Carson's brows drew together as he read the excerpt:
Men know him as the Dweller in Darkness, that brother of the Old
Ones called Nyogtha, the Thing that should not be. He can be
summoned to Earth's surface through certain secret caverns and
fissures, and sorcerers have seen him in Syria and below the
black tower of Leng; from the Thang Grotto of Tartary he has
come ravening to bring terror and destruction among the
pavilions of the great Khan. Only by the looped cross, by the
Vach-Viraj incantation and by the Tikkoun elixir may he be
driven back to the nighted caverns of hidden foulness where he
dwelleth.
Leigh met Carson's puzzled gaze calmly. "Do you understand now?"
"Incantations and elixirs!" Carson said, handing back the paper.
"Fiddlesticks!"
"Far from it. That incantation and that elixir have been known to
occultists and adepts for thousands of years. I've had occasion to use
them myself in the past on certain—occasions. And if I'm right about
this thing——" He turned to the door, his lips compressed in a
bloodless line. "Such manifestations have been defeated before, but the
difficulty lies in obtaining the elixir—it's very hard to get. But I
hope ... I'll be back. Can you stay out of the Witch Room until then?"
"I'll promise nothing," Carson said. He had a dull headache, which had
been steadily growing until it obtruded upon his consciousness, and he
felt vaguely nauseated. "Good-bye."
He saw Leigh to the door and waited on the steps, with an odd reluctance
to return to the house. As he watched the tall occultist hurry down the
street, a woman came out of the adjoining house. She caught sight of
him, and her huge breasts heaved. She burst into a shrill, angry tirade.
Carson turned, staring at her with astonished eyes. His head throbbed
painfully. The woman was approaching, shaking a fat fist threateningly.
"Why you scare my Sarah?" she cried, her swarthy face flushed. "Why you
scare her wit' your fool tricks, eh?"
Carson moistened his lips.
"I'm sorry," he said slowly. "Very sorry. I didn't frighten your Sarah.
I haven't been home all day. What frightened her?"
"T'e brown t'ing—it ran in your house, Sarah say——"
The woman paused, and her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. She made a
peculiar sign with her right hand—pointing her index and little fingers
at Carson, while her thumb was crossed over the other fingers. "T'e old
witch!"
She retreated hastily, muttering in Polish in a frightened voice.
Carson turned, went back into the house. He poured some whisky into a
tumbler, considered, and then set it aside untasted. He began to pace
the floor, occasionally rubbing his forehead with fingers that felt dry
and hot. Vague, confused thoughts raced through his mind. His head was
throbbing and feverish.
At length he went down to the Witch Room. He remained there, although he
did not work; for his headache was not so oppressive in the dead quiet
of the underground chamber. After a time he slept.
* * * * *
How long he slumbered he did not know. He dreamed of Salem, and of a
dimly-glimpsed, gelatinous black thing that hurtled with frightful speed
through the streets, a thing like an incredibly huge, jet-black ameba
that pursued and engulfed men and women who shrieked and fled vainly. He
dreamed of a skull-face peering into his own, a withered and shrunken
countenance in which only the eyes seemed alive, and they shone with a
hellish and evil light.
He awoke at last, sat up with a start. He was very cold.
It was utterly silent. In the light of the electric bulb the green and
purple mosaic seemed to writhe and contract toward him, an illusion
which disappeared as his sleep-fogged vision cleared. He glanced at his
wrist-watch. It was two o'clock. He had slept through the afternoon and
the better part of the night.
He felt oddly weak, and a lassitude held him motionless in his chair.
The strength seemed to have been drained from him. The piercing cold
seemed to strike through to his brain, but his headache was gone. His
mind was very clear—expectant, as though waiting for something to
happen. A movement near by caught his eye.
A slab of stone in the wall was moving. He heard a gentle grating sound,
and slowly a black cavity widened from a narrow rectangle to a square.
There was something crouching there in the shadow. Stark, blind horror
struck through Carson as the thing moved and crept forward into the
light.
It looked like a mummy. For an intolerable, age-long second the thought
pounded frightfully at Carson's brain: _It looked like a mummy!_ It was
a skeleton-thin, parchment-brown corpse, and it looked like a skeleton
with the hide of some great lizard stretched over its bones. It stirred,
it crept forward, and its long nails scratched audibly against the
stone. It crawled out into the Witch Room, its passionless face
pitilessly revealed in the white light, and its eyes were gleaming with
charnel life. He could see the serrated ridge of its brown, shrunken
back....
Carson sat motionless. Abysmal horror had robbed him of the power to
move. He seemed to be caught in the fetters of dream-paralysis, in which
the brain, an aloof spectator, is unable or unwilling to transmit the
nerve-impulses to the muscles. He told himself frantically that he was
dreaming, that he would presently awaken.
The withered horror arose. It stood upright, skeleton-thin, and moved to
the alcove where the iron disk lay embedded in the floor. Standing with
its back to Carson it paused, and a dry and sere whisper rustled out in
the dead stillness. At the sound Carson would have screamed, but he
could not. Still the dreadful whisper went on, in a language Carson knew
was not of Earth, and as though in response an almost imperceptible
quiver shook the iron disk.
It quivered and began to rise, very slowly, and as if in triumph the
shriveled horror lifted its pipestem arms. The disk was nearly a foot
thick, but presently as it continued to rise above the level of the
floor an insidious odor began to penetrate the room. It was vaguely
reptilian, musky and nauseating. The disk lifted inexorably, and a
little finger of blackness crept out from beneath its edge. Abruptly
Carson remembered his dream of a gelatinous black creature that hurtled
through the Salem streets. He tried vainly to break the fetters of
paralysis that held him motionless. The chamber was darkening, and a
black vertigo was creeping up to engulf him. The room seemed to rock.
Still the iron disk lifted; still the withered horror stood with its
skeleton arms raised in blasphemous benediction; still the blackness
oozed out in slow ameboid movement.
There came a sound breaking through the sere whisper of the mummy, the
quick patter of racing footsteps. Out of the corner of his eye Carson
saw a man come racing into the Witch Room. It was the occultist, Leigh,
and his eyes were blazing in a face of deathly pallor. He flung himself
past Carson to the alcove where the black horror was surging into view.