The Taint and Other Novellas (43 page)

“Mr. Crow,” said Carstairs in unusually unctuous tones, “I may require a little assistance tonight…”

“Assistance?” Crow peered at the other through red-rimmed eyes. “My assistance?”

“If you have no objection. I have some work to do in the cellar, which may well keep me until the middle of the night. I do not like to keep you from your bed, of course, but in the event I should call for you”—his voice stepped slyly down the register—“you will answer, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Crow hoarsely answered, his eyes now fixed on the burning orbs of the occultist.

“You will come when I call?” Carstairs now droned, driving the message home. “No matter how late the hour? You will awaken and follow me? You will come to me in the night, when I call?”

“Yes,” Crow mumbled.

“Say it, Titus Crow. Tell me what you will do, when I call.”

“I shall come to you,” Crow obediently answered. “I will come to you when you call me.”

“Good!” said Carstairs, his face ghastly as a skull. “Now rest, Titus Crow. Sit here and rest—and wait for my call. Wait for my call…” Silently he turned and strode from the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

Crow got up, waited a moment, switched off the one bulb he had allowed to burn. In his alcove bedroom he drew the curtains and put on the light, then quickly changed into his dressing gown. He took Harry Townley’s .45 revolver out from under his mattress, loaded it and tucked it out of sight in the large pocket of his robe. Now he opened the curtains some twelve inches and brushed through them into the library proper, pacing the floor along the pale path of light from the alcove.

To and fro he paced, tension mounting, and more than once he considered flight; even now, close as he was to those dark mysteries which at once attracted and repelled him. The very grit of his makeup would not permit it, however, for his emotions now were running more to anger than the terror he had expected. He was to be, to
have been,
this monster Carstairs’ victim! How now, knowing what the outcome would be—praying that it
would be
as he foresaw it—could he possibly turn away? No, flight was out of the question; Carstairs would find a substitute: the terror would continue. Even if Crow were to go, who could say what revenge might or might not fly hot on his heels?

At 9:30 P.M. cars pulled up at the house, quiet as hearses and more of them than at any other time, and through a crack in his shades Crow watched shadowy figures enter the house. For a little while then there were faint, subdued murmurings and creakings; all of which Crow heard with ears which strained in the library’s darkness, fine-tuned to catch the merest whisper. A little later, when it seemed to him that the noises had descended beneath the house, he put out the alcove light and sat in unmitigated darkness in the chair where Carstairs had left him. And all about him the night grew heavy, until it weighed like lead upon his head and shoulders.

As the minutes passed he found his hand returning again and again to the pocket where Townley’s revolver lay comfortably heavy upon his thigh, and every so often he would be obliged to still the nervous trembling of his limbs. Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed the hour of eleven, and as at a signal Crow heard the first susurrations of a low chanting from beneath his feet. A cold sweat immediately stood out upon his brow, which he dabbed away with a trembling handkerchief.

The Ritual of the Worm had commenced!

Angrily Crow fought for control of himself…for he knew what was coming. He cursed himself for a fool—for several fools—as the minutes ticked by and the unholy chanting took on rhythm and volume. He stood up, sat down, dabbed at his chill brow, fingered his revolver…and started at the sudden chiming of the half hour.

Now, in an instant, the house seemed full of icy air, the temperature fell to zero! Crow breathed the black, frigid atmosphere of the place and felt the tiny hairs crackling in his nostrils. He smelled sharp fumes—the unmistakable reek of burning henbane and opium—and sat rigid in his chair as the chanting from the cellar rose yet again, in a sort of frenzy now, throbbing and echoing as with the acoustics of some great cathedral.

The time must surely approach midnight, but Crow no longer dared glance at his watch.

Whatever it had been, in another moment his terror passed; he was his own man once more. He sighed raggedly and forced himself to relax, knowing that if he did not, that the emotional exhaustion must soon sap his strength. Surely the time—

—Had come!

The chanting told him: the way it swelled, receded and took on a new meter. For now it was his own name he heard called in the night, just as he had been told he would hear it.

Seated bolt upright in his chair, Crow saw the bookshelf door swing open, saw Carstairs framed in the faintly luminous portal, a loose-fitting cassock belted about his narrow middle. Tall and gaunt, more cadaverous than ever, the occultist beckoned.

“Come, Titus Crow, for the hour is at hand. Rise up and come with me, and learn the great and terrible mysteries of the worm!”

Crow rose and followed him, down the winding steps, through reek of henbane and opium and into the now luridly illumined cellar. Braziers stood at the four corners, glowing red where heated metal trays sent aloft spirals of burned incense, herbs, and opiates; and round the central space a dozen robed and hooded acolytes stood, their heads bowed and facing inward, toward the painted, interlocking circles. Twelve of them, thirteen including Carstairs, a full coven.

Carstairs led Crow through the coven’s ring and pointed to the circle with the white-painted ascending node. “Stand there, Titus Crow,” he commanded. “And have no fear.”

Doing as he was instructed, Crow was glad for the cellar’s flickering lighting and its fume-heavy atmosphere, which made faces ruddy and mobile and his trembling barely noticeable. And now he stood there, his feet in the mouth of the ascending node, as Carstairs took up his own position in the adjoining circle. Between them, in the “eye” where the circles interlocked, a large hourglass trickled black sand from one almost empty globe into another which was very nearly full.

Watching the hourglass and seeing that the sands had nearly run out, now Carstairs threw back his cowl and commanded: “Look at me, Titus Crow, and heed the Wisdom of the Worm!” Crow stared at the man’s eyes, at his face and cassocked body.

The chanting of the acolytes grew loud once more, but their massed voice no longer formed Crow’s name. Now they called on the Eater of Men himself, the loathsome master of this loathsome ritual:

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi—”

And the sand in the hourglass ran out!

“Worm!”
Carstairs cried as the others fell silent.
“Worm, I command thee—come out!”

Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow’s lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man’s mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.

And out of that mouth—out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head—there now appeared a writhing white flood of maggots, grave worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!

“Now, Titus Crow, now!” cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. “Take my hand!” And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.

“No!” said Titus Crow. “No, I will not!”

Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried,
“What?”
His cassock billowed with hideous movement. “Give me your hand—
I command it!”

“Do your worst, wizard,” Crow yelled. back through gritted teeth.

“But…I have your Number! You
must
obey!”

“Not my Number, wizard,” said Crow, shaking his head, and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of terror filling the cellar.

“You lied!” Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. “You…
cheated!
No matter—a small thing.” In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. “Worm, he is yours. I command you—
take him!”

Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor—and drew back from Crow’s circle as from a ring of fire. “Go on!” Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. “Who is
he?
What does he know? I command you!”

“I know many things,” said Crow. “They do not want me—they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916—on second December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr. Carstairs!”

The 2nd December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes.
“A Master!”
Crow heard the whisper.
“A twenty-two!”

“No!” Carstairs fell to his knees.
“No!”

He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. “Durrell, to me!” His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.

“Not me!” shrieked Durrell, flinging off his cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. “Not me!” Wildly he clambered from sight—and eleven like him hot on his heels.

“No!”
Carstairs gurgled once more.

Crow stared at him, still unable to avert his eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final—the first!—dark, Arab visage of his origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer’s face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.

Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:

“For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs
the very worm that gnaws;
till out of corruption horrid life springs…”

• • •

Later, in his right mind but changed forever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they crawled. Crow barely noticed them.

The tires of his car paid them no heed whatever.

The House of the Temple

Let’s step hack a year or two from Lord of the Worms. In April 1980, while serving out my last year at the Training Centre of the Royal Military Police, I mistakenly sent out two copies of The House of the Temple…a genuine error on my part—in no way my usual practice—as double submissions of that sort are much frowned upon. However, one copy went to editor Lin Carter who was editing a line of newly revived, mass market paperback issues of “Weird Tales” under the Zebra imprint, and the other to my then good friend Francesco Cova in Genoa, Italy. Cova was looking for quality stories for his exceptional Italian/English-language semi-pro “Kadath” magazine, and I had promised to do my very best for him. This novella is one of my best, I fancy, not least because both Carter and Cova bought it and brought it out uncomfortably close together in respectively, “Weird Tales” vol. 48, No. 3, and “Kadath” vol. 1, No. 3—the latter being in fact the true first in November 1980. This last quarter century has seen the story reprinted more than once, most notably in my Fedogan & Bremer collection “A Coven of Vampires.”

(Incidentally, when that last-mentioned collection went out of print very quickly after publication, it became Fedogan & Bremer’s fastest selling hook. While there’s no direct association, F&B picked up the Best Small press award at the very next World Fantasy Convention.)

I. The Summons

I suppose under the circumstances it is only natural that the police should require this belated written statement from me; and I further suppose it to be in recognition of my present highly nervous condition and my totally unwarranted confinement in this place that they are allowing me to draw the thing up without supervision. But while every kindness has been shown me, still I most strongly protest my continued detainment here. Knowing what I now know, I would voice the same protest in respect of detention in any prison or institute anywhere in Scotland…anywhere in the entire British Isles.

Before I begin, let me clearly make the point that, since no charges have been levelled against me, I make this statement of my own free will, fully knowing that in so doing I may well extend my stay in this detestable place. I can only hope that upon its reading, it will be seen that I had no alternative but to follow the action I describe.