. I was expecting your call. Never mind how, but it was the next natural development. No, that’s all right. I assume you are calling with reference to the Winfield inheritance? ... I am not without my sources."
Through all this, the giant Sikh let a small grin draw up the corners of his mouth. He was amused at the obvious confusion his master's prescience produced in such inquirers. He was no stranger to the feeling himself. If he felt a hint of amused superiority now, it was not because he understood Zarnak’s secret any better than the nonplused caller; he had simply become accustomed to the inexplicable. Now Dr. Zarnak was handing him back the receiver.
"We will depart at once, my friend. I felt it best not to require our scholarly caller to leave his ivory tower to venture the shadowed courts of our Oriental Quarter. The Sanbourne institute is no appreciable distance by car, and I suspect it will do us both good to get some fresh air." Akbar Singh nodded as he stepped away to fetch his master’s coat. Fresh air indeed—he had breathed little but drifting incense for some months now, half-suspecting that the fumes were meant to instill in him some psychic sensitivity, or else protection. He did not really care to know more.
AS the black sedan purred its way beyond the cobbled labyrinths of the Oriental Quarter and up the Southern California coast to Santiago, its driver felt relieved to open up the throttle till the county roadways brought them to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. To this institution the renowned Dr. Zarnak was no stranger. Indeed, it was from this place that he had earned the latest of his several doctoral degrees. His association with his alma mater was congenial, though he was scarcely the average alumnus.
Zarnak was not infrequently called upon to date or authenticate certain relics purchased by the Institute from various questionable vendors on River Street, where the wharves disgorged all manner of strange cargo brought in from obscure ports of call throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans, There was no use in scrupling over how such items were obtained, since legality meant little in most of the places these traders frequented. The antique objects might as well have been freshly exhumed from Davey Jones’ locker as far as any Westerner could tell. If one or one's institution did not take advantage of such opportunities, it was not to be doubted that others would.
It was in connection with quite a different matter that Zarnak was calling on Jacob Maitland, a zealous young graduate assistant at Sanbourne just nearing the end of his doctoral work and about to get his thesis in final shape to defend before his committee. He had done his work on a curious old document called the Ponape Scripture, a palm papyrus manuscript brought to the Sanbourne Institute not long before by the ill-fated scholar-explorer Harold Hadley Copeland. Maitland had had occasion before now to contact Dr. Zarnak, whose acquaintance he had made during the last months of Zarnak’s own work at Sanbourne. He had read Zamak's dissertation, A New Scrutiny of the Polynesian Genesis according to the Cthäat Aquadingen. Young Maitland had at once perceived the crucial utility of some of his elder colleague’s methods as applied to his own project, for he suspected that the obscure pages of the Ponape Scripture might be written in some lost variant of the Naacal language of fabled Mu. But these matters had been far from his mind when he had telephoned Zarnak an hour earlier.