The House of the Worm

CHAPTER I The House of the Worm

The house lies in ruin. Time and the elements have used it cruelly, and now have left it to perish dismally. They have left it to its loneliness; there is only silence in its empty halls, and the tittering of rats. The crumbling walls are effaced by leprous white fungi and scaly lichens; the dust of years lies thick on the rotting floors. The windows, once lit with a thousand twinkling lights, now are dark and boarded; all save two, and these are lightless as the sockets in a yellowed skull.

But for a single moment at evening, when the last ray of a dying sun touches on those two lozenge windows, the House wakes to stare into the night with eyes that shine red strangely long after the sun has passed, and perhaps dreams. Of what should a house dream? Of the past, maybe, of the time when it was young, when colourful pageants of men and women passed like players on a stage, and lived their lives as lives should be lived, and died? Perhaps; but now only the rats live here, and such memories are but the frail ghosts of forgotten years, beyond recall. Indeed, for the House of the Worm they never existed.

The House dreams of older things. For the House is far older than the mouldering timbers and crumbling masonry, the silence and the dank mildew. These are old indeed, but they are built on foundations whose age no man remembers and no record tells. They are akin to the works of the Great Ones of Kadath maybe — those five monoliths of black stone, graven with maddening symbols and curious runes, set in the hill as on the five points of a star — but they were ancient when Kadath lay yet unquarried, ancient ere men ever crawled from the slime of abyssmal seas, ancient even in that unutterable time when the wise Old Ones guessed vainly at their origin. Their antiquity was only dim legend, and doubted as legends are, when the timbers and the masonry were first raised by that Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak.

Now there are many tales told of that old man and his queer ways, for the most part having little truth to them. Facts seem to alter with the passing of time, when no one remembers the truth; and but one man now lives who attended that last banquet in the House of the Worm, and he is mad.

They say that he was not old when first he looked on the five pillars on the round hill overlooking Vornai in the plain of Kaar. He had held more contempt for the legends than fear, and had gone there alone to scoff at the daemons said to dwell within the ring. He went in the daylight, and would have returned long before dusk, for even his rash skepticism would not let him dare this thing by night. But the spell of the place caught him; or a morbid fascination of the way the monoliths’ shadows curiously distorted all they fell across; and how these shadows were cast not by sun or moon, but red Betelgeuse in the starry sky. Or perhaps he guessed the meaning of certain cryptic signs on the stones, or only stood too long in their presence. He did not return at dusk. Rather he came with the morning breeze when eastern skies were crimson. He came as one bowed beneath the weight of years; and the people wondered to see his raven locks turned white, and wondered more at the odd light that shone in his eyes, the light that would never leave him. They wondered, and only whispered, “The daemons.” He went slowly up to his cottage, speaking to no one, and was not seen again for a week and a day.

And the time passed quickly for the people of Vornai, and with it much of the amazement brought by the return of Him of Whom No One Likes to Speak. But on the eve of the ninth day a great and terrible Fear prowled in the city’s shadowed lanes, entwining the spires and minarets of the palaces and temples in webs of horror, or sending forth icy tendrils to snare the minds and souls of the unwary. The ground beneath them muttered queerly, and unguessed evils rode the wind. And inside none dared sleep for fear of evil dreams; but crouched trembling in the dark behind locked doors, while taloned things scratched at shutters and laughed, and eldritch lights flashed from the top of the hill where the pillars stand, with none to see save that old man.

An in the morning he took up residence in that great House now standing betwixt the pillars, where no house had ever stood before.

This they were willing to tell me in the city when I came to the plain of Kaar where all men fear the shadow of that House. It was only of that other matter that they were reluctant to speak. For these events are still too clear in their minds, though half a century old, and such is the horror of the memory that at its merest mention they seal their lips and go to count their beads and mutter prayers to their curious pot-bellied golden gods. And this is strange, for only three persons attended that last banquet in the House of the Worm, and of these but one now lives. They told me of him in the city when they saw that I was determined to have the tale, and told me also that he was mad.

This greybeard, they said, had become a hermit, and had secreted his dwelling on the hill where the trees are thick and do not behave like trees; and now he spoke no more to men, but worshipped a curious fetish on nights when red Betelgeuse is obscured by clouds. But I found his cave by daylight when the stars cannot be seen; and he that spoke no more to men was at last persuaded to speak (with the aid of a skin of the heady red wine of Sarrub, whose like is not in the World), and then and there he told me this tale.

It was in the hundredth year of his residence at the great House betwixt the pillars that the Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak gave the first of his famous banquets. For a century he had kept to himself and within his House, and his only dealings in the city below were for provisions, for which he paid with antique gold coins of no known kingdom. But now, whether because he desired company or for some darker reason, his invitations to dine that evening at the great House betwixt the pillars were found one morning tacked to the front doors of all the houses in the city, and none could say how they came there.

It is a trick, some said, and any who go will be set upon by creatures not good to imagine, and eaten for dinner instead of dining themselves. But some of the younger men were less sure. Who, they asked, has ever seen these creatures, or speaks with authority of the old man’s appetites? He is a vampire, said the others, who owes his unnatural longevity to a diet of human blood; but at this the young men laughed, for while it was uncommon for a man to live a hundred years, it was seldom supernatural. “We will go,” said they, and the others only shook their heads and looked sadly after them.

But in the evening as they trudged in file up to where the great House broods, all twenty of them doubted the wisdom of their choice. It was true that they did not believe the tales told of that strange old man and his queer ways, but they had heard the tales since infancy, and their hearts believed. Yet they did not turn back. And soon the night-songs of the insects grew strange in their ears, and they did not like the way Betelgeuse peered down at them from the heavens. And when at last the House came into view, their fears grew worse; for all the twinkling lights that burned in its many windows could not dispel the queerness in the shadows cast by those five pillars sticking out of the earth like the blackened finger-bones of a corpse in an ill-made grave. One man even fancied he saw a daemon squatting atop the nearest of these, and swore that it had no face where a face should have been. And still they went on, and at last stood before the great front door. And though the colour and grain of the wood was subtly wrong, and the little carvings seemed to twitch in the uncertain light, one man rapped the heavy knocker thrice; and they were ushered by a slant-lipped gnome into a great, gloomy pentagonal hall, where an oak fire burned green, and into the presence of that Old Man of Whom No One Likes to Speak, but of whom so many tales are told.

And there they dined at a pentagonal table, from plates and goblets of antique gold all traced with the sign of the five-pointed star; and the purple hangings were stitched with that same sign in silver thread; and it was woven into the deep rugs, and carved on the wooden furnishings; and set above the lintels of the doors, and on the sills of the shuttered, secretive windows, were five-pointed stars of a curious grey stone. They dined, and heard their strange host speak, and returned in silence to the city.

And so this curious ritual went for many nights, without change — but fewer and fewer guests returned to the old man’s House each night. Those who did not return had been frightened by that odd light which shone in the old man’s eyes, and by the things he said when in drink; for when the wine cups had been filled for the third time with a vintage surpassing even the heady red wine of Sarrub, being not of the World, and the green fire burned low, he would speak of things no sane man guesses. He told of the winged messengers from Outside, who fly on the aether even to the nethermost abysses of space, where violet gases sing hymns in praise of mindless gods; of what they bring from Yuggoth in the gulf, and what they take back for a nameless purpose. He revealed the. secrets the night-gaunts whisper to those luckless dreamers they snatch from the peak of Throk, to drive them mad; and the appearance of a Dhole; and the meaning of certain rites performed in worship of the goddess N’tse-Kaambl whose splendour hath shattered worlds; and the blasphemous Word that toppled the thrones of the Serpent-priests. He traced the sign of Koth on the table, and told of things in the forbidden Pnakotic Manuscripts which if written here would damn the writer. Men left his House weeping or mad, never to return; all save the three, the braver or perhaps the more foolish, who came to the House of the Worm on that last night.

On that night, while the three guests dined in silence from golden plates, and the green coals on the hearth glowed fitfully, and the wine that surpasses even Sarrub had gone round for the third time, he called their attention to the sign of the five-pointed star emblazoned throughout his gloomy hall, and reminded them that the pillars without were set on the points of that same sign, the Sign of the Elder Gods. He spoke then of those little gods, the present gods of Earth, whom men called the Elder Gods, by which was meant, the gods who love men, and to whom they prayed at evening. And he told how there were Other Gods before them, those Great Old Ones Who owned no master save only Azathoth, the daemon sultan, whose name no lip dares speak aloud. These had come down from the stars when the World was new, to infest and make horrible its dark and lonely places; but They were not wholly free of the stars, and when the stars were wrong They died, to await the distant time when the stars would be right again, and They might rise to shriek and revel and slay. They had already slept for unnumbered aeons when the Elder Gods came from Betelguese to find Them dreaming grotesquely and muttering Their dreams; and those weak little gods were afraid, and with a magic sent those hideous Ones into the keeping of hoary Nodens, who is lord not of the World but the Great Abyss, and bound Them beneath their Elder Sign forever. But there would come a time when hoary Nodens would sleep and forget his watch; and then would come those who would break the seals and the spells, and loose those horrible ravening gods who would not always stay dead. And the pillars marked the Sign of the Elder Gods, and beneath that Sign—

Suddenly the old man paused in his narrative. The silence that followed was oppressive, seeming even to suck the breath away; yet clearly that old man with his glittering eyes was listening for something more! The others heard nothing, but in the single taper’s light they saw that the old man was afraid. Then they heard it, that mad piping, wavering up from one of the cellars below; faint at first, but growing louder and wilder as the minutes passed; bringing strange visions of amorphous flute-players and howling daemons in pits of groping night. The guests remembered Azathoth, the daemon sultan, who gibbers unmentionably on his throne at the centre of Chaos, and something of the terror of their host was made clear to them; they shuddered. Then the old man rose, and taking the great candle from the table, whispered only, “Come!” and passed beneath a dark archway with carvings of hybrid monsters and stars. And because the three had drunk much wine, or because of some power in that one word uttered by their host, they followed him beneath the yawning arch.

Long they wandered down into those nighted regions of Stygian gloom where the moon and stars are mythical, down through the cellars and sub-cellars and still deeper. There were shallow stone steps leading down, and arches too low for the passage of men. Baleful-eyed rats watched them avidly. Deeper they went, ever deeper, and ever they heard that fiendish piping from below, and ever the old man’s light bobbed eerily before them, beckoning evilly. They passed by many corridors on their journey, above whose entrances were set signs that hinted of things even the Elder Gods have forgotten. These lightless halls drew the three despite the old man’s persistent warnings, until in the end of one they saw the distant stars, and a dread chuckle wafted on a frozen wind to where they stood… They looked in no more corridors. But hurrying on to a fork in the narrow way, they chose the left past a hoary altar in a circle of standing stones, and came quickly thence upon a boundless cavern, chasing the frightened shadows before them. Here the old man’s light failed, and the shadows left their hiding places to resume their guard and conceal anew their age old secrets; yet all was not dark. For there was a well in that cavern, a pit so vast that its farther edge was lost to sight, and from its gaping maw a hazy light poured. Here was the source of the piping.

The old man went to the edge of the pit and looked into its depths. The lights played eerily across his wrinkled face, showing so well each ghastly expression that lived there. And as the three guests moved closer, he told them in croaking whispers scarcely audible above the daemonia-cal flutes that this was the tomb where seethed and bubbled that unmentionable One; that ancient evil the frightened Elder Gods had sought to hide beneath a last binding and senescent spell; that hellish reason he must keep the pillars and the Elder Sign inviolate forever. Nor would he fail that trust, lest the very curse of Nodens descend upon his head; not though the stars come right and the children of Azathoth rise from the nethermost pits of Hell — for were they not already risen? Had he not heard their great, sloshing footsteps in the bowels of the World, or felt the breath of their titanic wings? They came to open a Way for this abomination’s return, even as the Pnakotic Manuscripts foretold and all men feared. Let them come! What could they ever hope to do while he, the Jailor, the Guardian of the Elder Sign, yet lived? He was screaming now, and his eyes blazed with a holy light. And before anyone even realized what was happening, something slithered up from the well like a river of burning pitch and swept that old man into the abyss.