I shifted restlessly. The dark implications of this statement sent a chill of nameless apprehension trickling down my spine.
“I know the country people always claimed that in his youth he sold his soul to the Devil, and that his sudden epileptic attacks were merely a visible sign of the Fiend’s power over him; but such talk is foolish, of course, and belongs in the Dark Ages. We all know that John Grimlan’s life was a peculiarly evil and vicious one, even toward his last days. With good reason he was universally detested and feared, for I never heard of his doing a single good act. You were his only friend.”
“And that was a strange friendship,” said Conrad. “I was attracted to him by his unusual powers, for despite his bestial nature, John Grimlan was a highly educated man, a deeply cultured man. He had dipped deep into occult studies, and I first met him in this manner; for as you know, I have always been strongly interested in these lines of research myself.
“But, in this as in all other things, Grimlan was evil and perverse. He had ignored the white side of the occult and delved into the darker, grimmer phases of it—into devil-worship and voodoo and Shintoism. His knowledge of these foul arts and sciences was immense and unholy. And to hear him tell of his researches and experiments was to know such horror and repulsion as a venomous reptile might inspire. For there had been no depths to which he had not sunk, and some things he only hinted at, even to me. I tell you, Kirowan, it is easy to laugh at tales of the black world of the unknown, when one is in pleasant company under the bright sunlight, but had you sat at ungodly hours in the silent bizarre library of John Grimlan and looked on the ancient musty volumes and listened to his grisly talk as I did, your tongue would have cloven to your palate with sheer horror as mine did, and the supernatural would have seemed very real and near to you—as it seemed to me!”
“But in God’s name, man!” I cried, for the tension was growing unbearable; “come to the point and tell me what you want of me.”
“I want you to come with me to John Grimlan’s house and help carry out his outlandish instructions in regard to his body.”
I had no liking for the adventure, but I dressed hurriedly, an occasional shudder of premonition shaking me. Once fully clad, I followed Conrad out of the house and up the silent road which led to the house of John Grimlan. The road wound uphill, and all the way, looking upward and forward, I could see that great grim house perched like a bird of evil on the crest of the hill, bulking black and stark against the stars. In the west pulsed a single dull red smear where the young moon had just sunk from view behind the low black hills. The whole night seemed full of brooding evil, and the persistent swishing of a bat’s wings somewhere overhead caused my taut nerves to jerk and thrum. To drown the quick pounding of my own heart, I said:
“Do you share the belief so many hold, that John Grimlan was mad?”
We strode on several paces before Conrad answered, seemingly with a strange reluctance. “But for one incident, I would say no man was ever saner. But one night in his study, he seemed suddenly to break all bonds of reason.
“He had discoursed for hours on his favorite subject—black magic—when suddenly he cried, as his face lit with a weird unholy glow: ‘Why should I sit here babbling such child’s prattle to you? These voodoo rituals—these Shinto sacrifices—feathered snakes— goats without horns—black leopard cults—bah! Filth and dust that the wind blows away! Dregs of the real Unknown—the deep mysteries! Mere echoes from the Abyss!
“‘I could tell you things that would shatter your paltry brain! I could breathe into your ear names that would wither you like a burnt weed! What do you know of Yog-Sothoth, of Kathulos and the sunken cities? None of these names is even included in your mythologies. Not even in your dreams have you glimpsed the black cyclopean walls of Koth, or shriveled before the noxious winds that blow from Yuggoth!
“‘But I will not blast you lifeless with my black wisdom! I cannot expect your infantile brain to bear what mine holds. Were you as old as I—had you seen, as I have seen, kingdoms crumble and generations pass away—had you gathered as ripe grain the dark secrets of the centuries—’
“He was raving away, his wildly lit face scarcely human in appearance, and suddenly, noting my evident bewilderment, he burst into a horrible cackling laugh.
“‘Gad!’ he cried in a voice and accent strange to me, ‘methinks I’ve frightened ye, and certes, it is not to be marveled at, sith ye be but a naked savage in the arts of life, after all. Ye think I be old, eh? Why, ye gaping lout, ye’d drop dead were I to divulge the generations of men I’ve known—’
“But at this point such horror overcame me that I fled from him as from an adder, and his high-pitched, diabolical laughter followed me out of the shadowy house. Some days later I received a letter apologizing for his manner and ascribing it candidly—too candidly—to drugs. I did not believe it, but I renewed our relations, after some hesitation.”
“It sounds like utter madness,” I muttered.
“Yes,” admitted Conrad, hesitantly. “But—Kirowan, have you ever seen anyone who knew John Grimlan in his youth?”
I shook my head.
“I have been at pains to inquire about him discreetly,” said Conrad. “He has lived here—with the exception of mysterious absences often for months at a time—for twenty years. The older villagers remember distinctly when he first came and took over that old house on the hill, and they all say that in the intervening years he seems not to have aged perceptibly. When he came here he looked just as he does now—or did, up to the moment of his death—of the appearance of a man about fifty.
“I met old Von Boehnk in Vienna, who said he knew Grimlan when a very young man studying in Berlin, fifty years ago, and he expressed astonishment that the old man was still living; for he said at that time Grimlan seemed to be about fifty years of age.”
I gave an incredulous exclamation, seeing the implication toward which the conversation was trending.
“Nonsense! Professor Von Boehnk is past eighty himself, and liable to the errors of extreme age. He confused this man with another.” Yet as I spoke, my flesh crawled unpleasantly and the hairs on my neck prickled.
“Well,” shrugged Conrad, “here we are at the house.”
The huge pile reared up menacingly before us, and as we reached the front door a vagrant wind moaned through the nearby trees, and I started foolishly as I again heard the ghostly beat of the bat’s wings. Conrad turned a large key in the antique lock, and as we entered, a cold draft swept across us like a breath from the grave—moldy and cold. I shuddered.
We groped our way through a black hallway and into a study, and here Conrad lighted a candle, for no gas lights or electric lights were to be found in the house. I looked about me, dreading what the light might disclose, but the room, heavily tapestried and bizarrely furnished, was empty save for us two.
“Where—where is—It?” I asked in a husky whisper, from a throat gone dry.
“Upstairs,” answered Conrad in a low voice, showing that the silence and mystery of the house had laid a spell on him also. “Upstairs, in the library where he died.”
I glanced up involuntarily. Somewhere above our head, the lone master of this grim house was stretched out in his last sleep— silent, his white face set in a grinning mask of death. Panic swept over me and I fought for control. After all, it was merely the corpse of a wicked old man, who was past harming anyone—this argument rang hollowly in my brain like the words of a frightened child who is trying to reassure himself.
I turned to Conrad. He had taken a time-yellowed envelope from an inside pocket.
“This,” he said, removing from the envelope several pages of closely written, time-yellowed parchment, “is, in effect, the last word of John Grimlan, though God alone knows how many years ago it was written. He gave it to me ten years ago, immediately after his return from Mongolia. It was shortly after this that he had his first seizure.
“This envelope he gave me, sealed, and he
made me swear that I would hide it carefully, and that I would not open it until he was dead, when I was to read the contents and follow their directions exactly. More, he made me swear that no matter what he said or did after giving me the envelope, I would go ahead as first directed. ‘For,’ he said with a fearful smile, ‘the flesh is weak but I am a man of my word, and though I might, in a moment of weakness, wish to retract, it is far, far too late now. You may never understand the matter, but you are to do as I have said.’”
“Well?”
“Well,” again Conrad wiped his brow, “tonight as he lay writhing in his death-agonies, his wordless howls were mingled with frantic admonitions to me to bring him the envelope and destroy it before his eyes! As he yammered this, he forced himself up on his elbows and with eyes staring and hair standing straight up on his head, he screamed at me in a manner to chill the blood. And he was shrieking for me to destroy the envelope, not to open it; and once he howled in his delirium for me to hew his body into pieces and scatter the bits to the four winds of heaven!”
An uncontrollable exclamation of horror escaped my dry lips.
“At last,” went on Conrad, “I gave in. Remembering his commands ten years ago, I at first stood firm, but at last, as his screeches grew unbearably desperate, I turned to go for the envelope, even though that meant leaving him alone. But as I turned, with one last fearful convulsion in which blood-flecked foam flew from his writhing lips, the life went from his twisted body in a single great wrench.”
He fumbled at the parchment.
“I am going to carry out my promise. The directions herein seem fantastic and may be the whims of a disordered mind, but I gave my word. They are, briefly, that I place his corpse on the great black ebony table in his library, with seven black candles burning about him. The doors and windows are to be firmly closed and fastened. Then, in the darkness which precedes dawn, I am to read the formula, charm or spell which is contained in a smaller, sealed envelope inside the first, and which I have not yet opened.”
“But is that all?” I cried. “No provisions as to the disposition of his fortune, his estate—or his corpse?”
“Nothing. In his will, which I have seen elsewhere, he leaves estate and fortune to a certain Oriental gentleman named in the document as—Malik Tous!”
“What!” I cried, shaken to my soul. “Conrad, this is madness heaped on madness! Malik Tous—good God! No mortal man was ever so named! That is the title of the foul god worshipped by the mysterious Yezidees—they of Mount Alamout the Accursed— whose Eight Brazen Towers rise in the mysterious wastes of deep Asia. His idolatrous symbol is the brazen peacock. And the Muhammadans, who hate his demon-worshipping devotees, say he is the essence of the evil of all the universes—the Prince of Darkness—Ahriman—the old Serpent—the veritable Satan! And you say Grimlan names this mythical demon in his will?”
“It is the truth.” Conrad’s throat was dry. “And look—he has scribbled a strange line at the corner of his parchment: ‘Dig me no grave; I shall not need one.’”
Again a chill wandered down my spine.
“In God’s name,” I cried in a kind of frenzy, “let us get this incredible business over with!”
“I think a drink might help,” answered Conrad, moistening his lips. “It seems to me I’ve seen Grimlan go into this cabinet for wine—” He bent to the door of an ornately carved mahogany cabinet, and after some difficulty opened it.
“No wine here,” he said disappointedly, “and if ever I felt the need of stimulants—what’s this?”
He drew out a roll of parchment, dusty, yellowed and half-covered with spiderwebs. Everything in that grim house seemed, to my nervously excited senses, fraught with mysterious meaning and import, and I leaned over his shoulder as he unrolled it.
“It’s a record of peerage,” he said, “such a chronicle of births, deaths and so forth, as the old families used to keep, in the Sixteenth Century and earlier.”
“What’s the name?” I asked.
He scowled over the dim scrawls, striving to master the faded, archaic script.
“G-r-y-m—I’ve got it—Grymlann, of course. It’s the records of old John’s family—the Grymlanns of Toad’s-heath Manor, Suffolk—what an outlandish name for an estate! Look at the last entry.”
Together we read, “John Grymlann, borne, March 10, 1630.” And then we both cried out. Under this entry was freshly written, in a strange scrawling hand, “Died, March 10, 1930.” Below this there was a seal of black wax, stamped with a strange design, something like a peacock with a spreading tail.
Conrad stared at me speechless, all the color ebbed from his face. I shook myself with the rage engendered by fear.
“It’s the hoax of a madman!” I shouted. “The stage has been set with such great care that the actors have overstepped themselves. Whoever they are, they have heaped up so many incredible effects as to nullify them. It’s all a very stupid, very dull drama of illusion.”
And even as I spoke, icy sweat stood out on my body and I shook as with an ague. With a wordless motion Conrad turned toward the stairs, taking up a large candle from a mahogany table.
“It was understood, I suppose,” he whispered, “that I should go through with this ghastly matter alone; but I had not the moral courage, and now I’m glad I had not.”
A still horror brooded over the silent house as we went up the stairs. A faint breeze stole in from somewhere and set the heavy velvet hangings rustling, and I visualized stealthy taloned fingers drawing aside the tapestries, to fix red gloating eyes upon us. Once I thought I heard the indistinct clumping of monstrous feet somewhere above us, but it must have been the heavy pounding of my own heart.
The stairs debouched into a wide dark corridor, in which our feeble candle cast a faint gleam which but illuminated our pale faces and made the shadows seem darker by comparison. We stopped at a heavy door, and I heard Conrad’s breath draw in sharply as a man’s will when he braces himself physically or mentally. I involuntarily clenched my fists until the nails bit into the palms; then Conrad thrust the door open.
A sharp cry escaped his lips. The candle dropped from his nerveless fingers and went out. The library of John Grimlan was ablaze with light, though the whole house had been in darkness when we entered it.
This light came from seven black candles placed at regular intervals about the great ebony table. On this table, between the candles—I had braced myself against the sight. Now in the face of the mysterious illumination and the sight of the thing on the table, my resolution nearly gave way. John Grimlan had been unlovely in life; in death he was hideous. Yes, he was hideous even though his face was mercifully covered with the same curious silken robe, which, worked in fantastic bird-like designs, covered his whole body except the crooked claw-like hands and the bare withered feet.
A strangling sound came from Conrad. “My God!” he whispered; “what is this? I laid his body out on the table and placed the candles about it, but I did not light them, nor did I place that robe over the body! And there were bedroom slippers on his feet when I left—”
He halted suddenly. We were not alone in the deathroom.
At first we had not seen him, as he sat in the great armchair in a farther nook of a corner, so still that he seemed a part of the shadows cast by the heavy tapestries. As my eyes fell upon him, a violent shuddering shook me and a feeling akin to nausea racked the pit of my stomach. My first impression was of vivid, oblique yellow eyes which gazed unwinkingly at us. Then the man rose and made a deep salaam, and we saw that he was an Oriental. Now, when I strive to etch him clearly in my mind, I can resurrect no plain image of him. I only remember those piercing eyes and the yellow, fantastic robe he wore.
We returned his salute mechanically and he spoke in a low, refined voice, “Gentlemen, I crave your pardon! I have made so free as to light the candles—shall we not proceed with the business pertaining to our mutual friend?”
He made a slight gesture toward the silent bulk on
the table. Conrad nodded, evidently unable to speak. The thought flashed through our minds at the same time, that this man had also been given a sealed envelope—but how had he come to the Grimlan house so quickly? John Grimlan had been dead scarcely two hours and to the best of our knowledge no one knew of his demise but ourselves. And how had he got into the locked and bolted house?
The whole affair was grotesque and unreal in the extreme. We did not even introduce ourselves or ask the stranger his name. He took charge in a matter-of-fact way, and so under the spell of horror and illusion were we that we moved dazedly, involuntarily obeying his suggestions, given us in a low, respectful tone.
I found myself standing on the left side of the table, looking across its grisly burden at Conrad. The Oriental stood with arms folded and head bowed at the head of the table, nor did it then strike me as being strange that he should stand there, instead of Conrad who was to read what Grimlan had written. I found my gaze drawn to the figure worked on the breast of the stranger’s robe, in black silk—a curious figure, somewhat resembling a peacock and somewhat resembling a bat, or a flying dragon. I noted with a start that the same design was worked on the robe covering the corpse.
The doors had been locked, the windows fastened down. Conrad, with a shaky hand, opened the inner envelope and fluttered open the parchment sheets contained therein. These sheets seemed much older than those containing the instructions to Conrad, in the larger envelope. Conrad began to read in a monotonous drone which had the effect of hypnosis on the hearer; so at times the candles grew dim in my gaze and the room and its occupants swam strange and monstrous, veiled and distorted like an hallucination. Most of what he read was gibberish; it meant nothing; yet the sound of it and the archaic style of it filled me with an intolerable horror.