The Xothic Legend Cycle

The Bell in the Tower H. P. Lovecraft and Lin Carter

THERE was a man in London once who screamed when the church bells rang. He lived all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people called him harmlessly mad. His room was filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tried to lose himself in their feeble pages. All that he apparently sought from life was not to think. For some strange reason, thought was very horrible to him, and anything that stirred the depths of the imagination he fled as from the plague.

He was very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there were those who declared that he was not nearly so old as he looked. Fear had its grisly claws upon his heart, and any sudden sound would make him start with staring eyes and a sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions, if in truth he possessed any, he shunned, for he wished to answer no questions regarding his strange condition. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete said that it was very pitiful to see him in this state. He had dropped them all years before, and no one of them knew for certain whether or not he had left the country or had merely sunk from sight in some hidden byway.

At the time of which I write, it had been a decade since he had taken rooms in Gray’s Inn, and of where he had been in the interval he would say nothing—until the night when young Williams bought the Necronomicon.

This Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when first he had moved into the ancient house he had felt a strangeness and the chill breath of cosmic winds about the grey, wizened man who dwelt in the next room. Curious, he forced his friendship upon his neighbour, where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his ears and eyes, and strove every waking moment to drown something with his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid, popular novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would yowl in unison until the last peal would die reverberantly away.

Try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect or his manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and would prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles, his voice every moment rising and thickening until at last it would break in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; Williams was not surprised to discover that he had attended Harrow and Oxford.

Later, it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd tales were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman and even pre-Roman origin, the old man refused to admit that there was anything unusual about the edifice. And he but tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under-crypts, believed hewn out of the solid granite crags which frown on the stormy waters of the North Sea, was raised by his young visitor.

So matters went between the two until that night when Williams brought home the infamous Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask certain questions of a bent and furtive old bookseller who kept a queer and dusty little shop in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men went pale when it was mentioned. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were rumoured to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and the rigid suppression of the lawgivers, and that all of these were believed safely locked away with frightened care by those custodians or archivists who had dared to glimpse into the hateful black-letter.

But now, at last, Williams had not only found an accessible copy of the notorious volume but had made it his own at a price so low that it seemed ridiculous. He had purchased the old book at a Jew’s shop in the more squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had occasionally purchased odd curios and obscure artifacts before; and he almost fancied that the gnarled old Levite had smiled as if with relief amidst the tangles of his beard, when Williams discovered the volume and announced his desire to purchase it. Indeed, the flaking leather bindings with their verdigris-eaten clasps of brass had been placed on the shelf so prominently, and the price was set at such an absurdly slight figure, as to almost make him suspect that the bookseller was eager—even anxious—to be rid of the accursed tome.

A single glimpse of the title was sufficient to send Williams into transports, and some of the diagrams inserted into the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He could not bear to waste a moment, but was possessed with impatience to take the ponderous volume home and to plunge into the decyphering of its pages, and he departed with the book in such precipitous haste that he hardly heard the old Jew chuckle disturbingly as he left the bookshop. But when at length he had borne the book safely to his room, had secured and locked the door behind him, and had begun to scan the yellowed pages, he found to his dismay that the combination of the clumsy black-letter, which was nigh-illegible, and the debased idiom in which the book was indited resisted such linguistic abilities as he possessed. Then he bethought him of his strange neighbour, whose scholarly attainments by far exceeded his own, and knocked upon the door of his mysterious, frightened friend for assistance in unravelling the twisted, medieval Latin.

Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat when the younger man entered, and he started violently at the appearance of his unexpected visitor. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and when Williams uttered aloud its title he fainted altogether. It was when he had fully regained his senses that he began to relate his own story, or figment of madness, in a frantic, whispering voice, eager to have it told so that he could make certain that Williams would not delay but would hasten to bum those abominable pages, and scatter their ashes wide.

THERE must (Lord Northam whispered) have been something very wrong at the start; but it would never have come to a head had I not explored too far into the mystery. I am the nineteenth baron of a line whose beginnings extend disquietingly far into the distant past—unbelievably far back. If family traditions may be credited, for there are ancestral tales of our descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Luneus Gabinius Capiro, military tribune of the Third Augustan Legion, then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for his participation in certain secret rites unconnected with any known and recognised religion. This Gabinius had, or so the rumours ran, come upon a cavern hollowed out of the cliffs which fronted upon the stormy waters of the sea, and where strange furtive folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; an odd, old folk whom the Britons knew not, but whom they greatly feared, and of whom they whispered that they were the last lingering few to survive from a great land amidst the Western Ocean, long since sunken beneath the hungry waves, leaving behind only those isles with their rathes and menhirs and circles of standing stones, of which Stonehenge was the greatest.

There was no certain evidence, of course, that Gabinius had bulk an impregnable fortress above that forbidden cave, and had thereafter established a line which Pict or Saxon, Dane or Norman, Roman or Briton, were equally powerless to obliterate. Nor was there any certainty in the tacit assumption that from that uncannily protected line had sprung that bold companion and staunch lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created first Baron of Northam. These legends were unsupported by any form of substantial evidence, but they were often whispered; and, in very truth, the stonework of Northam Keep, at least in the older portions of its masonry, bore disturbing and even alarming resemblances to the Roman stonework of Hadrian's Wall.

As a child (continued Northam after a pause), I always experienced the most peculiar dreams whenever I chanced to sleep in the more ancient parts of the castle, and I acquired a nervous habit of continuously searching back through my memories for certain half-amorphous scenes or inexplicable patterns or the oddly significant impressions created by certain effects of landscape vistas and odd cloud formations—none of which seemed to form any part of my conscious recollection of waking experience. By degrees, I became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying, a searcher after weird realms and inexplicable relationships once familiar as in some prior life, but seemingly discoverable nowhere in the visible regions of this world.

I became filled with a feeling our tangible world is only one strand—one fibre—in a fabric vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes impinge upon and permeate the sphere of the known at every point. In my youth and early manhood, having drained dry the fones of formal religion and mysticism, I turned to the intense perusal of the occult mysteries and the arcana of ceremonial and ritual magic. Nowhere, however, could I discover that for which I hungered—the means to penetrate beyond the vast illusion we call Reality, thereby to obtain the vision of those enthralling worlds of remote and unutterable alienage that dimly haunted my dreams, and the knowledge of whose intangible and ineluctable splendours obsessed my every waking moment and made bland and pallid every pain or pleasure to which the body and its senses may attain. In absinthe and hasheesh, in opium and laudanum, in a myriad of dangerous drugs and illegal or poisonous alkaloids I sought, through the deliberate and systematic derangement of the rational mind and the senses, that supernal and transcendent vision; but in no opiate did I find the key to that revelation of worlds and planes of existence ineffably superior to our own, which was the guerdon of my labours.

In lieu of ease and content I found only restlessness and ennui, and as I grew older the staleness and limitations of life became ever more tedious and maddening to me. During the ’nineties I sought surcease from the insipidity of existence by delving into Satanism, by dabbling with every theory and devouring avidly any doctrine which might offer a palliative to the close and stifling vistas of unimaginative science and philosophy and the dully unvarying so-called Laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly’s fabulous account of Atlantis I absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled me for a time with their meticulous documentation of inexplicable occurrences ... but in naught could I find a path to the utterly unplumbed gulfs beyond the reach of the astronomers or the cognizance of mundane cosmographers—the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting—the ultimate, unguessable regions beyond the strictures of time and space, where the laws of Euclidean geometry or of cause and effect or of Sequential time itself are bent awry, and where the chimerical and the self-contradictory are the norm, while the rational and the tangible are but idle fancies.

In despair, I sought in travel the alleviation of my discomfiture; I would traverse leagues to trace down some furtive village tale of an abnormal wonder, and once I ventured farther off and into the deserts of Araby in search of a certain Nameless City of vague and unsubstantiated rumour, which no man is known ever to have beheld. There rose within me the tantalising faith that somewhere an easily accessible Gate existed, which if once found would admit me freely to chose outer deeps whose echoes faintly reverberated in the ancestral adyts of my memory.

The Gate I sought might well be within the compass of the visible and waking world, yet it might exist only within the depths of my mind or soul. Perhaps (I mused) I held within my own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would unlock the innermost portal or awaken my dormant senses to elder or to future lives in forgotten dimensions of reality; which would give me access to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities which lie beyond them, and to states of being or modes of apprehension fabulous to me now.

Pursuant to this notion, I searched yet again through that mouldering library of ancient tomes accumulated over the span of centuries by the barons of my line, amongst which were treatises on daemonology and the alchemical science, abstruse and recondite philosophies, works which discussed the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, and innumerable histories of witchcraft and diabolism, the writings of the Kabballah and of the Gnostic mages. Although I had winnowed the library thoroughly in my youth, it yet remained within the bounds of possibility that there remained some rare and occult tome or monograph which I had scanned inattentively, or even overlooked, and which might hold the key that would open those supernal Gates to the astounding vistas and incredible marvels which lay Outside.

It was, I remember clearly, on a rainy evening in November when I found wedged and thus hidden behind a formidable row of tomes devoted to theological disquisitions, a secret book which, even as I had half-guessed, half-hoped, I had previously overlooked. It was none other than a copy of that abhorrent and frightful Necronomicon, another copy of which you so imprudently purchased this very day, young Williams. I had read shudder-some references to Alhazred's book in other volumes which reposed on these very shelves—in the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlecte, the Unaussprechlichen Kultes of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteriis—but never heretofore had I chanced to encounter a copy. Bound in rotting leather it was, and locked with clasps of rusty iron which I prised open with my pen-knife. The pages were crumbling with age and foxed with mildew, and a palpable reek of decay rose to assail my nostrils as I opened the volume and began to peruse its pages.

Unlike the printed copy you now hold, the book I had found concealed behind the shelves was a holograph manuscript, to which many different hands had contributed, as was patently evident from the different kinds of parchment, vellum, or paper upon which it was inscribed, and the variegated handwriting, and which of my ancestors had compiled the manuscript and had caused it to be bound in leather I could scarce conjecture. Indeed, it was not until I began to notice the occasional marginal gloss inscribed with fresher ink and by a more recent hand than the redactors of the pages themselves, that I gained cognizance of his identity: for it was in the unmistakable hand of my great-great-grandfather, the sixteenth baron of my ancient line—he who had so narrowly escaped the assizes and the consequent gallows in the last days of the maniacal witchcraft persecutions.

The copy of the Necronomicon was immensely long, well over one thousand pages, and for the following week I merely leafed through it, my febrile imagination seizing here and there upon an individual passage or phrase which titillated my fancy with hints of Gateways that opened to other worlds than these, to the abysses of anterior cycles of time, and to unimaginable regions beyond the bourne of space and time. At length it occurred to me that there might be other books or papers secreted behind that stolid row of interminable theological puerilities, and thus it was that I found a recessed latch sunk into the ancient mahogany of the bookcase. In pressing it, a groan as of the creaking of rusty hinges thrilled my senses, and in the next moment one entire section of shelving slid slowly and ponderously open, revealing a dark and dusty passageway and a flight of steep stairs leading upwards into the impenetrable gloom, all swathed and festooned with the ghostly webs of untold generations of spiders.

The great library of Northam Keep was on the topmost storey and I well knew that there was nothing above the room, save for an ancient stone tower whose casement windows had been tightly shuttered from within and whose only entrance had been sealed with brickwork long before I was born. Therefore, the mystery of where that steep and hidden stair might lead intrigued my curiosity immensely. Pausing only to prop the concealed doorway open with a heavy tome and to snatch up from the library table an oil lamp, I entered the dusty alcove and began to ascend the stair with a mingled feeling of cautiousness, trepidation, and adventurous expectancy which is hardly describable in mere prosaic words. The steps of the stair were of wood, thick with generations or centuries of dust and mouldering with neglect. At the top I found a trapdoor which I forced open with a squeal of protest from rust-gnawed hinges.

I discovered a queer, octagonal room almost completely bare of furnishings. My lamp disclosed nothing more than a table of heavy wood and a great carved oaken chair of Jacobean or, perhaps, Tudor craftsmanship, which reposed in the very center of the chamber. Upon the table there lay the stub of a candle in a brass holder, a dusty inkwell which contained the dark scum of long-dried ink. and several quills, arranged neatly beside a folio into which was thrust a sheaf of parchment written all over in a spidery hand. The only oddity which the tower chamber housed beyond these ordinary articles of furniture was a huge, ancient bell of age-blackened silver which was suspended from the rafters directly above the chair. It was the size of a church bell and stamped or otherwise incised about its rim was a series of angular characters which I vaguely recognised from my extensive readings in the occult as the "Nug-Soth runes", concerning which I knew little more than the name itself. The clapper of the bell was in the shape of an inverted trident, and it was tied by a length of tarry twine to a curious clockwork mechanism of coiled springs, heavily coated with some oily lubricant. The obvious purpose of this quaint mechanism was to enable the bell to be rung without the need of human hands to swing it.

As I could make nothing of the utility of this, I went at once to the table in the centre of the room, placed my lamp upon the dusty surface, and seated myself and began to examine the sheaf of manuscript, which was in the unmistakable hand of my great-great-grandsire—that Ruthven, Lord Northam, of which so many dubious legends are still whispered hereabouts, and whose age-dimmed oil portrait, with its heavy brow ridges and jutting cheekbones, harsh, angular jaw and severely aquiline nose, repeat the identical features which heredity has graven on the visages of every member of my line since the days of our remotest ancestor. The entries were dated in the seventeen hundreds and seemed to be the records of a series of experiments, but, alas, these were set down in some cypher which employed letters and numerals according to some code or system which I could nor at once unravel. Leafing impatiently through the manuscript I found at length a certain passage towards the end which was written in plain English, and which read:

Even as ye Brachmans of Hindoostan employ’d the repetitive ring'g of small Bells as an adjunct to their Meditations, so doe ye Shamans of Tartary and ye Red Priests of Thibet, for a similar Purpose, that is, to benumb ye Rational Minde and purify ye Senses so as to apperceive ye Higher Planes. See Abdool Al-Hazred his III Booke, chap.viii.

Thereupon followed certain instructions concerning the winding of the clockwork mechanism, the rhythm and timing of the ringing of the bell, and the duration deemed most advisable for the experiment.

At this point I began to notice that my head was aching and my heart pounding rapidly, to the point where it seemed likely I would swoon like a woman if I remained any longer in this enclosed space and continued to breathe the stifling and stale and vitiated air of the tower chamber. The wooden shutters which sealed the long windows resisted my efforts to open them; indeed, they were locked and barred so stoutly that it would take a crowbar to open them and admit the fresh air of open day. I took my lamp and the folio and descended the steep and narrow stair again to the library, and turned at once to perusal of the Necronomicon. I found without difficulty the passage to which my ancestor had alluded; it was in the third book of the Necronomicon, which bore the title "The Book of the Gates", and it read thusly:

And alsoe ther remaineth yet Another Mode by whiche ye may at least perceive That which lieth beyond ye strictures of ye Natural I Worlde, withouten daring ye Riskes attendant upon yr entry thereinto in ye Bodie; a means whereby ye may thrust aside ye Veil and peer into those oth’r Realms of Beinge the whiche pervade and inter-penetrate with our owne Plane, yet whiche remaine invisible and imperceptible to mortall Men, and by them Unknowne. Ye Ritual of ye Bell this mode is call’d, and it employeth a certaine Bell of Silver inscrib’d about ye Rim thereof with ye IX Spatial Key, the whiche shouldst be writ accordingly either in ye Runnes of Ye Nugge-Sothe or in ye antient Aklo letters. Yet be wary that ye not over-doe yr usage of this Mode; for him who sees Beyonde, he may betimes alsoe be seene by Them that make of that Realm the Place of Their abiding.

I read this passage over and over, possessed with a feverish sense of excitement and discovery which you may easily imagine. From the antique form of the writing, spelling, and grammar, I hazarded the guess that this was a transcription from Dr. Dee's own English translation of Alhazred’s book, of which I had often read in my studies; at least, the form of the language seemed as old as the reign of that Tudor queen in which Dee had flourished.

In my great-great-grandsire's hand there was scribbled a marginal gloss to this passage which sent a thrill through my inner being. He had written—

It worketh well.

MY impatience to attempt the Ritual of the Bell would brook no delay, so I began the experiment that very evening. According to the notes of my ancestor, a certain potion must be imbibed in preparation, the recipe for which was given in those portions of his papers which were not encoded. The formula involved certain drugs and poisonous alkaloids such as belladonna and aconite, but as I had sampled these and other potent narcotics earlier while striving to systematically derange my senses, I fortunately had liberal supplies of such chemicals on hand.

With some little labour I managed to open the shutters which effectively sealed the casement windows, permitting a cold wind from the tossing waves of the sea to clear the stale air from the tower chamber; then, setting the mechanisms according to the instructions, and imbibing the elixir, I seated myself directly beneath the bell of age-tarnished silver and the Ritual commenced. The slow tolling of the bell was deep-toned and mellow, and as the ringing continued I became aware of a drowsy numbness stealing over my senses, but whether this was due to the drugs I had taken or to the monotonous music of the bell was difficult to say with any precision.

Through the open casement I could see the houses of the old town below the Keep and the low hills beyond, and the crags which affronted upon the waves which glittered in the luminance of the rising moon. Gradually—imperceptibly—an uncanny change began to take place, transforming the scenery which lay below me. At first, the outlines of the old houses blurred and became indistinct; in time they faded away altogether and were replaced by another and very different set of images which seemed to have been superimposed upon them as if by some mysterious enchantment. The ancient houses, most of which dared from the day of Elizabeth, and which were crumbling with age and long neglect, became new and fresh, as if rejuvenated; the street of glistening cobblestones was gradually replaced by a meandering path that seemed strewn with glittering mica, and the rounded hills and rugged crags beyond the town of Northam were changed, by slow and minute gradations, into a fang-like row of stone spires, as harsh and unweathered by the ages of wind and rain as must be the mountains of the moon themselves.

Beyond the needle-like spires of naked stone now drove no longer the billows of the sea; in their place, a seething and viscous black vapour boiled and smoked, seemingly heavier than the air itself, and irisated with fugitive glints of strange and unfamiliar hues to which I could assign no name. The moon had long since faded from the firmament, which had changed from depthless black to a peculiar shade of fulgurant purple, upon which now floated moon after moon of luminous nacre and pallid opal. By the shifting rays of the many moons I perceived that the mica-strewn street or path, which had been empty, was now thronged with a strange and shadowy company who wore the habiliments of many lands and distant ages. Here strode a soldier in the brazen greaves and breastplate of a Roman legionary, and by his side a portly figure in the sober broadcloth and peaked hat of a Puritan divine; a shuffling Oriental in mandarin robes of shimmering silk went accompanied by Saxon peasants in coarse smocks of homespun, with shocks of straw-yellow hair and thong-bound cloth leggings; swarthy-visaged individuals paced the glittering path in turbans and tarboosh, their lower limbs clothed in voluminous pantaloons, scimitars thrust through sash and cummerbund.

As I gazed enthralled upon this fantastic promenade drawn, it seemed, from every nation and epoch, I became gradually aware that Others more shadowy and indistinct accompanied them—strange gaunt naked figures with beaked heads and folded membranous wings like Chinese fans. But there was some curious quality about these Others that made it exceedingly difficult for my vision to ascertain the details of their alienage, as if the very matter of which their bodies were composed defied the light of the many opalescent moons, or as if my organs of sight were too gross co discern their lineaments with clarity.

This uncanny multitude seemed bound for a common destination, as if embarked upon some nameless pilgrimage whose nature I could not name, but ere long I became uneasily aware that the goal of their pilgrimage was no other than the very castle in whose tower chamber I sat enthroned—or whatever bizarre and unguessable edifice occupied its same position in this alternate reality or weird, unearthly dimension. It was only then that I bethought me of those eldritch crypts rumoured to exist far below the bottommost cellars of Northam Keep, that cavern hewn by unknown hands before mundane history began, for some arcane and hidden purpose unknown to me. The mood of disquietude which came over me at this juncture I could not account for, but it sufficed to disturb my tranquility to such a degree that the vision blurred and faded, and the strangely new houses and the mica-dusted paths and sharp spires of naked rock were replaced by their known and familiar counterparts on this plane. And I awoke from my trance-like state, the tolling of the great bell having ceased, to a numbed and drowsy awareness of my surroundings, uncertain as to whether I had been awake all the while, or deep in drug-induced dreams.

Nightly thereafter I repeated the experience, each time discovering to my delight and marvel something previously unglimpsed in the unearthly landscape. Where gnarled and ancient oaks grew beyond the village, the dream-world of my visions sprouted monstrous and ichthyphallic fungoid growths with obscene, nodding bulbous heads all striped or splotched or mottled with surly crimson, febrile nacarat-orange, sinister purples, virulent and venomous greens; beyond the fungi grove I perceived curious, twisted trees whose serpentine and rugous trunks writhed with unwholesome vitality like undulating vipers, as if striving to reach the pale and leprous moons that drifted across the purpureal skies where strange stars flared and flickered in odd alignments, very alien to the constellations of our earthly skies. And once I glimpsed, far off across that ultra-telluric sea of coiling vapours, a stately ship with sails of lambent luxurious tapestry, so different from any vessel that ever plied our earthly seas as to hint at ports of origin beyond the moon, as if it had floated here across the unguessable abysses of space itself.

But ever, during these nocturnal visions, were the glittering paths thronged with a motley horde of pilgrims come hither from every era and nation: druidic priests in sombre robes, the oak-leaf chaplet bound about their brows, the golden sickle in their hands; Cro-Magnon hunters clad in hairy hides of beasts, bearing long stone-tipped spears in their grasp; Scythian archers; slender and beslippered Persians in mitred caps; Egyptian hierophants, their heads covered in klafts of starched linen, the mystic uraeus bound about their brows; half-naked savage Picts; tall Normans in sparkling chainmail half-covered with long surcoats emblazoned with scarlet heraldries ... and ever there loped or shambled amongst these more familiar figures, who had seemingly stepped from the pages of history, those gaunt and ungainly Others who bore no resemblance to terrene lifeforms, but were ghastly hybrids, mingling the likeness of men and beasts, lizards and insects, in their persons.

And each time I repeated the Ritual of the Bell, it seemed that my ability to perceive these Others was subtly incremented, until at length I beheld their alien anatomies, which seemed sprung from the divergent biologies of supra-mundane spheres, as clearly and distinctly as I behold you now. But it was not until the eleventh repetition of the experiment that something occurred which gave me pause and which drove icy terror into my very soul. I had been leaning from the tower window, staring with rapt and fascinated gaze upon the surging crowd, when one of the Others—a plodding and ungainly, brutish thing whose obese and pulpy corpulence was hideously pustuled with swollen and abnormal growths, like rudimentary tentacles or truncated proboscises—paused in its shambling progress, and craned its flat-browed and multi-eyed head skywards and stared directly into my eyes.

I SHRANК back from the window, shaken to the heart with a sudden and nameless fear—but fear of what, I could not say!—and returned tremblingly to the great, carven chair and cowered therein. The tolling of the ancient silver bell had ceased and a tense, uncanny silence brooded over the room, even as those leprous moons of cold and nacreous light brooded over the limitless vistas of the weird and wonderful and yet horrible world beyond my tower chamber. Then it was that I recalled with a chill of foreboding the words of admonition with which Abdul Alhazred had terminated his passage—the passage to which that reputed warlock, my great-great-grandsire, had drawn my attention:

Yet be wary that ye not over-doe yr usage of this Mode: for him who sees Beyonde, he may betimes alsoe be seene by Them that make of that Realm the Place of Their abiding.

Had I, in truth, continued my experiments beyond the proscribed limit? I had no way of knowing whether or not this was true, bur I resolved to discontinue using the drugged potion and the tolling of the bell hereafter; but first, I could not restrain my curiosity as to the nature of the goal of that ultra-mundane and trans-temporal nightly pilgrimage I had watched so many times—the crypts or cavern beneath the very foundations of Northam Keep, which had been so inexplicably protected from all attempts to destroy it over so many numberless decades and generations and centuries. Thus it was that the next morning, upon arising from restless and intermittent slumbers made unspeakably hideous by shadowy and half-remembered dreams, I descended into the cellars below the castle and found at length the sealed and barred portal of ancient black wood which for untold ages had guarded its secret from the knowledge of men.

The keys to the crypt were antique and cumbersome, and the locks were eaten with rust and decay, but with perseverance I at last managed to unseal the portal and ventured within, holding aloft an oil lamp to afford some illumination. The age of the crypt was unguessable, hewn as it was by crude, primitive implements from the solid granite of the crag upon which my remotest ancestors had reared Northam Keep, and the gloom which pervaded it, and which had perchance for centuries known not the benison of light, was Stygian and profound. In the outer chambers I discovered the stone sepulchres of my ancestors, whose dates marched backwards, generation by generation, into the abysm of time; but nowhere in these antechambers did I descry aught that could have been the goal or shrine of that mysterious pilgrimage which I had watched file by below my eyrie night after unforgettable night. Indeed, it was nor until I chanced to discover the innermost crypt that I came upon what proved the ultimate guerdon of my quest into the horrible history of my ancient line ... that great coffin crudely hacked from black basalt, whose ponderous lid I prised away, tilting the lamp so that I might peer within ... and from one terrible glimpse of that which the ages had mercifully hidden from the sight and knowledge of men ... that gaunt and glistening and all-but fleshless Thing that squirmed and wriggled in the stinking foetor of its own putrid slime ... that bony and naked and undead Thing whose skull-like and mewling head reared suddenly as if to stare with blind eyes into my own ... that slick, white, unclean Abnormality upon whose lineaments I stared with a soul-sickening sense of recognition ... at which I screamed and let fall the burning lamps from nerveless hands, to fall and shatter within the sarcophagus, to drench with liquid flame the writhing monstrosity which squealed and shrilled with torment from the flames, bat neither burned nor died ... and, screaming, I flung myself in panic-maddened flight from that unspeakable crypt of nethermost horrors ... sealed and locked the ponderous portals behind me with palsied hands ... and fled stumbling up the winding stair to the safety and sanity of the normal, everyday world.

THAT night I flung the abhorrent Necronomicon upon the fire in the grate and burned as well the papers I had found in that accursed rower chamber, and poured every last drop of the vile and hideous potion down the drain, vowing never to risk my soul or sanity again to feed the thirst of my imagination on that penumbral, nightmarish work! beyond the Veil.

The next day, hungry for the sight and sound of men, I left the castle for the first time in weeks and sought out the public house in town, where I sought surcease from my unendurable memories in strong ale and noisy companionship. From the tavern I wended my homewards way in the gloaming, and had all but reached the foot of the drive that ascends the steep to the gates of the castle, when the bells in the village church began to coll the hour. That dreadful music, so horribly alike to the monotonous tolling of that gruesome and sinister silver bell, made me shudder to the roots of my soul, and I was about to scramble up the drive to Northam Keep, when suddenly an inexplicable vertigo seized me and I was forced to lean against the corner of the nearest building in my giddy sickness. I shut my eyes, trying to master the strange weakness which had assailed me, and opened them at length to stare down at the slick cobbles beneath my feet, but saw only powdery and glinting mica. In a panic of utter terror. I looked around with dazed, uncomprehending eyes, noting the peculiar newness of the old, old houses ... looked skywards into depths of fathomless purple, where pallid moons of ghostly opals leered down as if in ghastly mockery at my plight. Now all about me moved a throng of curiously garbed strangers, bound for a goal which horribly I knew; and one of them, a pulpy and bloated, corpse-like thing with more limbs than was normal, turned to grin directly into my eyes, which widened with unbelieving horror. And all the time, the church bells tolled and tolled; and I knew myself to be hopelessly and irretrievably lost to a damnation more shuddersome than that threatened by any merely earthly creed ....

In that very hour I left forever the ancient castle of my ancestors, and fled to London, vowing never to return to that haunt of horror where I had rashly and imprudently dared the ultimate blasphemy of striving to pierce the Veil that separates our sane and mundane sphere from regions of unguessable loathsomeness that lie beyond, yet dreadfully near to hand. I am glad that I burnt the Necnnomicon, and you should do the same, young Williams, for there are things men were not meant to know and sights of the very Pit upon which no sane man should dare to gaze. And still I shriek and cower when the church bells chance to ring, and ever are my dreams and my every waking hour rendered unspeakable by that last sight I had in the crypt, when the undying thing reared its fleshless head to peer with blinded eyes into my own, and I saw—and knew—those heavy brow ridges, those jutting cheekbones. that harsh and angular jaw and severely aquiline nose ... the very features that heredity has stamped upon every member of my line since time immemorial and the days of my remotest ancestors!