Millwright considered it and gradually his manner became more relaxed. “Yes, you’re right, of course,” he answered. “It’s just that I don’t like complications in these things. You see, I know something of the Old Adepts. They didn’t issue the sort of warnings I’ve seen here for nothing. This
Bugg-Shash—whatever he is—must be the very worst order of demons. Everything about him is…demoniacal!”
III
That same evening, from copious notes copied in the rare books department of the British Museum, Millwright set up all the paraphernalia of his task. He cleared the floor of his study. Then, in what appeared to Nuttall and Bart completely random positions—which were, in fact, carefully measured, if in utterly alien tables—upon the naked floor, he placed candles, censers and curious copper bowls. When he was satisfied with the arrangement of these implements, leaving the centre of the floor clear, he chalked on the remaining surrounding floor-space strange and disturbing magical symbols in a similarly confusing and apparently illogical over-all design. Central to all these preparatory devices, he drew a plain white circle and, as the midnight hour approached, he invited his guests to enter with him into this protective ring.
During the final preparations the candles had been lit. The contents of the censers and bowls, too, now sent up to the ceiling thinly wavering columns of coloured smoke and incense. Moreover, the purely electrical lights of the room had been switched off—very much to the almost hysterical Bart’s dislike—so that only the candles gave a genuine, if flickering, light while the powders and herbs in their bowls and censers merely glowed a dull red.
As the first stroke of midnight sounded from the clock on the wall, Millwright drew from his pocket a carefully folded sheet of paper. In a voice dead of emotion—devoid, almost, of all human inflection—he read the words so carefully copied earlier that day from a near-forgotten tome in the dimmer reaches of the British Museum.
It is doubtful whether Bart or Nuttall could ever have recalled the jumble of alien vowels, syllables and discordants that rolled in seemingly chaotic disorder off Millwright’s tongue in that dimly lit room. Certainly, it would have been impossible for any mere mortal, unversed in those arts with which Millwright had made himself familiar, to repeat that hideously jarring, incredible sequence of sounds. To utter the thing backwards, then—“in reverse order,” as Millwright had had it—must plainly be out of the question. This thought, if not the uppermost in their minds, undoubtedly occurred to the two initiates as the occultist came to the end of his performance and the echoes of his hellish liturgy died away…but, within the space of seconds, this and all other thoughts were driven from their minds by sheer terror!
Even Millwright believed, at first, that he had made some terrible mistake, for now there fell upon the three men in the chalked circle a tangible weight of horror and impending doom! Bart screamed and would have fled the circle and the room at once—doubtless to his death—but the occultist grabbed him and held him firmly.
Slowly but surely, the candles dimmed as their flames inexplicably lowered. Then, one by one, they began to flicker out, apparently self-extinguished. Bart’s struggles and screaming became such that Nuttall, too, had to hold on to him to prevent his rushing from the circle. Suddenly, there came to the ears of the three—as if from a thousand miles away—the merest whisper at first, a susurration, as heard in a sounding shell. The rustling chitterings of what could only be…a presence!
Bart promptly fainted. Millwright and Nuttall lowered him to the floor and crouched beside his unconscious form, still holding him tightly in their terror, staring into the surrounding shadows. The hideously evil chitterings, madly musical in an indefinable alien manner, grew louder. And then…something slimy and wet moved gelatinously in the darker shadows of the room’s corners!
“Millwright!” Nuttall’s voice cracked on that one exclamation. The word had been an almost inarticulate utterance, such as a child might make, crying out for its mother in the middle of a particularly frightening nightmare.
“Stay still! And be quiet!” Millwright commanded, his own voice no less cracked and high-pitched.
Only two candles burned now, so low and dim that they merely pushed back the immediate shadows. As the occultist reached out a tremulous hand to draw one of these into the circle…so the other blinked out, leaving only a spiral of grey smoke hanging in the near-complete darkness.
At this, the abominable chittering grew louder still. It surrounded the circle completely now and, for the first time, the two conscious men clearly saw that which the single, tiny remaining flame held at bay. Creeping up on all sides, to the very line of the chalked circle, the Thing came; a glistening, shuddering wall of jelly-like ooze in which many mouths gaped and just as many eyes monstrously ogled! This was Bugg-Shash the Drowner, The Black One, The Filler of Space. Indeed, the bulk of this…Being?…did seem to fill the entire study! All bar the blessed sanctuary of the circle.
The eyes were…beyond words, but worse still were those mouths. Sucking and whistling with thickly viscous lips, the mouths glistened and slobbered and, from out of those gluttonous orifices poured the lunatic chitterings of alien song—the Song of Bugg-Shash—as His substance towered up and leaned inwards to form a slimy ceiling over their very heads!
Nuttall closed his eyes and began to pray out loud, while Millwright simply moaned and groaned in his terror, unable to voice prayers to a God he had long forsaken; but though it seemed that all was lost, the Third Sathlatta had not failed them. Even as the ceiling of jelly began an apparently inexorable descent, so the remaining candle flared up and, at that, the bulk of Bugg-Shash broke and ran like water through a shattered dam. The wall and ceiling of quivering protoplasm with its loathsome eyes and mouths seemed to waver and shrink before Millwright’s eyes as the awful Black One drew back to the darker shadows.
Then, miraculously, the many extinct candles flared up, returning to life one by one and no less mysteriously than they had snuffed themselves out. The occultist knew then that what he had seen had merely been an immaterial visitation, a vision of what might have been, but for the power of the Third Sathlatta.
Simultaneously with Bart’s return to consciousness, Millwright shouted: “We’ve won!”
As Nuttall ventured to open incredulous eyes the occultist stepped out of the circle, crossed to the light switch and flooded the room with light. The thing he and Nuttall had witnessed must indeed have been merely a vision—a demon-inspired hallucination—for no sign of the horror remained. The floor, the walls and bookshelves, the pushed-aside furniture, all were clean and dry, free of the horrid Essence of Bugg-Shash. No single trace of His visit showed in any part of the room; no single crack or crevice of the pine floor knew the morbid loathsomeness of His snail-trail slime…
IV
“Ray!” Alan Bart cried, shouldering his way through the long-haired, tassel-jacketed patrons of The Windsor’s smokeroom. Nuttall saw him, waved him in the direction of a table and ordered another drink. With a glass in each hand he then made his way from the bar, through the crush of regulars, to where Bart now sat with his back to the wall, his fist wrapped tightly around an evening newspaper.
Over a week had passed since their terrifying experience at the London flat of Thomas Millwright. Since then, they had started to grow back into their old creeds and customs. Although they still did not quite trust the dark, they had long since proved for themselves the efficacy of Millwright’s Third Sathlatta. Ever the cynic, and despite the fact that he still trembled in dark places, Nuttall now insisted upon taking long walks along lone country lanes of an evening, usually ending up at The Windsor before closing time. Thus Bart had known where to find him.
“What’s up?” Nuttall questioned as he took a seat beside the younger man. He noted with a slight tremor of alarm the drawn, worried texture of his friend’s face.
“Millwright’s dead!” Bart abruptly blurted, without preamble. “He’s dead—a traffic accident—run dow
n by a lorry not far from his flat. He was identified in the mortuary. It’s all in the paper.” He spread the newspaper before Nuttall who hardly glanced at it.
If the olive-skinned man was shocked, it did not show; his weak eyes had widened slightly at Bart’s disclosure, nothing more. He let the news sink in, then shrugged his shoulders.
Bart was completely taken aback by his friend’s negative attitude. “We did know him!” he protested.
“Briefly,” Nuttall acknowledged; and then, to Bart’s amazement, he smiled. “That’s a relief,” he muttered.
Bart drew away from him. “What? Did I hear you say—”
“It’s a relief, yes,” Nuttall snapped. “Don’t you see? He was the only one we knew who could ever have brought that…thing…down on us again. And now he’s gone.”
For a while they sat in silence, tasting their drinks, allowing the human noises of the crowded room to close in and impinge upon their beings. Then Bart said: “Ray, do you suppose that…?”
“Hmm?” Nuttall looked at him. “Do I suppose what, Alan?”
“Oh, nothing really. I was just thinking about what Millwright told us; about the protection of that spell of his lasting ‘only unto death’!”
“Oh?” Nuttall answered. “Well, if I were you, I shouldn’t bother. It’s something I don’t intend to find out about for a long time.”
“And there’s something else bothering me,” Bart admitted, not really listening to Nuttall’s perfunctory answer. “It’s something I can’t quite pin down—part of what we discovered that night at Millwright’s place, when we were going through all those old books. Damned if I can remember what it is, though!”
“Then forget it!” Nuttall grinned. “And while you’re at it, how about a drink? It’s your round.”
• • •
Against his better instincts, but not wanting Nuttall to see how desperately he feared the darkness still, Bart allowed himself to be talked into walking home. Nuttall lived in a flat in one of the rather more “flash” areas of the city, but walking they would have to pass Bart’s place first. Bart did not mind the dark so much—he said—so long as he was not alone.
Low, scudding clouds obscured the stars as they walked and a chill autumn wind blew discarded wrappers, the occasional leaf and loose, eerily-flapping sheets of evening “racing specials” against their legs.
Nuttall’s flat was city-side of a suburban estate, while Bart’s place lay more on the outskirts of the city proper. The whole area, though, was still quite new, so that soon the distances between welcome lamp-posts increased; there was no need for a lot of light way out here. With the resultant closing-in of darkness, Bart shuddered and pressed closer to his apparently fearless friend. He did not know it, but Nuttall was deep in worried thought. Bart’s words in the smokeroom of The Windsor had brought niggling doubts flooding to the forefront of his consciousness; he could quite clearly recall all that they had uncovered at Millwright’s home—including that which Bart had forgotten…
At the city end of Bart’s road, almost half-way to Nuttall’s flat and within half a mile of Bart’s door, they saw a man atop a ladder attending to an apparently malfunctioning street lamp. The light flickered, flared, then died as they approached the lamp-post and the base of the ladder.
“These people,” Bart asserted with a little shudder, “are the grafters. Out here all hours of the night—just to make sure that we have…light.”
Without a breath of warning, simultaneous with Bart’s shivery uttering of the word “light”, the great bowl of the street lamp crashed down from above to shatter into a million glass fragments at their feet.
“My God!” Nuttall shouted up at the black silhouette clambering unsteadily down the ladder. “Take it easy, old chap. You bloody near dropped that thing right on our heads!”
The two men stopped in the dark street to steady the precarious-looking ladder and, as they did so, a splattering of liquid droplets fell from above, striking their hands and upturned faces. In the darkness they could not see those liquid droplets…but they could feel the clinging sliminess of them! Frozen in spontaneous horror, they stared at each other through the shrouding night as the figure on the ladder stepped down between them.
Bart’s pocket torch cut a jerky swath of light across Nuttall’s frozen features until it played upon the face of the man from the ladder. That face—stickily wet and hideously vacant, dripping nightmare slime as it was—was nevertheless the face of Millwright!
Millwright, the pawn of the Black One, fled from the mortuary—where Bugg-Shash had found his body in the dark—to accomplish that Being’s purpose, the purpose He must pursue before He could return to His own hellish dimension!
Only blind instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, had caused Bart to reach for his torch; but the sight revealed by its beam had completely unnerved him. His torch fell from uselessly twitching fingers, clattering on the pavement, and the dead man’s heel came down upon it with shattering force. Again the darkness closed in.
Then the slimy figure between the two men moved and they felt fingers like bands of iron enclosing their wrists. The zombie that was Millwright exerted fantastic strength to hold them—or rather, Bugg-Shash exerted His strength through the occultist’s corpse—as dead lips opened to utter the ghastly, soul-destroying strains of the reversed Third Sathlatta!
In the near-distant darkness faint, delighted chitterings commenced; and the weird trio thrashed about across the road, to and fro in a leaping, twisting, screaming tug-o’-war of death as, at last, the thing that Bart had forgotten came back to his collapsing, nightmare-blasted mind:
He wakes the very Dead to His Command, and encased in the horror of his Essence even the worm-ravaged Lich hastens to His bidding…
• • •
The hellish dance lasted, as did the screaming, until they felt the lips of Bugg-Shash and his monstrous kisses…
De Marigny`s Clock
In May to June 1979, when I was a recently promoted Sergeant and had been at the recruiting office for just a few months, I found the time to write “De Marigny’s Clock”, a story that August Derleth liked at first sight. It would fit right into The Caller of The Black, he said, which it did, two years later. It’s another one of those stories with quite a long printing history, but I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that it features Titus Crow and the world’s strangest timepiece, a sort of longcase clock that you might even call a “spacetimepiece”. The clock wasn’t my invention; it belonged to Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price long before me, but Titus Crow and his ward, Henri Laurent De Marigny would later borrow it to take them on some of their weirdest adventures: even to frozen Borea, and beyond that to the home of the Elder Gods themselves—in far Elysia!
Any intrusions, other than those condoned or invited,upon the privacy of Titus Crow at his bungalow retreat, Blowne House, on the outskirts of London, were almost always automatically classified by that gentleman as open acts of warfare. In the first place for anyone to make it merely to the doors of Crow’s abode without an invitation—often even with one—was a sure sign of the appearance on the scene of a forceful and dogmatic character; qualities which were almost guaranteed to clash with Crow’s own odd nature. For Blowne House seemed to exude an atmosphere all its own; an exhalation of impending something which usually kept the place and its grounds free even from birds and mice; and it was quite unusual for Crow himself to invite visitors. He kept strange hours and busied himself with stranger matters and, frankly, was almost antisocial even in his most “engaging” moments. Over the years the reasons for this apparent inhospitality had grown, or so it seemed to Crow, increasingly clear-cut. For one thing, his library contained quite a large number of rare and highly costly books, many of them long out of print and some of them never officially in print, and London apparently abounded with unscrupulous “collectors” of such items. For another his studies, usually in occult matters and obscure archaeological, antiquarian or anthropo
logical research, were such as required the most concentrated attention and personal involvement, completely precluding any disturbances from outside sources.
Not that the present infringement came while Crow was engaged with any of his many and varied activities—it did not; it came in the middle of the night, rousing him from deep and dreamless slumbers engendered by a long day of frustrated and unrewarding work on de Marigny’s clock. And Titus Crow was not amused.
“What the hell’s going on here? Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” He had sat bolt upright in bed almost as soon as the light went on. His forehead had come straight into contact with a wicked-looking automatic held in the fist of a most unbeautiful thug. The man was about five feet eight inches in height, thickset, steady on legs which were short in comparison with the rest of his frame. He had a small scar over his left eye and a mouth that slanted downward—cynically, Crow supposed—from left to right. Most unbeautiful.
“Just take it easy, guv’, and there`ll be no bother,” the thug said, his voice soft but ugly. Crow’s eyes flicked across the room to where a second hoodlum stood, just within the bedroom door, a nervous grin twisting his pallid features. “Find anything, Pasty?” the man with the pistol questioned, his eyes never leaving Crow’s face for a second.
“Nothing, Joe,” came the answer, “a few old books and a bit of silver, nothing worth our while—yet. He’ll tell us where it is, though, won’t you, chum?”
“Pasty!” Crow exclaimed. “Powers of observation, indeed! I was just thinking, before hearing your name, what a thin, pasty creature you look—Pasty.” Crow grinned, got out of bed and put on his flame-red dressing-gown. Joe looked him up and down appraisingly. Crow was tall and broad-shouldered and it was plain to see that in his younger days he had been a handsome man. Even now there was a certain tawniness about him, and his eyes were still very bright and more than intelligent. Overall his aspect conveyed an impression of hidden power, which Joe did not particularly care much for. He decided it would be best to show his authority at the earliest opportunity. And Crow obligingly supplied him with that opportunity in the next few seconds.