The Compleat Crow (13 page)

Crow got up, waited a moment, switched off the one bulb he had allowed to burn. In his alcove bedroom he drew the curtains and put on the light, then quickly changed into his dressing-gown. He took Harry Townley’s .45 revolver out from under his mattress, loaded it and tucked it out of sight in the large pocket of his robe. Now he opened the curtains some twelve inches and brushed through them into the library proper, pacing the floor along the pale path of light from the alcove.

To and fro he paced, tension mounting, and more than once he considered flight; even now, close as he was to those dark mysteries which at once attracted and repelled him. The very grit of his makeup would not permit it, however, for his emotions now were running more to anger than the terror he had expected. He was to be, to
have been
, this monster Carstairs’ victim! How now, knowing what the outcome would be—praying that it
would be
as he foresaw it—could he possibly turn away? No, flight was out of the question; Carstairs would find a substitute: the terror would continue. Even if Crow were to go, who could say what revenge might or might not fly hot on his heels?

At 9:30 cars pulled up at the house, quiet as hearses and more of them than at any other time, and through a crack in his shades Crow watched shadowy figures enter the house. For a little while then there were faint, subdued murmurings and creakings; all of which Crow heard with ears which strained in the library’s darkness, fine-tuned to catch the merest whisper. A little later, when it seemed to him that the noises had descended beneath the house, he put out the alcove light and sat in unmitigated darkness in the chair where Carstairs had left him. And all about him the night grew heavy, until it weighed like lead upon his head and shoulders.

As the minutes passed he found his hand returning again and again to the pocket where Townley’s revolver lay comfortably heavy upon his thigh, and every so often he would be obliged to still the nervous trembling of his limbs. Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed the hour of eleven, and as at a signal Crow heard the first sussurations of a low chanting from beneath his feet. A cold sweat immediately stood out upon his brow, which he dabbed away with a trembling handkerchief.

The Ritual of the Worm had commenced!

Angrily Crow fought for control of himself…for he knew what was coming! He cursed himself for a fool—for several fools—as the minutes ticked by and the unholy chanting took on rhythm and volume. He stood up, sat down, dabbed at his chill brow, fingered his revolver…and started at the sudden chiming of the half hour.

Now, in an instant, the house seemed full of icy air, the temperature fell to zero! Crow breathed the black, frigid atmosphere of the place and felt the tiny hairs crackling in his nostrils. He smelled sharp fumes—the unmistakable reek of burning henbane and opium—and sat rigid in his chair as the chanting from the cellar rose yet again, in a sort of frenzy now, throbbing and echoing as with the acoustics of some great cathedral.

The time must surely approach midnight, but Crow no longer dared glance at his watch.

Whatever it had been, in another moment his terror passed; he was his own man once more. He sighed raggedly and forced himself to relax, knowing that if he did not, then the emotional exhaustion must soon sap his strength. Surely the time—

—Had come!

The chanting told him: the way it swelled, receded and took on a new meter. For now it was his own name he heard called in the night, just as he had been told he would hear it.

Seated bolt upright in his chair, Crow saw the bookshelf door swing open, saw Carstairs framed in the faintly luminous portal, a loose-fitting cassock belted about his narrow middle. Tall and gaunt, more cadaverous than ever, the occultist beckoned.

“Come, Titus Crow, for the hour is at hand. Rise up and come with me, and learn the great and terrible mysteries of the worm!”

Crow rose and followed him, down the winding steps, through reek of henbane and opium and into the now luridly illumined cellar. Braziers stood at the four corners, glowing red where heated metal trays sent aloft spirals of burned incense, herbs and opiates; and round the central space a dozen robed and hooded acolytes stood, their heads bowed and facing inwards, toward the painted, interlocking circles. Twelve of them, thirteen including Carstairs, a full coven.

Carstairs led Crow through the coven’s ring and pointed to the circle with the white-painted ascending node. “Stand there, Titus Crow,” he commanded. “And have no fear.”

Doing as he was instructed, Crow was glad for the cellar’s flickering lighting and its fume-heavy atmosphere, which made faces ruddy and mobile and his trembling barely noticeable. And now he stood there, his feet in the mouth of the ascending node, as Carstairs took up his own position in the adjoining circle. Between them, in the “eye” where the circles interlocked, a large hourglass trickled black sand from one almost empty globe into another which was very nearly full.

Watching the hourglass and seeing that the sands had nearly run out, now Carstairs threw back his cowl and commanded: “Look at me, Titus Crow, and heed the Wisdom of the Worm!” Crow stared at the man’s eyes, at his face and cassocked body.

The chanting of the acolytes grew loud once more, but their massed voice no longer formed Crow’s name. Now they called on the Eater of Men himself, the loathsome master of this loathsome ritual:

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi, WORM!

“Wamas, Wormius, Vermi—”

And the sand in the hourglass ran out!

“Worm!”
Carstairs cried as the others fell silent.
“Worm, I command thee—come out!”

Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow’s lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man’s mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.

And out of that mouth—out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head—there now appeared a writhing pink flood of maggots, grave-worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!

“Now, Titus Crow, now!” cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. “Take my hand!” And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.

“No!” said Titus Crow. “No, I will not!”

Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried,
“What?”
His cassock billowed with hideous movement. “Give me your hand—
I command it!
”

“Do your worst, wizard,” Crow yelled back through gritted teeth.

“But…I have your Number! You
must
obey!”

“Not my Number, wizard,” said Crow, shaking his head—and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of terror filling the cellar.

“You lied!” Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. “You…
cheated
! No matter—a small thing.” In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. “Worm, he is yours. I command you—
take him!
”

Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb-horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor—and drew back from Crow’s circle as from a ring of fire. “Go on!” Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. “Who is
he
? What does
he
know? I command you!”

“I know many things,” said Crow. “They do not want me—they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916—on the 2nd December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr. Carstairs!”

The 2nd of December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes.
“A Master!”
Crow heard the whisper.
“A twenty-two!”

“No!” Carstairs fell to his knees.
“No!”

He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. “Durrell, to me!” His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.

“Not me!” shrieked Durrell, flinging off his cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. “Not me!” Wildly he clambered from sight—and eleven like him hot on his heels.

“No!”
Carstairs gurgled once more.

Crow stared at him, still unable to avert his eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final—the first!—dark Arab visage of his origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer’s face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.

Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half-forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:

“For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs
the very worm that gnaws
; till out of corruption horrid life springs…”

Later, in his right mind but changed forever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they crawled. Crow barely noticed them.

The tires of his car paid them no heed whatever.

One night, not so long ago, I was disturbed, during the study of some of the ancient books it is my pleasure to own, by a knock at the solid doors of my abode, Blowne House. Perhaps it would convey a more correct impression to say that the assault upon my door was more a frenzied hammering than a knock. I knew instinctively from that moment that something out of the ordinary was to come—nor did this premonition let me down.

It was blowing strongly that night and when I opened the door to admit the gaunt stranger on my threshold the night wind gusted in with him a handful of autumn leaves which, with quick, jerky motions, he nervously brushed from his coat and combed from his hair. There was a perceptible aura of fear about this man and I wondered what it could be that inspired such fear. I was soon to learn. Somewhat shakily he introduced himself as being Cabot Chambers.

Calmed a little, under the influence of a good brandy, Chambers sat himself down in front of my blazing fire and told a story which even I, and I have heard many strange things, found barely credible. I knew of certain legends which tell that such things once were, long ago in Earth’s pre-dawn youth, but was of the belief that most of this Dark Wisdom had died at the onset of the
present
reign of civilized man—or, at the very latest, with the Biblical
Burning of the Books
. My own ample library of occult and forbidden things contains such works as Feery’s
Original Notes on The Necronomicon
, the abhorrent
Cthaat Aquadingen
, Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s translation of the
G’harne Fragments
(incomplete and much abridged)—a tattered and torn copy of the
Pnakotic Manuscripts
(possibly faked)—a literally priceless
Cultes des Goules
and many others, including such anthropological source books as the
Golden Bough
and Miss Murray’s
Witch Cult
, yet my knowledge of the thing of which Chambers spoke was only very vague and fragmentary.

But I digress. Chambers, as I have said, was a badly frightened man and this is the story he told me:

“Mr. Titus Crow,” he said, when he was sufficiently induced and when the night chill had left his bones, “I honestly don’t know why I’ve come to you for try as I might I can’t see what you can do for me. I’m doomed. Doomed by Black Magic, and though I’ve brought it on myself and though I know I haven’t led what could be called a very
refined
life, I certainly don’t want things to end for me the way they did for poor Symonds.” Hearing that name, I was startled, for Symonds was a name which had featured very recently in the press and which had certain unpleasant connections. His alleged heart failure or brain seizure had been as unexpected as it was unexplained but now, to some extent, Chambers was able to explain it for me.

“It was that fiend Gedney,” Chambers said. “He destroyed Symonds and now he’s after me. Symonds and I, both quite well-to-do men you could say, joined Gedney’s Devil-Cult. We did it out of boredom. We were both single and our lives had become an endless parade of night-clubs, sporting-clubs, men’s-clubs and yet more clubs. Not a very boring life, you may think, but believe me, after a while even the greatest luxuries and the most splendid pleasures lose their flavours and the palate becomes insensitive to all but the most delicious—or perverse—sensations. So it was with Symonds and I when we were introduced to Gedney at a club, and when he offered to supply those sensations, we were eager to become initiates of his cult.

“Oh, it’s laughable! D’you know he’s thought of by many as just another crank? We never guessed what would be expected of us and having gone through with the first of the initiation processes at Gedney’s country house, not far out of London, processes which covered the better part of two weeks, we suddenly found ourselves face to face with the truth. Gedney is a devil—and of the very worst sort. The
things
that man does would make the Marquis de Sade in his prime appear an anaemic cretin. By God, if you’ve read Commodus you have a basic idea of Gedney but you must look to the works of Caracalla to really appreciate the depths of his blasphemous soul. Man,
look at the Missing Persons columns sometime
!

“Of course we tried to back out of it all and would have managed it too if Symonds, the poor fool, hadn’t gone and blabbed about it. The trouble with Symonds was drink. He took a few too many one night and openly down-graded Gedney and his whole box of tricks. He wasn’t to know it but the people we were with at the time were Gedney’s crew—and fully-fledged members at that! Possibly the fiend had put them on to us just to check us out. Anyway, that started it. Next thing we knew Gedney sent us an invitation to dinner at a club he uses, and out of curiosity we went. I don’t suppose it would have made much difference if we hadn’t gone. Things would have happened a bit sooner, that’s all. Naturally Gedney had already hit us for quite a bit of money and we thought he was probably after more. We were wrong! Over drinks, in his best ‘rest assured’ manner, he threatened us with the foulest imaginable things if we ever dared to ‘slander’ him again. Well, at that, true to his nature, Symonds got his back up and mentioned the police. If looks could kill Gedney would have had us there and then. Instead, he just upped and left but before he went he said something about a ‘visit from The Black.’ I still don’t know what he meant.”

During the telling of his tale, Chambers’ voice had hysterically gathered volume and impetus but then, as I filled his glass, he seemed to take a firmer grip on himself and continued in a more normal tone.

“Three nights ago I received a telephone-call from Symonds—yes, on the very night of his death. Since then I’ve been at the end of my rope. Then I remembered hearing about you and how you know a lot about this sort of thing, so I came round. When Symonds called me that night, he said he had found a blank envelope in his letter-box and that he didn’t like the
design
on the card inside it. He said the thing reminded him of something indescribably evil and he was sure Gedney had sent it. He asked me to go round to his place. I had driven to within half a mile of his flat in town when my damned car broke down. Looking back, it’s probably just as well that it did. I set out on foot and I only had another block to walk when I saw Gedney. He’s an evil-looking type and once you see him you can never forget how he looks. His hair is black as night and swept back from a point low in the centre of his forehead. His eyebrows are bushy above hypnotic eyes of the type you often find in people with very strong characters. If you’ve ever seen any of those Bela Lugosi horror films you’ll know what I mean. He’s exactly like that, though thinner in the face, cadaverous in fact.

“There he was, in a telephone kiosk, and he hadn’t seen me. I ducked back quickly and got out of sight in a recessed doorway from where I could watch him. I was lucky he hadn’t seen me, but he seemed solely interested in what he was doing. He was using the telephone, crouched over the thing like a human vulture astride a corpse. God! But the
look
on his face when he came out of the kiosk! It’s a miracle he didn’t see me for he walked right past my doorway. I had got myself as far back into a shadowy corner as I could—and while, as I say, he failed to see me, I could see him all right. And he was
laughing
; that is, if I dare use that word to describe what he was doing with his face. Evil? I tell you I’ve never seen anyone looking so hideous. And, do you know, in answer to his awful laugh there came a distant scream?

“It was barely audible at first but as I listened it suddenly rose in pitch until, at its peak, it was cut off short and only a far-off echo remained. It came from the direction of Symonds’ flat.

“By the time I got there someone had already called the police. I was one of the first to see him. It was horrible. He was in his dressing-gown, stretched out on the floor, dead as a doornail. And the
expression
on his face…I tell you, Crow, something monstrous happened that night.

“But—taking into account what I had seen before, what Gedney had been up to in the telephone kiosk—the thing that really caught my eye in that terrible flat, the thing that scared me worst,
was the telephone
. Whatever had happened must have taken place while Symonds was answering the ’phone—
for it was off the hook, dangling at the end of the flex…
”

Well, that was just about all there was to Chambers’ story. I passed him the bottle and a new glass, and while he was thus engaged I took the opportunity to get down from my shelves an old book I once had the good fortune to pick up in Cairo. Its title would convey little to you, learned though I know you to be, and it is sufficient to say that its contents consist of numerous notes purporting to relate to certain supernatural invocations. Its wording, in parts, puts the volume in that category “not for the squeamish.” In it, I knew, was a reference to
The Black
, the thing Gedney had mentioned to Chambers and Symonds, and I quickly looked it up. Unfortunately the book is in a very poor condition, even though I have taken steps to stop further disintegration, and the only reference I could find was in these words:

Thief of Light, Thief of Air…,

Thou The Black—drown me mine enemies…

One very salient fact stood out. Regardless of what actually caused Symonds’ death, the newspapers recorded the fact
that his body showed all the symptoms of suffocation…

I was profoundly interested. Obviously Chambers could not tell his story to the police, for what action could they take? Even if they were to find something inexplicably unpleasant about the tale, and perhaps would like to carry out investigations, Chambers himself was witness to the fact that Gedney was in a telephone kiosk at least a hundred yards away from the deceased at the time of his death. No, he could hardly go to the police. To speak to the Law of Gedney’s
other
activities would be to involve himself—in respect of his “initiation”—and he did not want that known. Yet he felt he must do something. He feared that a similar fate to that which had claimed Symonds had been ordained for him—nor was he mistaken.

Before Chambers left me to my ponderings that night, I gave him the following instructions. I told him that if, in some manner, he received a card or paper like the one Symonds had mentioned, with a peculiar design upon it, he was to contact me immediately. Then, until he had seen me, he was to lock himself in his house admitting no one. Also, after calling me, he was to disconnect his telephone.

After he had gone, checking back on his story, I got out my file of unusual newspaper cuttings and looked up Symonds’ case. The case being recent, I did not have far to search. I had kept the Symonds cuttings because I had been unhappy about the coroner’s verdict. I had had a suspicion about the case, a sort of sixth sense, telling me it was unusual. My memory had served me well. I reread that which had made me uneasy in the first place. The police had discovered, clenched in one of Symonds’ fists, the crushed fragments of what was thought to have been some type of card of very brittle paper. Upon it were strange, inked characters, but the pieces had proved impossible to reconstruct. The fragments had been passed over as being irrelevant.

I knew that certain witch-doctors of some of this world’s less civilized peoples are known for their habit of serving an intended victim with a warning of his impending doom. The trick is usually accomplished by handing the unfortunate one an evil symbol and—having let him worry himself half to death—the sorcerer then invokes, in the victim’s presence
or within his hearing
, whichever devil is to do the dirty work. Whether or not any devil actually appears is a different kettle of fish. But one thing is sure—
the victim nearly always dies…
Naturally, being superstitious and a savage to boot, he dies of fright…Or does he?

At first I believed something of the sort was the case with Symonds and Chambers. One of them, perhaps helped along in some manner, had already worried himself to death and the other was going the same way. Certainly Chambers had been in a bad way regards his nerves when I had seen him. However, my theory was wrong and I soon had to radically revise it. Within a few hours of leaving Blowne House Chambers ’phoned me and he was hysterical.

“I’ve got one, by God! The devil’s sent me one. Listen, Crow. You must come at once. I went for a drink from your place and I’ve just got in. Guess what I found in the hall? An envelope, that’s what,
and there’s a damned funny looking card inside it
! It’s frightening the daylights out of me. He’s after me! The swine’s after me! Crow, I’ve sent my man home and locked the doors like you said. I can open the front door electronically from my room to let you in when you arrive. You drive a Merc’, don’t you? Yes, thought so. As soon as you say you’ll come I’ll put down the ’phone and disconnect it. Now, will you come?”

I told him I would only be a few minutes and hung up. I dressed quickly and drove straight round to his house. The drive took about fifteen minutes for his place lay on the outskirts of town, near the old Purdy Water-mill. The house is completely detached and as I pulled into the driveway I was surprised to note that every light in the house was on—
and the main door was swinging open!
Then as I slowed to a halt, I was partly blinded by the lights of a second Mercedes which revved up and roared past me out onto the road. I leapt out of my car to try to get the other vehicle’s number but was distracted from this task by the screams which were just starting.

Within seconds, screams of utter horror were pouring from upstairs and, looking up, I saw a dark shadow cast upon a latticed window. The shadow must have been strangely distorted for it had the general outline of a man, yet it was
bulky
beyond human dimensions—more like the shadow of a gorilla. I watched, hypnotized, as this black caricature clawed frantically at itself—
in a manner which I suddenly recognized!
The shadow was using the same brushing motions which I had seen Chambers use earlier to brush those leaves from himself in my hallway.