The Xothic Legend Cycle

The Soul of the Devil-Bought by Robert M. Price

THE telephone rang with a sound one does not typically expect telephones to make. This one sounded like a gong, and was in fact attached, in an arcane manner recalling the hammer and tympanum arrangement of the human ear, to a medium-sized brass gong somewhere in the surprisingly vast interior of the apartment. Muffled as it was by the many Oriental rugs and elaborate tapestries that insulated nearly the whole layout of the place, the mellow depth of the sound still managed to penetrate every inch of the strange domain. There would be but a single ring in any case, but this time a dusky hand reached out to the dumbbell-like receiver in a second flat, as the giant possessor of the hand, a turbaned and taciturn Sikh, had been standing like a posted guard next to the intricately carved teakwood pillar-table on which the telephone sat like a museum antiquity. Akbar Singh spoke the monosyllable with something suggesting imperious urgency: "Yes?" Then, “What is your business with my Master?”

The statuesque Sikh stood apparently alone in the book-lined study, as if he were a cigar-store Indian included among the exotic collection of antiques, curiosities, and finely bound books crowding the place. It was not his own sanctum sanctorum, and yet he seemed alone in it—till all at once the high-backed leather swivel chair behind the great mahogany desk spun around to face him. The face he saw was an accustomed one for all its peculiarity in the eyes of most of the few who had seen it. His subtle Eurasian face remained as passive as the Buddha's, yet his obliquely slanted eyes beneath a high, unfurrowed brow seemed to smolder with adventurous expectancy. It was almost as if he were following the telephone conversation telepathically, as perhaps he was.

Dr. Ancon Zarnak rose and reached across the cluttered desk top to receive the telephone from his servant. His eyes closed as he listened, as if meditating, as if seeking to pick up signals from his caller that the other was not intentionally sending. The silver-white lightning zigzag that mounted up from his widow’s peak to disperse through his otherwise jet-black hair might have suggested the drawing of psychic forces to his magnet-like brain.

"Yes, Mr. Maitland ... soon to be Dr. Maitland, is it not? Yes, I thought so. I was expecting your call. Never mind how, but it was the next natural development. No, that’s all right. I assume you are calling with reference to the Winfield inheritance? ... I am not without my sources."

Through all this, the giant Sikh let a small grin draw up the corners of his mouth. He was amused at the obvious confusion his master's prescience produced in such inquirers. He was no stranger to the feeling himself. If he felt a hint of amused superiority now, it was not because he understood Zarnak’s secret any better than the nonplused caller; he had simply become accustomed to the inexplicable. Now Dr. Zarnak was handing him back the receiver.

"We will depart at once, my friend. I felt it best not to require our scholarly caller to leave his ivory tower to venture the shadowed courts of our Oriental Quarter. The Sanbourne institute is no appreciable distance by car, and I suspect it will do us both good to get some fresh air." Akbar Singh nodded as he stepped away to fetch his master’s coat. Fresh air indeed—he had breathed little but drifting incense for some months now, half-suspecting that the fumes were meant to instill in him some psychic sensitivity, or else protection. He did not really care to know more.

AS the black sedan purred its way beyond the cobbled labyrinths of the Oriental Quarter and up the Southern California coast to Santiago, its driver felt relieved to open up the throttle till the county roadways brought them to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. To this institution the renowned Dr. Zarnak was no stranger. Indeed, it was from this place that he had earned the latest of his several doctoral degrees. His association with his alma mater was congenial, though he was scarcely the average alumnus.

Zarnak was not infrequently called upon to date or authenticate certain relics purchased by the Institute from various questionable vendors on River Street, where the wharves disgorged all manner of strange cargo brought in from obscure ports of call throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans, There was no use in scrupling over how such items were obtained, since legality meant little in most of the places these traders frequented. The antique objects might as well have been freshly exhumed from Davey Jones’ locker as far as any Westerner could tell. If one or one's institution did not take advantage of such opportunities, it was not to be doubted that others would.

It was in connection with quite a different matter that Zarnak was calling on Jacob Maitland, a zealous young graduate assistant at Sanbourne just nearing the end of his doctoral work and about to get his thesis in final shape to defend before his committee. He had done his work on a curious old document called the Ponape Scripture, a palm papyrus manuscript brought to the Sanbourne Institute not long before by the ill-fated scholar-explorer Harold Hadley Copeland. Maitland had had occasion before now to contact Dr. Zarnak, whose acquaintance he had made during the last months of Zarnak’s own work at Sanbourne. He had read Zamak's dissertation, A New Scrutiny of the Polynesian Genesis according to the Cthäat Aquadingen. Young Maitland had at once perceived the crucial utility of some of his elder colleague’s methods as applied to his own project, for he suspected that the obscure pages of the Ponape Scripture might be written in some lost variant of the Naacal language of fabled Mu. But these matters had been far from his mind when he had telephoned Zarnak an hour earlier.

Jacob Maitland's story, and his dire suspicions, began to unfurl as he welcomed Dr. Zarnak and his manservant into his tiny office. His name was stenciled onto a cardboard plaque taped to the pebbled glass of the door. As a graduate assistant he had little status and few prerogatives, and those few did not include spacious accommodations. Glancing at the massive frame of the Sikh. Maitland suggested perhaps the faculty club or even the library might be more conducive, but Zarnak insisted privacy was the more important consideration, and Akbar Singh modestly retired from the scene, announcing his intention to stay with their automobile outside.

It seemed that Maitland had been highly annoyed at a duty assigned him by his supervisor, manifestly because no one else with the right to delegate the matter had hesitated to exercise that right. He was to seek out a Mr. Winfield Phillips, heir to the property of one Hiram Stokely, an eccentric recluse for whom no living contemporary had had any use—save for the famous Harold Hadley Copeland, himself the great benefactor of the Sanbourne Institute. Copeland had at some point managed the unthinkable, to purchase from the cantankerous Stokely two priceless old volumes. Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten of F. W. von Junzt and the R'lyeb Text, with which Maitland knew Zarnak to be more than familiar, together with some manuscript pages from an oddity called the Yuggya Chants. How he had been able to persuade old Hiram to yield up these volumes no one at the Institute could even guess, unless, as some suggested, Hiram had mastered all that these books had had to teach him.

Copeland had eventually bequeathed his own vast collection of idols, manuscripts, modern volumes, maps, diaries, and what not to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Once it had been discovered among his diaries that his copies of von Junzt and of the R'lyeh Text had come to him from Stokely's collection, the trustees of the Institute naturally wondered what else of similar scholarly importance might lie moldering in the late eccentric's library. Could not some arrangement be made with the heirs, a pair of the old man’s nephews, Bryan Winfield and Winfield Phillips? According to the local scandal mill, the two had moved into the decaying hacienda-style estate of the hated Hiram Stokely some weeks before to set up an openly homosexual household, to the outraged consternation of the poor white trash of the nearby town of Durriham Beach, whose Puritanical scruples apparently did little to hinder their own squalid depravities.

Soon a new scandal had replaced the old. Perhaps rumor had merely substituted a new lie for one that had become stale, but it was noised about that, whereas formerly the two young men had been inseparable on the few occasions they had ventured forth into town, now one caught sight only of Winfield Phillips, whose air seemed distracted in an ominous way, though no one, not even the gossips, could point to any specific evidence of foul play. Perhaps some lovers' spat between the two dandies had driven the offended cousin away under cover of night, or perhaps he had taken his own life in a moment of maudlin despair, as homosexuals were wont (or thought) to do.

Jacob Maitland had found these reports half-plausible, having read somewhere of Phillips' keen Interest in the Decadents. He judged no man for his private affairs, but the Durnham Beach gossip was more than casually interesting to him simply because it had fallen to him to make the first cordial contact with Winfield Phillips, and he feared on the basis of these reports that the man might be arbitrary and unreasonable in his dealings. When Maitland soon discovered, in addition, that Phillips had for a number of years been associated with Miskatonic University in an analogous capacity to his own at the Sanbourne Institute, he began to dread that his counterpart might have designs on whatever of his uncle’s precious volumes might remain, intending to donate the books to the Hoag Library of Miskatonic, and thus to strengthen his own prospects of gaining a choice faculty position. This possibility sounded all the more likely to Maitland because he had hoped, by securing any such rare books for the Sanbourne's collection, to advance his own scholarly career. There had been nothing to do but drive up to the Hiram Stokely property and discuss matters as amicably as he could with Winfield Phillips himself.

Phillips had not bothered to restore telephone service to his uncle's house, apparently sharing some of the old man's eremitic inclinations. So Jacob Maitland had had little choice but to make the long drive through the dreary mudflats and acres of stunted scrub pines to the old hacienda—and just hope that Phillips would be home. Given the desolation of Durnham Beach and the surrounding acres, Maitland had considered it unlikely Phillips would be busy at anything away from home. The peculiar look of the midget forest of scrub pine had made him think of the New Jersey Pine Barrens which, according to local superstition, housed the fantastic Jersey Devil. Looking at the local equivalent of the Barrens, he could well understand how the desolation of a place like this would incarnate itself in legendary form.

He had grimaced as he had realized he was driving past the blasted acres of the infamous Hubble's Field, the routine excavation of which some years previously had yielded shocking revelations of many ages’ worth of human sacrifice and mass murder. These ghastly revelations had effectively doomed the adjacent town to eventual desertion, as no one would move there. Even the surly denizens of Durnham Beach seemed to despise their ancestral habitat, though no appreciable number had ever sought to leave, not even a few years back when there had been a rash of strange disappearances, mostly of children. It seemed to Maitland that something kept the Durnham people rooted to their poisoned land, so that the thought of fleeing never even seemed to cross the minds of most. What could keep an outsider like Phillips here? It was no wonder that his boyfriend had left, no doubt deciding that he had had quite enough of these surroundings.

ZARNAK listened with inscrutable silence as Maitland continued to fill the narrow confines of his office cubicle with details of his story. The younger man more than once paused to reprove himself for boring his guest with over-ample detail, but the latter assured him that no fact ought to be neglected. "Sometimes, my young friend, the memory is but a camera which records details which mean nothing to us but which may speak volumes to another who examines the picture it has taken. Go on."

Maitland had had no idea what to expect when his knock was finally about to be answered. What would Phillips look like? Maitland had seen, a poor photo of the man, standing literally in the shadow of his erstwhile employer, Dr. Seneca Lapham, a professor at Miskatonic, the subject of the photograph. That had been from some years ago, in the aftermath of some queer business at Billington’s Woods in rural Massachusetts.

The sight that had greeted him was even more unexpected. It was not Winfield Phillips, nor even his reputedly vanished cousin. The figure before him, despite his undistinguished manner of dress, had plainly been an American Indian (of the once-local Hippaway people, as Maitland would later learn). This taciturn man, whose prominent cheekbones shaded curious scar patterns, must have been taken on by Winfield Phillips, with some of his new-found wealth, as a factotum. That the man was an Indian might imply that none of the nearby townspeople would willingly work for Phillips, though, God knew, there were few enough employment opportunities in the ghost-town community.

Each man had momentarily contemplated the other in silence, Maitland at a loss for words, the Indian awaiting some remark to which he might reply. Finally, as Maitland had begun to sputter false starts of embarrassed cliché, the Indian, a much older man, simply pointed to himself, saying “E-choc-taqus."

Maitland had managed to get out his own name, albeit srumblingly, as if he were not quite sure of it, and then a third figure had joined them. This man had introduced himself as Winfield Phillips. He had at least matched the general impression of the man in the photograph, though he had had somehow the appearance of being substantially older than his thirty years should have made him. Perhaps the unaccustomed duties of settling his late uncle’s affairs had worn on him. The burdens of everyday life often took a greater toll on those whose minds were characteristically at home with scholarly abstractions, as Jacob Maitland knew only too well.

Maitland had extended a hand and received a shake with a hint of reluctance. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Phillips. I wonder if I might come in to discuss something with you. About your inheritance, you see."

The other's eyes had narrowed in suspicion. "The assessor’s office? But I thought—"

“Oh, no, nothing like that, Mr. Phillips. I’m from the Sanbourne Institute."

“All right. Do come in. I'm afraid I’ve had quite enough of federal, state, and local jackals appearing out of the woodwork, each expecting a share of the carrion. Forgive the imagery."

“Uh, surely," Maitland had said, removing his hat and handing it to the Indian servant, who at first had seemed not quite sure what to do with it.

The place had been sumptuously furnished, mostly in Victorian style, something Maitland had noted with a subliminal note of relief, for he hated to see homes where the inner decor belied the outer facade, or, worse yet, where the oblivious new homeowner had no sense of propriety and would mix styles haphazardly. Then he had realized that Mr. Phillips must simply have had the interior of the old place cleaned out and repaired as necessary, not bothering to second-guess his ancestor’s tastes in furnishings. Still, that very effort implied Phillips’s intent to stay and make the home his own.

Phillips had led his guest into the second floor library and indicated a seat on one of the couches facing the fireplace, while his servant had stoked the fire in the grate. Taking a seat in a wing-back leather chair opposite Maitland's perch, Phillips had sat comfortably, like the lord of the manor settling into the familiar contours of a favorite chair.

"At first, as you may know, Mr. Maitland, I came here from back east, thinking merely to attend my uncle Hiram's funeral and to take care of a few items of business over at the Sanbourne. I’m afraid I haven't got around to that yet. Affairs here have kept me unexpectedly ... busy." He had gazed emptily up at the high ceiling, as if looking through it to greater expanses beyond. “I had planned to sell the old place, but the longer I stayed here, the more I began to feel at home, I can’t say just why. In fact, I almost had the feeling, silly isn’t it, that I had returned home here after being away. No, I had never been here to visit Uncle Hiram, though I confess to feeling that I know him better now, living among his things this way.”

Maitland had not been able to help noticing that in all this garrulous speech, Phillips had made no mention of his cousin and companion Bryan Winfield. It had sounded as if his cousin had formed no part of the events. Maitland had wondered what else Phillips might be strategically omitting. Then again, Maitland’s role was simply to negotiate for some old books, nor to play the role of detective.

"Well, to come to the point, Mr. Phillips, speaking of your late uncle’s possessions, I am here to tell you that the trustees of the Sanbourne Institute are curious to know whether his, that is, your library might contain any more old volumes like those Harold Hadley Copeland once purchased from Hiram Stokely—"

"Yes," Phillips had interrupted. "I know the ones you mean. And frankly, I can't imagine what it was that possessed Uncle Hiram to part with them in the first place. In fact, I’d been considering asking for their return, so that the Stokely Collection, as I’ve begun to think of it, might be complete again. Of course you must have had photographic facsimiles made of them by now, you’ve had them long enough.''

There was a blow! Maitland had come to add to the rare book holdings of the Sanbourne, and here he was, about to lose some of the crown jewels of the Institute. He should, he silently rebuked himself, never have come!

"This comes as something of a surprise, Mr. Phillips, but I can understand your viewpoint. I’m sure the trustees will be willing to consider the matter. I'm sure it can be settled amicably. Before I go, is there something I might help you with over at the Institute? You mentioned some errand you had there—"

"To be sure, Mr. Maitland, I did. But I really don’t think I'll bother seeing it through. You see, it had to do with a fellow named Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, a rather distraught man who appeared one day at Miskatonic, having come all the way across country from your own Sanbourne Institute. It seems he had a peculiar dread of one of the old Melanesian idols from the Copeland bequest, he sounded more than a little paranoid, if you want my impression. Nonetheless, some of our faculty heard him out and thought it the most compassionate thing to let him take home with him one of our own lesser museum pieces, a star-shaped stone of curious workmanship, which he was convinced would function as some sort of apotropaic device to protect him from the occult doom he feared.

"Newspapers not long afterward reported that his terrors had gotten the best of him at last, that he had gone wild in the Sanbourne Museum gallery, murdering a night-watchman and trying to set the place ablaze. All this transpired some eight years ago.

"My employer at Miskatonic, a Dr. Lapham. asked me, while I was out here for Uncle Hiram's funeral, to check into the matter, wondering if there were something more to the tragedy than the papers thought best to let on. But since coming into my inheritance, I have decided not to return east after all, and as for the Hodgkins case, I rather imagine it best to let sleeping dogs lie, don’t you? The Sanbourne is hardly likely to relish the prospect of the whole messy business being stirred up again for prurient public consumption, are they?"

Maitland had indeed heard of the bizarre tragedy of the unstable Hodgkins, whose days at the Institute had not overlapped his own. He knew there was more to the case, though what it might be he neither knew nor cared to find out. Phillips was right: It would be a blessing for the Sanbourne Institute not to have to deal with that publicity nightmare all over again.

"Your point is well taken, Mr. Phillips. Little is to be gained that way. We appreciate Professor Lapham's concern, but to be honest, we would appreciate your own more!" Both men had laughed, thawing the stiff politeness of the conversation, though only in time for it to draw to its close. Phillips had risen as the old Indian had entered the room.

"Echoctaqus. would you please show our guest out?" The Indian’s features had remained impassive, but something in his bearing had said that the role of underling did not come easily to him. "I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you about those books, and please reassure your trustees that I'll be more than happy to reimburse the Institute for at least the amount Copeland paid my uncle for them. You won’t forget? Good."

A bemused Jacob Maitland had followed the Indian servant down the winding staircase to the entry hall and had been halfway our the door when behind him he had heard the raised voice of Winfield Phillips calling him back.

"Oh, and, ah, one other thing, Maitland, if you please! If you should happen to hear from Dr. Lapham or anyone else at Miskatonic, please be sure to give them my regards and to convey my apologies for what I now realize was a joke in rather bad taste. Thanks so much, old man."

Maitland had felt surprisingly relieved to be behind the wheel again and retracing his path through the dismal acres of Durnham Beach and Hubble's Field, silently eating up the miles back to the palm-girded campus of the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities.

THERE his tale ended as well, as his voice trailed off into a question mark. He had asked Dr Zarnak nothing specific, but both men knew that the whole story was in fact a question, a puzzle, the beginning of a story and not the end of one.

"First, my young colleague, tell me, have you brought Phillips' request before the trustees yet?"

"No, all this happened little more than a week ago, and the trustees won't be meeting for another month and a half."

"Good, good," nodded the other, "You must never relay that request, for Phillips must never regain those volumes. I am sure that his uncle never yielded them up to Harold Hadley Copeland willingly in the first place."

"Then how ...?" The rounding eyes and rising brows of the younger man finished his question for him.

"I am not at full liberty to say, Mr. Maitland. Suffice it to say that Professor Copeland possessed something well beyond a theoretical knowledge of certain matters that had occasioned his acquaintance with Hiram Stokely in the first place. Let us say that there were at his service certain resources that enabled him to drive a hard bargain and to get what he wanted. Though you can see the good it did poor Copeland in the end."

"All right, sir, but what about the business of the 'joke' Phillips had made? That struck me as odd, hardly characteristic of the man’s general mien."

“You are to be congratulated. You have the keen eye of the researcher. As for the so-called joke, I think I can provide a comprehensive answer there." So saying, Zarnak reached down for a leather valise he had carried in with him, opened it, and deposited before Jacob Maitland a neatly typed manuscript of some forty pages. Alone on the top sheet, like a voice crying in the wilderness, stood the single terse line "Statement of Winfield Phillips."

"Go ahead, read it now. It will not take long, and it contains a number of things you will need to know for our conversation to continue. I shall meditate in the meantime."

So Maitland read, unperturbed at first, then with a growing sense of subtle alarm. The typescript began on a somber note, anticipating the writer’s own imminent death. Phillips had composed the narrative in the very same house, no doubt in the same room, in which Maitland had interviewed him less than a week ago. He told of his mission to Santiago, his meeting with his cousin (and here Maitland could read between the lines some possible justification for the rumors of the pair’s homosexuality), and their initial exploration of their uncle's mansion. Phillips’ breathless description of his chance discovery of a shelf full of little-known classics of the Decadent movement left Maitland cold, as his own interests ran decidedly toward the scientific, nor the literary, much less the polluted tributary of the Decadents. When he got to the subsequent disclosure of centuried copies of John Dee's Necronomicon and Gaspard du Nord’s edition of the Livre d'Ivon, his pulses quickened; here were the books whose hypothesized presence had motivated his trip out to the Stokely, now Phillips, estate. He was aghast at the implied death of Bryan Winfield and half-suspected that the narrator protested too much his innocence in the affair. All in all, much that had been unclear was explained in these mad pages, and yet somehow everything seemed even more mysterious than before.

Zarnak’s eyes met his as Maitland looked up from the last page. “You are perhaps wondering whether Phillips gave in to the voices that beckoned to him in the end. Deep down, from what you have told me. I think we both know the answer to that.”

"Then this is no joke? I was afraid it wasn’t. What was rhe 'joke in poor taste', then? And how did you manage to get hold of this manuscript. Dr. Zarnak?"

"I came by it through unexceptional means. It seems that Winfield Phillips mailed the manuscript to his old mentor. Seneca Lapham, no doubt immediately after typing it. It was his last act while in reasonable possession of his faculties. It was not long before he regretted having sent it off and wanted very much to allay the fears and questions his shocking account must have occasioned at Miskatonic. He wrote again, assuring Dr. Lapham that the earlier parcel had simply been an endeavor to fictionalize his visit to Durnham Beach. It was the discovery of the various chapbooks and manuscripts of Henquist, Gordon, Ariel Prescott, and the rest that had inspired him to seize upon the macabre qualities of his visit, the funeral, the old, mildewed mansion, and so forth, and utilize them in a pastiche of his own. He claimed he realized only after having mailed it off that he had omitted a cover letter explaining the fictional nature of the whole thing and wanted to supply that lack now."

"To tell you the truth, Dr. Zarnak, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been satisfied with that explanation. But I take it Professor Lapham was not?"

“Correct. He had ample reason to know that truth is often very much stranger than fiction. Then there was the complete surprise of young Winfield abandoning his position at Miskatonic. Besides, even if the manuscript had been a piece of fiction, why on earth would Phillips ever have thought the serious-minded Seneca Lapham would have wanted to read its disgusting contents? He is not a man for such trifles, as Phillips knew better than most.

"Dr. Lapham did not reply to either mailing from his former assistant but instead passed the manuscript on to me for my opinion. When I heard from you, I knew you must see it as well. It is certain that the narrative contains elements that the secretive Phillips now wishes had never been revealed, facts that presumably may be used against him. For instance, did you notice Phillips' initial puzzlement over the unaccountable fact that his uncle, whom he did not know and had not met, should make him and his cousin bis sole beneficiaries? Hiram Stokely had become estranged from both branches of the family to which the two young men belonged. What could have been his motivation? Something else: What was the reason for the hasty, closed-casket funeral?"

Maitland lowered his eyes, shading his features with his hand, "Frankly, I’d rather not guess. But why bother with Phillips? If he turns out to be every bit as mad as that fellow Hodgkins, it's his own business, surely? Why appoint ourselves his inquisitors?"

Zarnak knew that the younger man was having second thoughts. His earlier forebodings were now giving way to fear, and this he sought to rationalize as much as to disguise. "Mr. Maitland, Jacob, why then did you call me into the matter, if not to get to the bottom of it?"

"My only interest in Winfield Phillips was in the rare books his uncle left him. I’ve told you, even in that errand I was only carrying out the wishes of my superiors here at the Institute."

“Come, Jacob, you don't even believe that yourself, I am quite a good judge of first impressions, and I realized when we met that you were a true delver into secrets. And we both know that most secret things are concealed for their danger. The righteous hide them away lest their disclosure prove dangerous, while the wicked hide them only till an opportune time, when the secret things would do the most damage. You knew that from the start, and I believe you know what is at stake here, specifically.”

"Hubble's Field. That’s the problem, isn’t it? The locals think the disappearances will start again, and they’ll be next. And it will be Phillips who starts it all up. Hell keep his new allies, the yuggya?, well sated with their blood in return for who knows what rewards?"

"Very astute, Jacob Maitland. I see I was right about you. What you have outlined is but the beginning of sorrows that will ensue if our friend Phillips is not stopped straightway. For I am convinced that he was lured out to his uncle's property in order to continue the old sorcerer's terrible work. My guess is that, while his vampiric allies had no concerns beyond ensuring a fresh supply of human sacrifices, Hiram Stokely had rather bigger things in mind, things hard for a sane mind to conceive of, though I have a few guesses.

"It would be a complex plan entailing much effort. His devil’s bargain caught up with him before he could finish his tasks. More than likely, Professor Copeland had thrown Stokely's plans awry by forcing him to part with certain crucial volumes he required. You saw how eager his nephew Phillips was to regain them. Somehow, perhaps through the lingering psychic influence in the house itself, young Phillips has been enlisted to carry old Hiram’s blasphemous schemes to their completion. At least that is my fear."

"What of the Indian?" asked Maitland, suddenly recalling how strange his presence had seemed. "Is it no more than Phillips having to go outside the town for help?"

"Would that it were so, friend Jacob. In that case, one would still have to ask why Phillips would trouble himself to locate an Indian, of the Hippaway tribe, I believe. There are none of them to be found in a radius of many miles nowadays. I cannot imagine there would be one on the list of any nearby employment agency. Especially not for such work. His name is the real signal. Does it strike a familiar note with you?"

Maitland rose, put one fist to his hip, touching the index digit of the other hand to his chin, unconsciously striking the contemplative pose. "Yes ... yes, it does, now that you mention it, though I was sure at the time I’d not heard the outlandish jumble before."

“No, it would be something you have heard, or rather read, since your visit."

About to give up on the game, Maitland suddenly turned a quarter circle to face him and, with light dawning in his eyes, he almost spoke, then grabbed up the typescript and began shuffling through the pages. "Here it is! The old devil is named for the Place of the Conqueror Worm. E-choc-tah in the tongue of the Hippaway. Hubble's Field. Good Christ! Why would anyone ...?"

Zarnak had stood to his feet now and was shaking the pile of pages together to even up their edges once more. "It is a very old legacy, Jacob. Our local burying ground, Hubble’s Field, is only one of many such honey-combed horrors. The children of Ubb, Lord of Maggots and Corruption, are active the world over, as many traditions attest. The holy city Jerusalem, now part of the British Mandate of Palestine, had once been a center of the cult of Yog-Sothoth, and it was erected in olden times next to an unclean place of Ubb. The Bible curses that place as Tophet, Gehenna, and Akeldama, the Field of Blood. Of it Isaiah writes, 'the worm dieth not and the fire is never quenched.' The demon Ubb eventually seduced Solomon to his fealty, whose great treasures and sorcerous powers are well known, though their true source remains unsuspected. In return, Solomon caused Ubb’s cult to be established in the Jerusalem temple itself, where it remained till the reforming zeal of King Josiah swept the whole gallery of abominations away."

Zarnak fell silent as the shadow of his man Akbar Singh loomed against the pebbled glass window. The occultist lifted his valise and motioned for Jacob Maitland to precede him. Maitland had not planned on any outings today, but he felt he had little choice but to accompany the strange and almost spectral figure to his waiting sedan. All were silent as the tall Sikh, whose turbaned head brushed the ceiling of the automobile, made the nightblack vehicle glide through the urban jungle like a panther on the prowl.

SEVERAL hours later, the road-weary Maitland found himself standing in the entrance hall of number 13 China Alley, the dwelling of Anton Zarnak. The master of the house himself had quietly disappeared for the moment, and the wide-eyed guest handed his coat to Akbar Singh, who seemed to him as improbable a manservant as the old Indian Echoctaqus.

Poor Maitland scarcely knew whether he stood in an embassy of some Far Eastern empire or in a compact and overflowing museum whose collection of exotica far surpassed anything the museum of the Sanbourne Institute had to show. Beneath his feet lay the huge skin of a white Siberian tiger. Suits of gilded armor stood to either side of a door frame, and their make suggested no conventional armorial style, no particular country or era he knew. He strained to read the small placard mounted on the base of one and thought he made out the odd word "Nemedian."

Everywhere his eyes met wonders. From the walls of the corridor mounted animal heads gazed glassily at one another. One was avian, though far too large to represent any ordinary species of bird; the other had to be some kind of boar, but it had altogether too many tusks. He caught sight of what he first took to be a stuffed bat, but closer inspection showed it to be a flying reptile of an unknown type. In a daze, Maitland stepped closer and extended a finger. Yes, the stitching was that of the taxidermist, not of the toy maker.

The gentle touch of the mighty hand of Akbar Singh brought him to his senses once again. He shook his head and followed the direction the giant indicated and soon found himself sinking into a plush chair facing that of Anton Zarnak, who sat with his hands together, like a tripod, his goateed chin resting on their apex. On the desk before him was an old book.

Zarnak took it up, saying simply, "Let me read you something."

"Well, what do you make of that, my friend?" Zarnak let the massive book fall closed.

The other's eyes had closed during the reading but now sprang open. "But wasn’t the author of the Necronomicon himself something of a wizard? So Ibn Khallikan attests. And the Al-Azif has the reputation of a kind of occult Bible. I'm afraid I don’t understand, Dr. Zarnak."

"I have thought long and hard on the very matter you mention. Here is what I have discovered, or at any rate surmised. To put it perhaps over-simply for the moment, I have concluded that the Al-Azif and the Necronomicon are not in fact one and the same. The former was the work of an eighth-century Yemenite demonologist, Abd al-Hazrat. The more notorious Necronomicon, while it incorporates various bits and pieces of lore filched from the older Azif, is substantially a new work, a series of mediumistic revelations made to Dr. John Dee while he gazed into his scrying crystal.

"Once he had transcribed the visionary material, he stood aghast at the character of it. Suspecting demonic inspiration for the larger pare of it, he tried to disguise its true origin by fathering the work on the obscure Arab al-Hazrat. It was a day when Christians commonly believed their Saracen rivals to worship idols and monsters such as Termagant and Iblis, so the attribution seemed natural. Dr. Dee dared not simply destroy the blasphemous text outright for fear of what vengeance might be wrought upon him by whatever alien influences had imparted the revelations to him. Afterward he petitioned his God for the gift of the tongue of angels, that spoken by the antediluvian revealer Enoch, that henceforth he might receive the oracles of God without admixture.

"What I have just read you comes from the original work of al-Hazrat. I do not care to say how it came into my hands. But I am fairly certain that in this passage we have some clues to our mystery. I will keep my own counsel about some of it till events corroborate my guesses, but I will tell you this. It would be a waste of rime to approach our Mr. Phillips again. He would surely grow suspicious, no matter what pretext we used to cloak the reason for our interest in his affairs. We must retain the element of surprise, and here is how we shall do it ..."

MIDNIGHT found a lonely trio trudging through an even lonelier landscape, as Anton Zarnak, accompanied by his servant Akbar Singh and the somewhat reluctant young scholar Jacob Maitland, made their way through Hubble's Field, trying to get as near as they dared to the old Hiram Stokely mansion without being seen in the wan moonlight.

The farthest quarter of the vast and desolate expanse harbored a very old cemetery, with headstones dating in some cases to pioneer days. Excavations some years before had disclosed the shocking fact that pretty much the whole of Hubble's Field had long been honeycombed with clandestine burials dating back further still, but of course none of those makeshift graves was marked.

Work at the site had been suspended while the appropriate county boards had met to decide what to do next. Finally, two considerations had persuaded them to discontinue the operation and to reroute the planned utility lines elsewhere. First, the presence there of ancient Indian remains made the place sacred in the eyes of the surviving Hippaway, who appeared as if from nowhere to make their case quire vociferously. Second, since there was no possibility of identifying any of the skeletal carcasses, some of them seemingly mummified, it was thought best not to bother reinterring them elsewhere. Best to let the place alone, dreaming of its enigmatic past. No one came there any more, not even to lay flowers at the graves in the tiny cemetery that lay close to the mansion. Most of these graves were so old that no one survived to memorialise dead relatives resting there.

It was here that Zarnak chose to start digging. To Maitland's nervous questioning the unflappable occultist replied, "It is always easier when paying a visit to begin by locating the door. These even have their residents' names listed. Rather like your apartment house." It was a grim jest, but neither man laughed.

Akbar Singh's huge muscles swelled as he attacked the moldy mound of graveyard soil, unearthing the rotting lid of a coffin in surprisingly few minutes. They seemed long to Maitland, who was in constant terror, not of the supernatural, but simply of being apprehended by the local police—as if any were likely to be patrolling the God-forsaken area. He winced at every blow of the Sikh's shovel against the yielding wood of the old casket. Wood splintered as Akbar Singh pulled free what was left of the lid.

"Just as you surmised, my Master—nothing!”

Maitland and Zarnak both advanced to the lip of the emptied grave. Maitland spoke first. "You mean we've taken all this insane risk for nothing? I told you—"

"No, young Mister Maitland; please take a closer look. Don't be afraid. Indeed, the coffin is untenanted. That is as I suspected. I believe we will find something else instead. Now, let Akbar Singh finish his work." The Sikh set to work again, this time roughly tapping this and that section of the exposed coffin bottom, shredding what was left of the once-fine silken lining. Then a sudden splintering sound.

"The false bottom, sahib." Zarnak joined him, drawing forth an electric torch.

“And the steps? Yes, there they are. Not much, barely more than an uneven incline, I fear, but we ought to be able to make it. Come, gentlemen.”

Jacob Maitland’s reaction to this development may readily be imagined. With a quick prayer, the first he had uttered in many a year, the young scholar followed Akbar Singh, Zarnak bringing up the rear, down the stairs in the crypt.

When they finally reached the end of the slippery ramp, which seemed to be a huge mud hill lent what little stable structure it possessed by an underlying heap of yellowed bones, the three venturers were glad to attain level ground again—until, that is, their descending feet splashed through fully a foot of scummy standing water. As they made their slow way forward, feet emerging from the mire with a sucking pop! each time, they tried hard to gain a sense of their bearings in case a speedy retreat should prove necessary. That was of no use: The place was a labyrinth. Echoes defined the height of the ceiling variously the further they went. Once or twice their heads bumped the rock above them, but then they would shortly hear the distinct sounds of leathery wings fluttering stickily far above them. Once they had to retrace their steps, losing an hour or two, when the ceiling began to close over their heads again and finally lowered to such a degree that passage was impossible.

Eventually, they judged, they must be in more or less close proximity to the mansion. If so, there would soon be visible piles of gemstones, ancient coins and treasures: the gathered loot of the centuries, mined and excavated by the wriggling scavengers who served the repellent Ubb, blasphemous totem of the eaters of the dead.

Though none cared to point out the fact, it would also be soon that they would encounter one of the nonhuman subjects of Father Ubb, unless of course the statement of Winfield Phillips had indeed been a fiction or a macabre joke after all. Too much of it had proven out already for that welcome alternative to hold out much hope.

The moment delayed no longer, as fearful anticipation incarnated itself in the form of an obscenely glistening wave of corpulent viscosity, suddenly rising up before them from the underlying ooze. The thing, which held its ungainly position for several seconds unmoving, had no visible countenance. In general shape it might have borne comparison to a single severed octopus tentacle endowed with a life of its own. Great circular sucker-mouths quivered along its exposed underside, no doubt in eager throes of appetite.

All three men had crouched, bracing themselves for fight or flight, though each seemed equally futile. It was then, in the midst of the cool detachment deadly danger brings, that Jacob Maitland realized what it must mean that the disgusting creature towered motionlessly, with its presumably more vulnerable underside exposed. It was trying in the only way it might to indicate peaceful intentions. He thought of the passage from the Azif which ascribed some manner of craftiness, hence intelligence, to the servitors of Ubb. Without thinking, he blurred out his hunch to the others. Even with the echoes Maitland thus let loose, the posture of the hideous denizen did not change.

"Well done, Maitland!" cried the mud-smeared Zarnak, a ridiculous caricature of his usually impeccable appearance. "I believe our host is satisfied that you have understood him. Look, there he goes, and I’d swear he means us to follow. Come!"

The bloated maggot-thing slid slowly through the muck and slime that covered the cavern floor, apparently troubling to keep the upper portion of its segmented jelly above the surface, so they could track and follow it. Fully aware that they might well be following along like sheep to the slaughter, the three men saw little in the way of alternatives. If the yuggya, for such they must be, had sought their destruction, a sudden and fatal ambush would have been a simple matter.

Before long they began to recognize familiar-looking landmarks. They must, they now realized, have strayed far from their goal, and the beast before them had perhaps been sent to guide them to their destination. Soon the feeble glow of the waning flashlight began to magnify itself a thousandfold as its pale rays fell upon sudden heaps of ancient treasure. Here it was! The mysterious source of the wealth of Winfield Phillips, of Hiram Stokely before him, and of who knew how many corrupted souls in the ages before them?

As Zarnak had warned them, the real treasures of temptation were the promised secrets of elder blasphemy that lay beyond the veils of human ignorance. They were already getting more of those secrets than Maitland, for one, would have wished. He only hoped he might survive this adventure with a fair measure of blissful ignorance intact.

MORE than once nearly losing their footing, as their clumsy waterlogged steps landed on piles of underwater coins or fell on the open hinges of old chests that closed like toothless bear traps on their numb feet, the weary party finally arrived at the chosen destination to which their nightmare sheep dog had guided them. All alike strained and squinted to grasp the outlines of a shadowed image pressed against the rocky cave wall in front of them. Was it some sort of statue? It seemed motionless enough, bur then a low moan crept eerily from where its lips would be. Emboldened, the men came nearer, semi-circling the pathetic creature fastened to the rocks with a combination of rusty manacles and too-tight cords.

It hardly stirred, and anyone could see it had severe anemia. Half-healed scars showed that the man had been often and deeply bled. It was a marvel that any spark of life lingered. Perhaps whoever, or whatever, had done this to him knew ways of prolonging life. Or, more to the point, prolonging death. Zarnak knew that, in any case, life could not keep its toehold here for long. He bent close, gesturing for the others to do the same. The flesh-scarecrow somehow rallied. A whisper struggled forth.

“Bryan ... Winfield ... still alive ... wish I weren’t, damn them—”

Suddenly the great worm-thing rose up again, splashing noisome ooze in all directions. Again it remained upright, directly across from the crucified man, with Zarnak, Akbar Singh, and Maitland between them. As the three involuntarily turned their heads to see the thing standing behind them, the dying man spoke again, this time with a greater steadiness called forth from some unknown reserve.

"My cousin ... Winfield ... yes, that!"

Zarnak's whisper punctuated the other’s: "... fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws ...."

Maitland was turning greener. “But ... who was it I saw? Surely ...." He trailed off into dumbfoundment, passive and resigned before one paradox too many. He began to totter, and the tireless Sikh reached out to steady him. Zarnak turned to him.

“Jacob, sahib Singh, unless I miss my guess, the man living in the house somewhere above is not Winfield Phillips, though he bears his face and form. It is in fact none other than Hiram Stokely!"

The wasted form manacled to the nitrous wall nodded with its much emphasis as it could manage.

“He had read the Necronomicon and must have reasoned that he could cheat death by willing himself to linger in his decaying physical form till the maggots got to him. He must have arranged to let his ’impending’ death be known, left instructions not to embalm him, and mandated an immediate burial. The sooner he reached the moist and tainted earth of Hubble's Field the better. He had already begun to change in a hideous way, hence the closed coffin ceremony. He exerted his fading will on the loathsome carrion-eaters, till they had consumed him. Somehow”—(here Zarnak indicated the swaying bulk of the yugg-creature)—"somehow this was the result. But who could abide the thought of living on in such a form? This is where the ill-fated Winfield Phillips and his cousin Bryan came in.”

Maitland, ringing wet and already chilled to the bone, nonetheless discovered his spine was capable of even deeper freezes. Zarnak went on.

"As young relatives and strangers to him, they could be assumed not to harbor the old family grudges, nor to know the reasons behind them. Old Hiram had chosen them as his heirs for no other reason, hoping to lure them to the old hacienda. His logic was flawless, I must admit. He trusted that they would not be long in discovering the secret of the cavern below the house, probably reasoning that sheer greed, if not curiosity, would impel them on a thorough search of the place for hidden caches of the old man’s fortune. The thing that had been Hiram Stokely simply resolved to wait at the foot of the stairway till the boys should sooner or later discover the secret closet in the library, and he would seize the first that came within his reach.

"This was the ‘Red Offering’, the blood his new body needed to maintain it. The first doomed interloper turned out to be poor Bryan here. The Stokely-thing expected to be able to establish a telepathic link with whichever cousin remained, counting on a certain psychic predisposition that ran in their witchcraft-blighted line. It worked, and under the guise of promising him Faustian knowledge and wealth untold, he lured the immature Phillips to his damnation. In the end, he worked the wonder of supplanting Phillips’ very consciousness, trapping it forever in his own slime-coated body. His plan worked perfectly—until now. We must see to it that the old wizard does not live on to bring his terrible schemes to ultimate fruition, or the whole earth will become one vast Hubble’s Field."

"That, as you know, would be only the start." This was a new voice, and it came from above, no doubt from further up the same staircase the two cousins had perilously descended many months before. It was Winfield Phillips' voice, though again it was not. None of them knew what Hiram Stokely’s voice had sounded like, but if they had, there would be no mistaking it now.

A flood light, or so it seemed to the sensitive eyes of the three below, enveloped them, making them easy targets for an unseen gunman. Maitland went down at once, though there was no way to judge how severe the wound might be. The impact would have knocked him over, weakened as he was, in any case. Zarnak and Akbar Singh both made for the outer circumference of the beam as fast as they could stumble, while another shot shattered the lolling head of Bryan Winfield. If he had not already succumbed in the previous moments, his message delivered to someone at last, the bullet, meant for Zarnak, freed him. Other shots echoed and ricocheted, competing in volume with Stokely’s outraged cries; he had apparently hoped to drain Bryan of a bit more blood.

As Zarnak and the Sikh each found shallow niches to provide a moment’s shelter, neither could readily think of what to do next. They had few options as long as the Indian Echoctaqus, for it must be he, held his rifle. There was one variable in the equation everyone was overlooking—until, that is, it broke the surface of the slime lake and glided with amazing swiftness to the landing where the newly bodied Hiram and his confederate stood, the latter desperately firing futile rounds at the oncoming behemoth.

"Don’t waste your shots, you old fool!" Hiram screamed, the voice of the younger Phillips cracking with the unaccustomed emphasis. As the wriggling missile bore in on them, it became clear that its object was Hiram alone, and the Indian, casting aside his empty rifle, sailed from the rocky precipice, half thrown, half jumping, into the darkness. To his misfortune, he managed to land atop the waiting form of Akbar Singh, who proceeded to provide an appropriate welcome—with his fists.

Meanwhile, Hiram, wearing the form of his nephew, was struggling against a second, grossly pulpy layer of flesh, as the greasy slime of the yuggya body engulfed him. The great invertebrate gained new strength as its kissing suckers popped open dozens of veins and arteries all over the now-limp form of his enemy. The screams died down, the eyes glazed; the usurped body of Winfield Phillips shrank like a dried fruit rind. The vengeance of Winfield Phillips was complete.

All this Zarnak saw as he crept from concealment and ascended the stairs unnoticed. Below him, the Sikh and the Indian fought with surprising fury. Akbar Singh's titan strength dampened somewhat by many hours of dull exertion, the Indian’s adrenaline pumping away to even up the odds. Still, Zarnak entertained no doubt of the eventual outcome.

As he ventured to approach the quivering mass of translucent, stinking jelly, lapping and bubbling over the desiccated form it had vanquished. Zarnak sensed a sudden and subtle change—for the worse. Something terrible was happening. The yugg-maggot was regaining its form, its strength, its stature. It seemed somehow different.

Zarnak’s sensitive instincts told him what had surely happened: In the moment of death, the demon-soul of Hiram Stokely had again displaced the psyche of Winfield Phillips and regained control of its previous host. Now it meant to pass into the body of Anton Zarnak himself! The occultist seemed unable to thwart the other’s design. He began to feel the separation, the drifting, the—

Then he went down, struck by something hard and wet smacking into the back of his nodding head. As he struggled to hold onto consciousness, he saw from the corner of his eye what had hit him, breaking the mesmeric hold the Hiram-thing had exerted upon him: the severed head of the Indian shaman Echoctaqus! Akbar Singh had wrenched it free of its moorings in one great effort and used it as the only instrument available to disrupt the horror he could see transpiring above.

The desperate maneuver had worked, and now Akbar Singh came charging up the steps, dangerously slippery with splattered blood and ooze. He had seized a torch out of its wall bracket as he passed, and now he thrust it over the head of Zarnak, just rising slowly to his knees, and into the midst of the viscous larva before him.

The thing made no sound except for the echoes of stones knocked loose by its flailing, ropy tentacles, the pseudopods randomly erupting from all over its violently quivering bulk. Then came the sound of bubbling and nauseous popping as molten pustules formed and vomited forth their unwholesomeness. Cleansing, obliterating flame swept in seconds over the glistening form of the thing, reducing it swiftly to a crumbling heap of caked ash, which kept collapsing as hidden pockets of mephitic gas imploded one by one.

Glad to turn away from the sickening spectacle. Zarnak and his rescuer made their way gingerly down the precarious steps to see to their third companion. Before they reached bottom, however, they met the staggering figure of Maitland, clutching the ripped flesh of a surface wound on one arm, but otherwise almost cheerful, given the circumstances. “What say we vacate the premises before any of Ubb’s colleagues get wind of what’s happened and come looking to settle the score? And this time, let's go through the house!”

So they did, taking one further precaution. After a quick search, Akbar Singh located a quantity of flammable liquids left over from the cleaning and renovation of the old hacienda. These he dispensed in liberal amounts over most of the extent of the interior. He had saved one of the torches from below the house. Once he was a safe distance from the front door, he warned the others, ignited the torch, and pitched it onto the verandah. Then he turned and ran as if the demons of hell were on his tail. Truth to tell, he wasn’t entirely sure they weren't. Rejoining the others, he turned and watched the growing inferno. Beside him, Zarnak whispered, as if speaking to himself, "Happy the town by night whose wizards are all ashes."