The Xothic Legend Cycle

The Fishers from Outside by Lin Carter

WHEN Mayhew found the Black Stone beneath the ruins of Zimbabwe, it was the culmination of many long and weary years of work. His quest had begun twenty years before, when as a young student at Miskatonic he had first heard of the "Fishers from Outside" in the unpublished journals of the explorer Slauenwite. That odd and curious term was the name by which the Gallas of Uganda referred to a mysterious race that had ruled central Uganda—according to the legend—before the first mammals were.

Intrigued, Mayhew read on with growing excitement as Slauenwite told of certain hellishly old stone ruins which the local tribes dread and avoid, of jungle-grown megaliths believed to be "older than man", and of a certain stone city somewhere in the south which their witch doctors whispered was an abandoned outpost of creatures "flown down from the stars when the world was young."

I suppose it is hard for a scholar or a scientist to pin down exactly what first impelled him in the direction of his future work. But Mayhew always said it was the native stories Slauenwite recorded in 1932 in his journals. At any rate, he embarked on a search for more information about the Fishers from Outside. He found fragments of lore concerning the mystery race in such old books as the dubious Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the notorious Book of Eibon, Dostmann's questionable Remnants of Lost Empires, De Vermis Mysteriis by the Flemish wizard Ludvig Prinn, and the frightful Ponape Scripture that Abner Exekiel Hoag had found in the Pacific islands. In the fervor of his growing obsession, Mayhew even dared to look into the nightmarish pages of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the Arabian demonologist.

According to Alhazred's account, the Fishers were the minions or servants of the demon Groth-golka, who had anciently been worshiped on Bal-Sagoth, which some rather questionable authorities claim to have been the last foundering remnant of the mythical Atlantis. On Bal-Sagoth he was worshiped in his "bird-god” avatar, wrote the Arab. Most scholars would dismiss the legend as idle tales, but Mayhew knew there was independent corroboration for at least part of the account, for Norse voyagers during the early Crusades had seen Bal-Sagoth, recording something of its strange gods in their sagas.

AFTER completing his doctorate, Mayhew obtained a grant and went to Africa He followed the footsteps of Slauenwite, exploring central Uganda, studying native myths and stories. Tales came to his ears of an ancient stone city buried in the southern jungles of the Dark Continent, which some thought the ruins of the legendary King Solomon’s mines but which others ascribed to the handiwork of Portuguese slavers or traders. Mayhew knew that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy had written many centuries ago of "Agysimba", the stone city in the jungle. Doubtless the Ugandan myth and the old Egyptian story referred to the same ruin ... and that could hardly be anything else than old Zimbabwe itself, that immemorial and mysterious stone city deep in the jungled heart of Rhodesia ... Zimbabwe, whereof so much is whispered and so very little known for certain.

I joined him at the site of Zimbabwe in 1946. I had been studying at the University of Cape Town, and one of his papers—a monograph on Ugandan petroglyphs, still indecipherable—caught my eye. I wrote, applying for a job. and was promptly accepted.

I knew little of Zimbabwe. I knew it was the focal point of a vast system of mighty towers and ramparts spread out over something like three hundred thousand square miles of trackless jungle. The ruins are found in Mashonaland, the mining areas of Gwelo, Que-Que, and Selukwe. At the center, deep in southern Rhodesia, about two hundred and eighty miles from the sea in the valley of the Upper Metetkwe, lie the colossal fortifications of enigmatic Zimbabwe—greatest and most fabulous of the roughly five hundred stone structures found in this wide zone, which seem the work of a race unknown to history, and whose puzzling architecture has no parallel elsewhere on this planet, save in certain fearfully ancient ruins in Peru.

This little I had gleaned from that tantalizing book, Hall’s Great Zimbabwe, which raises so many disturbing questions and settles so very few—if any—of them. And soon I was to see the fantastic city myself!

MY first sight of mysterious Zimbabwe came at dusk. The sky was one supernal blaze of Carmine and vermilion flame, against which the titanic walls of the enclosure soared impressively, composed of massive blocks weighing each many tons, the wall extending hundreds of feet, enclosing the weird, uncanny "topless towers" of which I had heard. Mayhew's workmen had cleared away the vines and undergrowth which for ages had encumbered the gigantic rampart, but the jungle, I somehow knew, had not surrendered, but had merely retreated before superior force and was biding its time, waiting for the puny, ephemeral children of men to leave that it might inexorably regain its antique domain over the mighty walls and towers.

A shudder, as of eerie premonition, ran through me as I first gazed upon lost Zimbabwe drowsing the ages away. Then I forced a shaky laugh and put such trepidations from me; after all, night had nearly fallen, and the breeze was dank and wet.

Mayhew I found a devoted, even fanatic, scientist. His peculiar fixation on the legend of the "Fishers from Outside” set by, he was a learned and scholarly man. He told me something of the Groth-golka myth and discussed what scraps of knowledge had been accumulated as to the history of the stupendous ruin before us. The Portuguese had first glimpsed it about 1550, he told me, but the first explorer did not reach these parts until 1868.

“I understand no inscriptions have ever been found," I murmured. He nodded, his lean, ascetic face serious and troubled.

"Yes, and that's another mystery! A race that can build a stone wall fourteen feet thick, in an elliptical enclosure eight hundred feet in circumference, should surely have some form of writing, if only for the required mathematics,” he mused.

“And no artifacts have ever been found?” I hazarded.

“Only these," he said somberly, holding out a wooden tray. Within I saw a number of small, oddly shaped objects of baked clay and carved stone. They resembled curiously stylized birds, but not like any birds I know ... there was something misshapen, deformed, even—monstrous about them. I repressed a shiver of distaste.

“Do you know what they represent?” I asked faintly.

For a long moment he peered down at the tray of tiny artifacts, gazing at them through his eyeglasses, a pair of pince-nez spectacles he wore always, looped about his throat on a long ribbon of black silk. These pince-nez were his most famous affectation, and I knew of them long before I ever came to know the man himself.

Then he turned and looked at me.

"Perhaps the Fishers from Outside," he said, his voice dropping to a faint, hoarse whisper. “Or, perhaps, their mighty Master ... Groth-golka."

Something in the uncouth, harsh gutturals of that strange name made me wish, obscurely, that he had not spoken it aloud. Not here, amid the immemorial ruins of elder Zimbabwe ....

I SHALL not bore you with any extended account of the many weeks it rook to complete our excavations. First, we investigated the weird topless towers, which were devoid of any interior structure, save for thick stone piers jutting at intervals into the hollow, chimney-like interior. They were uncannily reminiscent of the pegs in an aviary, the perches in a bird cage, it seemed to me: but I said nothing, leaving the professor to his own conjectures.

Within a month I was sent upriver to obtain supplies. I was rather glad of this, for I would miss our work in the Plain of Megaliths. There was something about this vast and level field, covered with row on row of mammoth stone cubes, that made me think of hundreds of Druidic sacrificial altars. As the date of their excavation approached, my sleep was disturbed by dark dreams in which I seemed to see hundreds of squirming naked blacks bound to row after row of the altar stones ... while weirdly bird-masked shamans raised an eerie, cawing chant beneath the peering moon, whose cold eye was obscured by drifts of reeking smoke from many fires ....

Terrible dreams they were!

Upriver, I found the trading post and loitered there long enough for the excavations to be completed on the Plain of Megaliths. My host was a local tradesman of Boer descent, who questioned me intently about our work and eyed me furtively from time to time, as if there were questions he did not quite dare ask.

“Ever heard of the ‘Great Old Ones’?” he blurted one night, his courage bolstered by rum. I shook my head.

“I don't think so,” I said. "What are they, some native legend?"

“Yes ... but, mein Gott! ... native to what world, I could not say!”

I stared at him, baffled; before I could ask another question, he abruptly changed the subject and began to talk lewdly and disgustingly about the local native women. I left downriver the next day with the supplies.

It seems I had lingered at the Ushonga trading post longer than had been needful; the Plain of Megaliths had been excavated, and the diggers had turned up nothing more interesting than hundreds of the little bird-like Stone images. Mayhew had therefore turned his attention to the great Acropolis, and beneath the foundations of the huge center stone a remarkable discovery had been made.

He showed it to me by the wavering light of a hissing kerosene lamp, tenderly unwrapping the odd-shaped thing with hands that shook with excitement. I stared at it in awe and amazement ... yes, even as I had stared at Zimbabwe itself that first night ... and with a cold inward shudder of ghastly premonition, too.

The Black Slone.

It was a decahedron, a ten-sided mass of flinty, almost crystalline black stone which I could not at once identify. From the weight of it, I guessed it to be some sort of metal.

“Meteoric iron," Mayhew whispered, eyes alive with feral enthusiasm, behind the glinting lenses of his pince-nez, for once askew. "Cut from the heart of a fallen star ... and look at the inscriptions!''

I peered more closely: Each of the ten angled sides was a sleek plane of glistening black, covered with column on column of minute characters or hieroglyphs in a language unknown to me, though naggingly familiar. They in no slightest way resembled hieratic or demotic Egyptian, or any other form of writing I could remember having ever seen. I later copied some of them down in my notebook and can reproduce a few specimens here:

The professor reverently turned the metallic block over. “This side in particular." he said in a low voice.

I stared at the weird, stylized profile figure of a monstrous thing like a hideous bird with staring eyes and a gaping beak filled with fangs. There was a stark ugliness to the depiction that was quite unsettling.

I looked up at him, a mute question in my eyes. “Groth-golka" he breathed.

WITHIN the week we departed for the States. Nor was I at all loath to go, for all the excitement of our excavations and the discoveries they had unearthed. To tell the truth, ever since that night I had first set eyes on the Black Stone, I had not been sleeping at all well, A touch of jungle fever, perhaps, but night after night I tossed and turned, my dreams a mad turmoil of frightful nightmares ....

One night in particular, after I saw the Stone, I again dreamed of Zimbabwe as it might have looked at its height: the sacrificial smokes staining the sky and obscuring behind lucent veils the white face of the leering moon as it gloated down on scores of writhing blacks bound to the stone altars, grotesquely masked priests leaping in a wild and savage dance ....

I knew that they were trying to call down from the stars some monstrous horror-god, but how this knowledge came to me I cannot really say. Then the moon was hidden by black, flapping shapes that circled and swooped like enormous fishing-birds, darting down to the altars to pluck and tear at the wriggling bodies bound there ... and one of the huge, queerly deformed-looking bird-things emerged into the moonlight, and I stared with unbelieving horror at its hulking, horribly quasi-avian form, clothed with scales not feathers ... one glimpse of the repulsive thing with its one leg and glaring Cyclopean eye and hideous, hooked, fang-lined beak—

I woke screaming, with a bewildered Mayhew shaking me by the shoulders, demanding to know what was the matter.

No, I wasn’t unhappy to be going home: I had had more than my fill of the sinister brooding silence of that thick, fetid jungle, crowding so ominously close to the ruins as if waiting, waiting ... of that horribly old stone city, whose mysterious past contains hideous secrets I did not wish to plumb ....

The reason for our abrupt departure was quite easily explained. It would seem that Professor Mayhew had found what he had been looking for. The discovery of the Black Stone from Zimbabwe would make him very famous—and his fame would be all the greater, of course, were he able to decipher the inscriptions.

For he, as well, had half-recognized them. My vague, teasing recollection of having somewhere once seen something very much like those queer glyphs tormented me; I could neither pin it down nor could I get it out of my mind.

It was Mayhew, however, who remembered where he had seen symbols very much like them, and the moment he spoke of it I felt certain that he was right. The Ponape Scripture! I must have seen the glyphs reproduced in some Sunday supplement article about the cryptic old book. But the professor, of course, had studied the actual Ponape Scripture itself, in its repository at the Kester Library in Salem, Massachusetts. He had examined the actual book, written in an unknown tongue, and had compared it against the debatable English version prepared by Abner Exekiel Hoag’s bodyservant, a Polynesian half-breed from the isle of Ponape.

Mayhew hoped to find, somewhere, somehow, the key to the unknown language. On the boat, he fretted over that, sending radio-telegraph messages.

“Churchward would know, if he were alive, I’m sure of that,” he muttered. “His Naacal Key has never been published, but I have seen his speculative work on Tsath-yo and R’lyehian. Somewhere among his note's there might be data on this Ponapian glyph system, whatever it is called ....”

One night, as we neared the coastline, he burst into my cabin, triumphantly waving a piece of yellow paper.

"Churchward’s widow has given me permission to borrow his unpublished notebooks and papers!" he crowed, face unhealthily flushed, eyes bright with excitement. “A chance, at last!”

Privately. I doubted it. Bur I kept my reservations to myself.

We disembarked and went immediately to Salem, where the professor had reserved rooms for us at the University Club. The next morning, leaving me to unpack our notes, records, and sample artifacts, he was off to await the arrival of Churchward's papers. For days he pored through them in growing exasperation, for the author of The Lost Continent of Mu and other dubious works of pseudoscientific speculation had known nothing of the unknown language, it seemed.

“What about Hoag’s papers?” I suggested. “Perhaps his servant left a glossary or something; I know it was back in the seventeen hundreds, but still, since the Scripture is right here at the Kester, perhaps they hold the remainder of his library, as well.”

His eyes flashed and he smote his brow with a groan, dislodging his pince-nez from their perch. “A splendid idea, young fellow!” he cried. “My intuition on hiring you was right.”

The next day, I accompanied the professor to the library, where his scholarly credentials quickly gained us access to a private reading cubicle and to the strange old book itself. While he pored over it eagerly, I regarded the volume with thinly disguised repugnance. I recalled what little was known of its curious history: The famous “Yankee trader”, Abner Exekiel Hoag, of the Hoags of Arkham, had discovered the ancient book on one of his rum-and-copra trading ventures in the South Seas, back in 1734.

It was a weird document of many pages, inscribed with metallic inks of several colors on palm leaf parchment sheets, which were bound between boards of archaic wood. Carved with grotesque designs ... the very reek of the ages rose from it, millennia made almost palpable, like the miasma of age-old rottenness ....

I had read what the famous Pacific archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland had written of the book in his own shocking and controversial The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture, which only increased my repugnance. Poor Professor Copeland, that once-brilliant and pioneering scholar, had developed an uncanny fixation regarding the so-called "lost continent of Mu" which some occultists and pseudoscholars, like Colonel Churchward, consider to have been the original birthplace of humanity—the "Atlantis of the Pacific."

Suddenly I became aware that Mayhew had turned upon me a glittering eye, bright with excitement.

"What is it, Professor?"

"Sloan, my boy, it's here ... many of the identical symbols we traced and copied from the Black Stone! See—" he indicated several of the symbols on the crumbling, half-decayed sheets of leather-tough native parchment, “here—and here, and—here!"

“Odd that you didn’t recognize them at once, when you first began making your tracings from the Stone," I murmured inanely, searching for something to say. He shrugged, restlessly.

“I only glanced over the original codex," he explained, “as I was more interested in the English version ... but look: I have tried as best I could to match the hieroglyph to the English text, with the following conjectural result—"

I glanced at the sheet of scribbled notepaper he brandished before me. I do not recall all of the symbols or their meanings, but of the three symbols I drew earlier in this statement, the first stood for the name or word "Yig ", the second for "Mnomquah.” and the third for—

"Groth-goIka!" Mayhew breathed, almost reverently.

For some reason, I shuddered as if an icy wind were blowing upon my naked soul.

THE Curator of Manuscripts at the Kester Library was Professor Edwin Winslow Arnold, a chubby-faced man with a cherubic smile and piercing blue eyes. He had obviously heard of my employer and knew somewhat of his academic reputation, for we found no obstacle in our path which would prevent us from examining the miscellaneous diaries and papers of Abner Exekiel Hoag. A large number of these were in the Massachusetts Historical Archives, of course, but these could hardly be expected to contain the information Professor Mayhew desired. The documents which related to the Ponape Scripture were in the "sealed" files, and were made available only to reputable scholars.

Within a day or two, Mayhew found what he was looking for, in the form of a battered, water-stained notebook obviously kept by Hoag’s man, Yogash. This Yogash was the bodyservant Hoag had "adopted" in the Pacific islands, a Polynesian/Oriental half-breed of some kind (weirdly there filtered into my memory a bit of nonsense poor mad Copeland had recorded in his book, The Prehistoric Pacific, in which he conjectured that this mysterious Yogash person might be, in his inexplicable phrase, "a human/Deep One hybrid", whatever that might mean).

Yogash had kept a workbook in which the English equivalents, often marked with an interrogation point in the margin, perhaps to indicate that the equivalency was dubious or uncertain, were aligned with columns of minutely inked glyphs. This was the key to the language of the Scripture, by perusal of which Mayhew hoped to be able to translate the secrets of the Black Stone.

"They are all here." gloated Mayhew, peering enthusiastically over the blurred, stained pages of the old notebook. “Nug, and Yeb, and their mother, Shub-Niggurath ... Yig and Mnomquah and Groth-golka himself—"

"Are these the gods of some Pacific mythology?” I hazarded.

"So they would appear to be, from their prominence in the Ponape Scripture," he murmured abstractedly.

"But—if that is true, then, how do you explain their recurrence on the other side of the globe, in the depths of South Africa?" I cried.

The Professor peered at me over his pince-nez.

"I cannot explain it," he said finally, after a moment's silence. “Any more than I can explain how virtually the same characters found on the Easter Island Tablets, whereof Churchward wrote, appear in the Mohenjo-Daro inscriptions, found in the northerly parts of India.”

"Churchward was an occultist of sorts." I protested. "His reputation as a scientist has never been taken seriously!"

“Nevertheless, the Easter Island Tablets exist—you can find excellent photographs of them in back files of National Geographic, without needing to search mote deeply into the scholarly periodicals. And I trust you are aware of the veracity, if not of the significance, of the inscriptions found at the site of Mohenjo-Daro?”

I nodded, my resistance to his arguments subsiding. But—how could this mystery be explained, save by postulating some worldwide prehistoric race or network of religious cults which have hitherto eluded the attention of scholars?

Baffled, I turned to other tasks, abandoning speculation.

WITH the help of the amiable Dr. Arnold, Professor Mayhew and I had clear and distinct photographic copies of the notebook made for further study and comparison with the inscriptions on the Black Stone, since obviously the Kester Library could not permit Yogash’s notebook to leave the premises, as it was a part of the Hoag papers.

For days and weeks we compared the symbols, jotting down a rough rendering into English. The grammar and punctuation, of course, had to be supplied by the professor and myself, as it was not possible to deduce from the notes of Yogash what equivalents of these were in the unknown language of the Scripture. From a study of the notebook, many bits of data came to light which meant little to me at the time, but which excited the professor tremendously.

"So!" he exclaimed one evening, "the language is neither any known form of Naacal, nor is it R’lyehian or even Tsath-yo ... I had rather conjectured it might be a form of Tsath-yo ... but, no. Yogash refers to it in six places as 'the Elder Tongue' and in two places as ‘the Elder Script’—"

"I’ve heard you mention that word ‘Tsath-yo’ before," I interjected. "What exactly does it refer to?"

“It was the language of ancient Hyperborea in prehistoric times,” he muttered offhandedly.

“Hyperborea?” I exclaimed, skeptically. "The polar paradise of Greek mythology? I believe Pindar refers to it in—"

"The conjectural name—lacking a better one!—for a polar civilization which was the presumed link between elder Mu and the more recent civilizations of Atlantis, Valusia, Mnar, and so on. Although Cyron of Varaad, in his brief Life of Eibon, does indeed suggest that the first humans migrated from foundering Mu to Valusia and the Seven Empires, and Atlantis as well, then in its barbaric period, before traveling north to Hyperborea ...."

I could make little or nothing of these rambling explanations, but filed them away for future reference. My concepts of ancient history, I perceived, were going to require some extensive revisions if I must include therein, as true and veritable cultures, such fairy tales as Mu and Hyperborea and Atlantis.

That night my bad dreams bothered me again, and I awoke soaked in cold sweat and shivering like a leaf in a gale. Across the room I saw the white moonlight bathing the eerily inscribed facets of the Black Stone, and suddenly I felt an uncanny and inexplicable fear. Or was it—foreboding?

BEFORE many weeks had passed, Professor Mayhew gradually came to understand the purpose and nature of the mysterious inscriptions on the Black Stone from Zimbabwe.

They were nothing less than litanies and ceremonials for the summoning—the "calling down", to employ the ominous phrase of the Stone's language—of the Fishers from Outside which were the minions and servitors of the dark demon-god Groth-golka. Odd, how my weird dreams had seemed to predict this very discovery, for those horrible nightmares which had plagued me from the first day I laid eyes on the accursed Stone had been of rituals whereby the hideously masked priests had seemed to call down from the nighted skies those horrible bird-things (the professor had discovered, in deciphering the Stone, that they were properly termed “shantaks”)! But here I caught myself beginning to take almost for granted that one's dreams can actually presage the future.

As for the dark divinity they served, Groth-golka was presumed by this mythology to dwell beneath the "black cone" of Antarktos, a mountain in Antarctica, at or very near to the South Pole. (Of course, I am translating these concepts: The actual text calls it "the anteboreal Pole", and the name "Antarktos” was supplied by the professor himself.)

When he had gotten to that portion of the translation, he seemed to hesitate, to become lost in dreams. I asked him if all was well, if he felt ill; he roused himself with an effort, and gave me a shadowed smile.

"It is nothing; a momentary qualm. No, Sloan ... I called to mind a scrap of verse I have somewhere read—I cannot think just where—but the name Antarktos was attached to it—"

And in a low, throbbing voice, he recited these strange lines:

Something in his hushed, hoarse voice—or was it in those grim and ominous lines of verse?—made me shudder uncontrollably. I thought again of my weird dreams of that Plain of Megaliths, of those naked bodies bound for sacrifice, and of the semi-avian monstrosities as they swooped, and plunged, and clutched and clawed, ripping and tearing the naked, writhing meat staked out for them ....

And again that night I had ... unwholesome dreams.

TWO days after this incident—and fear not, officers, my story is very nearly done—the professor seemed to have concluded the major portion of his researches. That is, as far as I could tell he had finished deciphering the last of the Summoning rituals of the shantaks cut deep on the slick metallic planes of the Black Stone.

"Sloan, I want you to go to the Kester today," he told me that afternoon, just when I had assumed our day’s toil was done. "I will need the text of this part of the Book of Eibon—" and here he handed me a scrap of paper torn from his pocket notebook, with page numerals scribbled down. I gave him a surprised look.

"But surely the library is closed by this time. Professor, and I could make the trip tomorrow morning—?”

He shook his head. "I need the text of that passage tonight. The library, staff are on hand and qualified scholars with passes signed by Dr. Arnold should be able to gain entry without difficulty. Take care of this at once, please."

Well, there was no refusing such a request—Professor Mayhew was my employer, after all—so I left the University Club and caught the streetcar on Banks Street to the library. The sky was lowering and gray; a fitful, uneasy wind, chill and dank as a breath from the very grave, prowled amid the dry leaves of early fall as I hurried between the granite pillars and into the bronze gateway.

I found no difficulty in securing the Book of Eibon from the files and began copying down the passage which the professor required. It consisted of certain matter from the seventh chapter of Part III of the Eibon, a lengthy mythological or cosmological treatise called "Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom.” The passage read as follows:

... but great Mnomquah came not down to this Earth but chose for the place of His abiding the Black Lake of Ubboth which lieth deep in the impenetrable glooms of Nug-yaa beneath the Moon's crust; but, as for Groth-golka, that brother of Mnomquah, He descended to this Earth in the regions circumambient to the Austral Pole, where to this day He abideth the passage of the ages beneath the black cone of Mount Antarktos, aye, and all the hideous host of Shantaks that serve Him in His prison merit, they and their Sire, Quumyagga, that is the first among the minions of Groth-golka, and that dwelleth either in the nighted chasms beneath black Antarktos or in the less inaccessible of the peaks of frightful Leng; where also did great Ithaqua, the Walker Upon the Wind, take for His earth-place the icy Arctic barrens, and mighty Chaugnar Faugn dwelleth thereabouts as well, and fearsome Aphoom Zhah, who haunteth the black bowels of Yaanek, the ice-mountain at the Boreal Pole, and all they that serve Him, even the Ylidheem, the Cold Ones, and their master, Rlim Shaikorth—

It was with a distinct shock that I realized suddenly that there was nothing—nothing at all—in this Eibonic material that the professor and I did not already have recorded in our notes, and that the only explanation for my being sent on this false errand was to get me out of the way while the professor did—what?

SEIZED by a nameless premonition, I snatched up the papers on which I had copied the passages from Eibon, returned the old book to the clerk, and left the grounds of the library. Dark clouds had come boiling up over the horizon, drowning the long narrow streets in gloom. The wind blew from the north, cold and dank as the panting breath of some predatory beast.

Abandoning the notion of waiting for the streetcar, I hailed a passing taxi and rode back to the University Club. I had the horrible feeling that every moment might count against life or death, and yet I could not have told you what it was that I feared. There are certain times in our lives when knowledge comes to us by unknown paths, and woe unto him who ignores the warnings explicit in that foreknowing!

Tossing a crumpled bill at the driver, I sprang from the cab and raced into the building. Plunging up the staircase, I entered the rooms assigned to us, only to find no sign of the professor.

Even as I turned to descend the stair and to seek for Mayhew in the club library, there came to my ears a weird, ragged, chanting ululation from the roof directly above our rooms, and among the weird vocables I recognized certain words—

“Iä! Iä! Groth-golka! Groth-golka Antarktos! Yaa-haa Quumyagga! Quumyagga! Quumyagga nug’h aargh—”

These were the opening words of one of the summoning litanies to the shantaks, for I clearly recalled them from the manuscript of Professor Mayhew's tentative translation of what he called the "Zimbabwe Rituals." Then I knew, with a surge of cold fear that closed like a vise about my heart, that the professor had employed a mere subterfuge to get me out of the way while he went up to the roof and cried out the summoning litany ... and I cried out; I cursed the unholy curiosity of the scholar that would dare such an enormity.

Up to the roof I ran, stumbling over the stairs, and burst out upon the rooftop to see before me a scene of horror!

A dome of leaden clouds hid the sky as if some immense lid of gray metal had been clamped down upon the world from horizon to horizon. The wan luminance that filtered through the roiling vapors was a lurid, unnatural, phosphoric, sulfurous yellow. For a fleeting instant I was reminded of the skies over Zimbabwe in my dreams—the flaring bale-fires, the drifting smokes, the bird-masked priests, the leering moon—then I shrieked and saw—and saw—

Down they came, the semi-avian hurtling shapes, all slimy scales where feathers ought by rights to be, hippocephalic clubbed heads hideously grinning ... and hovered on scaly, translucent wings: hovered and swooped and dipped, to tear and tear at the shrieking scarlet-splattered thing that jerked and jiggled prone on the rooftop, wallowing in a bath of blood—that shrieking thing that I could never have distinguished as having once been human, had it not been for the one detail to which my shuddering gaze clung with unbelieving terror—the blood-spattered pince-nez on their sodden ribbon of black silk, about the crimson ruin of a hat had once been a man's head.