Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (73 page)

It appealed to Leverett perfectly. He barely noticed his guest as he pored over the brittle pages. Allard was describing a megalithic structure his doomed narrator had encountered in the crypts beneath an ancient churchyard. There were references to “elder glyphics” that resembled his lattice devices.

“Look here,” pointed Dana. “These incantations he records here from Alorri-Zrokros’s forbidden tome: ‘Yogth-Yugth-Sut-Hyrath-Yogng’— Hell, I can’t pronounce them. And he has pages of them.”

“This is incredible!” Leverett protested. He tried to mouth the alien syllables. It could be done. He even detected a rhythm.

“Well, I’m relieved that you approve. I’d feared these last few stories and fragments might prove too much for Kent’s fans.”

“Then you’re going to have them published?”

Dana nodded. “Scotty was going to. I just hope those thieves weren’t searching for this—a collector would pay a fortune. But Scotty said he was going to keep this secret until he was ready for announcement.” His thin face was sad.

“So now I’m going to publish it myself—in a deluxe edition. And I want you to illustrate it.”

“I’d feel honored!” vowed Leverett, unable to believe it.

“I really liked those drawings you did for the trilogy. I’d like to see more like those—as many as you feel like doing. I mean to spare no expense in publishing this. And those stick things …”

“Yes?”

“Scotty told me the story on those. Fascinating! And you have a whole notebook of them? May I see it?”

Leverett hurriedly dug the notebook from his file, returned to the manuscript.

Dana paged through the book in awe. “These things are totally bizarre—and there are references to such things in the manuscript, to make it even more fantastic. Can you reproduce them all for the book?”

“All I can remember,” Leverett assured him. “And I have a good memory. But won’t that be overdoing it?”

“Not at all! They fit into the book. And they’re utterly unique. No, put everything you’ve got into this book. I’m going to entitle it
Dwellers in the Earth
, after the longest piece. I’ve already arranged for its printing, so we begin as soon as you can have the art ready. And I know you’ll give it your all.”

He was floating in space. Objects drifted past him. Stars, he first thought. The objects drifted closer.

Sticks. Stick lattices of all configurations. And then he was drifting among them, and he saw that they were not sticks—not of wood. The lattice designs were of dead-pale substance, like streaks of frozen starlight. They reminded him of glyphics of some unearthly alphabet—complex, enigmatic symbols arranged to spell … what?

And there
was
an arrangement—a three-dimensional pattern. A maze of utterly baffling intricacy …

Then somehow he was in a tunnel. A cramped, stone-lined tunnel through which he must crawl on his belly. The dank, moss-slimed stones pressed close about his wriggling form, evoking shrill whispers of claustrophobic dread.

And after an indefinite space of crawling through this and other stone-lined burrows, and sometimes through passages whose angles hurt his eyes, he would creep forth into a subterranean chamber. Great slabs of granite a dozen feet across formed the walls and ceiling of this buried chamber, and between the slabs other burrows pierced the earth. Altar-like, a gigantic slab of gneiss waited in the center of the chamber. A spring welled darkly between the stone pillars that supported the table. Its outer edge was encircled by a groove, sickeningly stained by the substance that clotted in the stone bowl beneath its collecting spout.

Others were emerging from the darkened burrows that ringed the chamber—slouched figures only dimly glimpsed and vaguely human. And a figure in a tattered cloak came toward him from the shadow—stretched out a claw-like hand to seize his wrist and draw him toward the sacrificial table. He followed unresistingly, knowing that something was expected of him.

They reached the altar, and in the glow from the cuneiform lattices chiseled into the gneiss slab he could see the guide’s face. A mouldering corpse-face, the rotted bone of its forehead smashed inward upon the foulness that oozed forth.…

And Leverett would awaken to the echo of his screams.…

He’d been working too hard, he told himself, stumbling about in the darkness, getting dressed because he was too shaken to return to sleep. The nightmares had been coming every night. No wonder he was exhausted.

But in his studio his work awaited him. Almost fifty drawings finished now, and he planned another score. No wonder the nightmares.

It was a grueling pace, but Dana Allard was ecstatic with the work he had done. And
Dwellers in the Earth
was waiting. Despite problems
with typesetting, with getting the special paper Dana wanted—the book only waited on him.

Though his bones ached with fatigue, Leverett determinedly trudged through the graying night. Certain features of the nightmare would be interesting to portray.

The last of the drawings had gone off to Dana Allard in Petersham, and Leverett, fifteen pounds lighter and gut-weary, converted part of the bonus check into a case of good whiskey. Dana had the offset presses rolling as soon as the plates were shot from the drawings. Despite his precise planning, presses had broken down, one printer quit for reasons not stated, there had been a bad accident at the new printer—seemingly innumerable problems, and Dana had been furious at each delay. But the production pushed along quickly for all that. Leverett wrote that the book was cursed, but Dana responded that a week would see it ready.

Leverett amused himself in his studio constructing stick lattices and trying to catch up on his sleep. He was expecting a copy of the book when he received a letter from Stefroi:

Leverett’s bushy brows rose. Allard had intimated certain dark rituals in which the stick lattices figured. But Allard had written over thirty years ago, and Leverett assumed the writer had stumbled onto something similar to the Mann Brook site. Stefroi was writing about something current.

He rather hoped Stefroi would discover nothing more than an inane hoax.

The nightmares haunted him still—familiar now, for all that its scenes and phantasms were visited by him only in dream. Familiar. The terror that they evoked was undiminished.

Now he was walking through forest—a section of hills that seemed to be close by. A huge slab of granite had been dragged aside, and a pit yawned where it had lain. He entered the pit without hesitation, and the rounded steps that led downward were known to his tread. A buried stone chamber, and leading from it stone-lined burrows. He knew which one to crawl into.

And again the underground room with its sacrificial altar and its dark spring beneath, and the gathering circle of poorly glimpsed figures. A knot of them clustered about the stone table, and as he stepped toward them he saw they pinned a frantically writhing man.

It was a stoutly built man, white hair disheveled, flesh gouged and filthy. Recognition seemed to burst over the contorted features, and he wondered if he should know the man. But now the lich with the caved-in skull was whispering in his ear, and he tried not to think of the unclean things that peered from that cloven brow, and instead took the bronze knife from the skeletal hand, and raised the knife high, and because he could not scream and awaken, did with the knife as the tattered priest had whispered.…

And when after an interval of unholy madness, he at last did awaken, the stickiness that covered him was not cold sweat, nor was it nightmare the half-devoured heart he clutched in one fist.

Leverett somehow found sanity enough to dispose of the shredded lump of flesh. He stood under the shower all morning, scrubbing his skin raw. He wished he could vomit.

There was a news item on the radio. The crushed body of noted archaeologist, Dr. Alexander Stefroi, had been discovered beneath a fallen granite slab near Whately. Police speculated the gigantic slab had shifted with the scientist’s excavations at its base. Identification was made through personal effects.

When his hands stopped shaking enough to drive, Leverett fled to Petersham—reaching Dana Allard’s old stone house about dark. Allard was slow to answer his frantic knock.

“Why, good evening, Colin! What a coincidence your coming here just now! The books are ready. The bindery just delivered them.”

Leverett brushed past him. “We’ve got to destroy them!” he blurted. He’d thought a lot since morning.

“Destroy them?”

“There’s something none of us figured on. Those stick lattices—there’s a cult, some damnable cult. The lattices have some significance in their rituals. Stefroi hinted once they might be glyphics of some sort, I don’t know. But the cult is still alive. They killed Scotty … they killed Stefroi. They’re onto me—I don’t know what they intend. They’ll kill you to stop you from releasing this book!”

Dana’s frown was worried, but Leverett knew he hadn’t impressed him the right way. “Colin, this sounds insane. You really have been overextending yourself, you know. Look, I’ll show you the books. They’re in the cellar.”

Leverett let his host lead him downstairs. The cellar was quite large, flagstoned, and dry. A mountain of brown-wrapped bundles awaited them.

“Put them down here where they wouldn’t knock the floor out,” Dana explained. “They start going out to distributors tomorrow. Here, I’ll sign your copy.”

Distractedly Leverett opened a copy of
Dwellers in the Earth
. He gazed at his lovingly rendered drawings of rotting creatures and buried stone chambers and stained altars—and everywhere the enigmatic latticework structures. He shuddered.

“Here.” Dana Allard handed Leverett the book he had signed. “And to answer your question, they
are
elder glyphics.”

But Leverett was staring at the inscription in its unmistakable handwriting: “For Colin Leverett, Without whom this work could not have seen completion—H. Kenneth Allard.”

Allard was speaking. Leverett saw places where the hastily applied flesh-toned makeup didn’t quite conceal what lay beneath. “Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions—inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the ‘pentagram’ (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried—but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol’s brain. He erred at the last instant—almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.

“Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett—you with your artist’s knowledge and diagrams of Althol’s symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with
our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living.”

Leverett turned to run, but now they were creeping forth from the shadows of the cellar, as massive flagstones slid back to reveal the tunnels beyond. He began to scream as Althol came to lead him away, but he could not awaken, could only follow.