The House of the Worm

CHAPTER V The Return of Zhosph

In which of the Seven Cryptical Books is forgotten, Hsan records this peculiar and exceedingly doubtful fact: that wisdom possessed in life is not permitted to pass with the soul toward whatever death really is, but cleaves to the mouldering corpse to fester and diminish even as flesh beneath the gentle nibblings of worms. Such perhaps is the reason dust from certain graves is valued in unlawful practices, and why necromancers are burned, lest the worms acquire arcane knowledge it is better they should not have. And such most certainly drove Snurd in secrecy through the high iron gate of Zulan-Thek, onto that dim, star-litten plain where they of Zulan-Thek were wont to inter their dead in dreams that died before men’s wasted souls.

Of Snurd and his dubious parentage men once hinted unmentionable things, indicating as evidence that hitherto only the detestable ghouls and kindred horrors were known to inflict such enormities upon the dead. What, they inquired of one another in hushed voices, became of the fat miller before the sextons came, and who defiled Klotlei’s grave and Shek’s in the night? Then they would gesture knowingly but make no more lucid answer. Little did Snurd care! He knew how the bones were taken down from the high place where the camels passed from Gak, laiden with bright silks and spices of exotic name, and where malefactors were displayed on a grisly hook set there for that purpose; only that morning they were taken and dragged by the muffled sextons whose duty it was, to the catacombs where their odour would not offend the camels. He guessed the nature of those crimes for which this penalty was exacted, and that all to some degree approximate witchcraft. And few knew better than Snurd what is written in Hsan’s Cryptical Books.

He went out with only the stars to see: they of Zulan-Thek were fearful of their dead, and kept the Night securely bolted out of doors and peering vainly at shuttered windows. How the Night finally overcame these barriers to extinguish all the lamps and hope, does not concern this tale. Snurd feared neither darkness nor the buried dead. But leaping grotesquely in the deep shadows of crumbling mounds, he ran his tongue over his pointed teeth in a hunger not often manifested by fully human persons. He remembered the screams of the carrion fowl flapping darkly in the gloom around the mewling bundle on the hook, and how the bundle lost its own tongue trying to charm the ravens from its eyes. Perhaps, ah, perhaps the avid beak could not wholly penetrate those bleeding sockets to the maddened brain. Perhaps it was still shut away within the clean-picked skull… And Snurd laughed and leered at the frightened Moon.

It did not take him long to find that path the sextons used in their particular trade, for Snurd was more familiar than any sexton should have been with the startling ways of that path. The weeds there grew too quickly, and made little rustling noises even without the wind. But it was no business of Snurd’s who stirred the weeds. He hurried over a confusing rise and between the huddled, leaning boulders, and moments ere the Dawn paled the East in wholesomer lands and the tides of Night receded, Snurd crept near to that vine-hidden stone door with the hippogryph on either side. The graven signs and expressions on the faces of those images were too worn to ascertain their correct meaning; but the swollen vines slithered quietly back at his approach, and Snurd passed through and down the fifty-seven lightless steps to those darker lower halls where it must be blasphemy that light should ever come. Snurd had not that inconvenience of requiring light to see, and moved quickly and with improbable sureness over the floor slimed and worn smooth by the passage of nameless things and Time, disturbing the rats and less pleasant things with his breathing. The rats were whispering plots in the dark with uncouth scarabs. Once he spied a light beneath a secretive door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He came at last to a little unlighted vault and found where the sextons had deposited the leavings of that grisly hook. It was doubtlessly only his imagination that the pale skull grinned when Snurd entered the room…

Thus ends the unhappy tale of Zhosph as recorded elsewhere, and told once by them of Zulan-Thek until the Night came with his retinue of shadows to feast in Zulan-Thek’s palaces and fanes, attended by Fear: that when the sextons who carried Zhosph’s bones returned to the hippogryph-guarded entrance on a matter of unfinished business, they found things not quite as they had left them. The faces of the hippogryphs seemed altered and strangely smug, and the vines misbehaved shockingly, deliberately tripping the frenzied rats as they fled madly from the catacombs, and strangling them in a manner the sextons did not like. But worse was the wailing in the depths that had frightened the rats. One man later averred that it moaned disturbingly of something evil that should have been dead but scratched subtly in back of the mind, changing things for a purpose and tittering within. And certainly they all heard that tearing scream in the dark, and saw afterwards the queer little being with large ears that scampered up the dark stairs and made a terrible sign at them before drying its curious wings and fluttering back toward Zulan-Thek against the cryptic stars, to bargain with the Night.

When at last the sextons had confered in bleak whispers and descended to that tiny room where they had left it, they found the skeleton of Zhosph the thaumaturge disturbed, the skull split like the rind of a pomegranate and the sorcerer’s brain quite gone. This was attributed to the activities of rats, until later. One other thing they found which was less easily explained: a shrivelled yellowish membrane much as a serpent might leave in moulding, or the chrysalis of certain rare moths, not entirely recognizable as the skin of Snurd turned inside-out. The sextons did not pause long to ponder the riddle.