Mysteries of the Worm
“H. P. Lovecraft—like his creation, Cthulhu—never truly died. He and his influence live on, in the work of so many of us who were his friends and acolytes. Today we have reason for rejoycing in the widespread revival of his canon . . . If a volume such as this has any justification for its existence, it’s because Lovecraft’s readers continue to search out stories which reflect his contribution to the field of fantasy {The tales in this book} represent a lifelong homage to HPL . . . I hope you’ll accept them for what they were and are—a labor of love.”
—Robert Bloch
This book is one in an expanding collection of Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction and related topics. Call of Cthulhu fiction focuses on single entities, concepts, or authors significant to readers of H. P. Lovecraft.
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The Antarktos Cycle
The Book of Eibon
Cthulhu’s Dark Cults
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Tales Out of Innsmouth
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Lin Carter’s The Xothic Legend Cycle
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Arthur Machcn’s The Three Impostors & Other Stories
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Miskatonic University® Archives
The Book of Dzyan
Mysteries of the Worm:
Twenty Cthulhu Mythos Tales
by Robert Bloch
is published by Chaosium Inc.
This book copyright © 1991, 1993, 2009 by the estate of Robert Bloch;
all rights reserved.
Mysteries of the Worm is an original omnibus publication by Chaosium, Inc. “The Secret in the Tomb” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, May 1935. “The Suicide in the Study” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, June 1935. “The Shambler from the Stars” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, September 1935. “The Faceless God” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, May 1936. “The Grinning Ghoul” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, June 1936. “The Opener of the Way” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, October 1936. “The Dark Demon” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, November 1936. “The Brood of Bubastis” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, March 1937. “The Mannikin” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, April 1937. “The Creeper in the Crypt” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, July 1937. “The Secret of Sebek” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, November 1937. “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, December 1937. “The Eyes of the Mummy” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, April 1938. “The Sorcerer’s Jewel” was first published in Strange Stories magazine, February 1939. “Black Bargain” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, May 1942. “The Unspeakable Betrothal” was first published in Avon Fantasy Reader #9, 1949. “The Shadow from the Steeple” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, September 1950. “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” was first published in Weird Tales magazine, May 1951. “Terror in Cut-Throat Cove” was first published in Fantastic magazine, June 1958. “Philtre Tip” was first published in Rogue magazine, March 1961. Mr. Bloch’s “After Word” was completed in 1981.
Cover art by Steven Gilberts.
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Published June 2009.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
De Vermis Mysteriis: A Preface (Robert M. Price)
The Secret in the Tomb
The Suicide in the Study
The Shambler from the Stars
The Faceless God
The Grinning Ghoul
The Opener of the Way
The Dark Demon
The Brood of Bubastis
The Mannikin
The Creeper in the Crypt
The Secret of Sebek
Fane of the Black Pharaoh
The Eyes of the Mummy
The Sorcerer’s Jewel
Black Bargain
The Unspeakable Betrothal
The Shadow from the Steeple
Notebook Found in a Deserted House
Terror in Cut-Throat Cove
Philtre Tip
After Word (Mr. Bloch)
Demon-Dreaded Lore (Lin Carter)
The death of Robert Bloch in the autumn of 1994 was to his many friends and fans a horror far worse than any he chronicled. Now he has become one with his fictional counterpart Ludvig Prinn: future generations of readers will know him as an eldritch name hovering over a body of nightmare texts. To know them will be to know him. Frank Belknap Long, of course, passed into the darkness earlier in the same year. Fritz Leiber and Don Wandrei had booked passage “to Arkham and the stars” just a couple of years earlier. Until now it was as if the Golden Age of Weird Tales, the Cthulhu Mythos, and the Lovecraft Circle had lingered even unto our own day. Now we find ourselves in the cold dawn of a new era.
Of course we are hardly orphans. We still receive goodly quantities of unwholesome nourishment from surviving members of the New Lovecraft Circle, though Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley rarely write Cthulhu Mythos fiction any more. Colin Wilson never wrote much of it and remains busy with other interests. James Wade and Lin Carter have already left us. And Gary Myers’s second collection of tales, The Club of Seven Dreamers, the successor to The House of the Worm, has appeared . . . in a private edition of only three copies. So it is time to take stock of the great treasure we have inherited from this company of sorcerers. And thus we have decided to release a new and expanded third edition of Robert Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm. This collection contains four more Mythos tales—“The Opener of the Way”, “The Eyes of the Mummy”, “Black Bargain”, and “Philtre Tip”—not included in the first two editions. It seems a good way to remember Robert Bloch, as if we could ever forget him.
—Robert M. Price, 2007.
About De Vermis Mysteriis
Each member of the Lovecraft Circle tried his hand at creating a tome worthy of being placed on the shelf alongside HPL’s own Necronomicon, and most of them succeeded. In many passages wherein Lovecraft has occasion to mention the Necronomicon he also notes the presence of Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Clark Ashton Smith’s Book of Eibon, and two of Robert Bloch’s creations, Cultes des Goules and De Vermis Mysteriis. The last named is developed at some length by its creator, and it will be our task here to reconstruct from the scattered references in Bloch’s tales just what can be known of that repository of lunacy and evil.
Bloch had originally titled the nefarious work simply Mysteries of the Worm, but Lovecraft advised him to spruce it up with a little erudition. “If Prinn’s immortal work is in Latin, you ought to give the title in that language—hence my change in two places (in yr. ms.) to DE VERMIS MYSTERIIS (concerning / of the worm / the mysteries).” (January 25, 1935, SL. V.88). So De Vermis Mysteriis it became . . . but not very often. Bloch of course retained Lovecraft’s interpolations in “The Shambler from the Stars” (the manuscript he had sent HPL), but he seldom referred to the book by its Latin title again. Usually it was simply Mysteries of the Worm.
What is to be known of the author of De Vermis Mysteriis? Fortunately Bloch was not stingy with details, and readers got to know Prinn pretty well when he was introduced in “The Sha
mbler from the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935). Prinn was a Flemish knight who marched off to the Holy Land in the Ninth Crusade (i.e., the Seventh, if the two children’s crusades are omitted). At some point he was captured by the Muslims (“Saracens”) and became a slave of certain Syrian wizards and thaumaturges, learning their secrets and trafficking with evil spirits. Having become a potent sorcerer in his own right, he traveled to Egypt and gave birth to a cycle of legend that spread his reputation across North Africa. His time was spent delving for occult secrets in forbidden tombs. Eventually he returned to his Flemish homeland to pursue his blasphemous studies in a ruined mausoleum dating from roman times, surrounded by familiar spirits and conjuring up devilish entities from the stars. He came to grief during the witch-trials, being captured and tortured. While awaiting death in his cell he wrote De Vermis Mysteriis. After its posthumous publication it was everywhere suppressed, but authorities could not prevent fugitive copies from falling into the hands of certain seekers. There were at least two editions, the original Latin and an English translation.
What of the content of the book? In its initial appearance in “The Shambler from the Stars,” it seems to be primarily a book of invocations. Prinn is depicted mainly as one who deals with spirits, and of course the whole story is heading toward the ill-fated invocation of the Shambler itself. (Lovecraft provided Bloch with the Latin formula of invocation: “I’ve supplied just a tantalizing fragment of that hellish invocation: ‘Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigillum . . .’ {To the great Not-to-be-Named/ the signs/ of the stars/ black/ and/ of the toad-shaped/ Tsathoggua/ the seal . . .})” (SL V.88). We also hear of “such gods of divination as Father Yig, dark Han, and serpent-bearded Byatis” being mentioned in the text. It is implied that they, too, could be invoked to reveal their secrets. But the book is also said to contain “spells and enchantments”. To this, one item of information is added in “The Faceless God” (Weird Tales, May 1936), namely that Prinn had learned some unspecified knowledge of Nyarlathotep in the course of his travels “in Saracenic lands”.
In the next several stories in which Prinn’s book occurs, it is barely mentioned, merely being enumerated along with several other works like the Necronomicon. We find it so listed, with no further role to play in “The Secret in the Tomb” (WT, May 1935), “The Suicide in the Study” (WT, June 1935), “The Grinning Ghoul” (WT, November 1936), and “The Mannikin” (WT, April 1937). By the way, in none of these tales is the Latin title used.
De Vermis Mysteriis (with this form of the title) crops up again in a set of three of Bloch’s “Egyptian” series of stories, “The Brood of Bubastis” (WT, March 1937), “The Secret of Sebek” (WT, November 1937), and “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (WT, December 1937). All three allude to Prinn’s chapter called “Saracenic Rituals,” which “revealed the lore of the efreet and the djinn, the secrets of the Assassin sects, the myths of Arabian ghoul-tales, the hidden practices of dervish cults.” Also within it might be found “a great wealth of material on the legends of Inner Egypt” (“The Secret of Sebek”). It is this last subject matter which forms the chief concern of all three stories. It seems that in ancient Egypt, the real rulers behind the throne were the priests of certain “dark nature-gods”, whose worship remained underground until the accession to the throne of Nephren-Ka who elevated the bloody worship of the gods Sebek, Bubastis, Anubis, and Nyarlathotep. However, the outrages of the Pharaoh and his followers were so great that the lot of them were deposed and either entombed alive or exiled.
In “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” Prinn’s volume informs us that Nephren-Ka and his personal attendants (at least a hundred) were entombed in a secret vault beneath modern-day Cairo and that in one last orgy of Promethean blasphemy, Nephren-Ka sacrificed those with him to Nyarlathotep in return for prophetic knowledge of the future ages of Egypt. Before he himself expired he was able to inscribe that entire future history on the walls of the tomb. Prinn adds that descendants of the Black Pharaoh’s followers still maintain their cult, having as their special duty to guard the body of Nephren-Ka till the day of resurrection.
A similar tale is told by Prinn of the human-sacrifice of crocodile-headed Sebek in “The Secret of Sebek”. Here the salient point is that Sebek’s priest had earned with their sacrifices the god’s promise to guard their bodies till the Resurrection should come. In “The Brood of Bubastis” we learn from Prinn that the ghoulish cat-goddess’s hierophants escaped the persecution and fled to Cornwall, where the story itself takes place.
Actually the three stories build upon one another in sequence. In “The Brood of Bubastis”, the cult of Bubastis is a minority religion which merely gets out of line and is expunged by the religious establishment for its heretical practices. In “The Secret of Sebek”, the Bubastis persecution is mentioned, and some “never named abomination” is said to have ended Nyarlathotep-worship, but Nephren-Ka is not mentioned, though heretical priests are said to rule behind the throne. This is a much higher status than implied in “The Brood of Bubastis”. Finally, Nephren-Ka appears as the figurehead of the whole movement in “Fane of the Black Pharaoh”.
Two years later Bloch employed Prinn’s book again in “The Sorcerer’s Jewel” which appeared in Strange Stories, February 1939, under the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske. Prinn’s book appeared only under the English title Mysteries of the Worm. This time we hear of a new section, “Prinn’s chapter on divination”. The jewel of the title is an ancient Egyptian seer-stone called “The Star of Sechmet”, and Prinn gives a partial history of the gem, hinting at its whereabouts between the times of its ownership by Gilles De Retz and Rasputin. (This would seem to be an anachronism, as Prinn seems to have died in the 15th century.)
In “Black Bargain” (WT, May 1942), the book is the central occult prop. It is referred to as “De Vermis Mysteriis, ‘Mysteries of the Worm.’ ” “It was something . . . that told you how you could compound aconite and belladonna and draw circles of phosphorescent fire on the floor when the stars were right. Something that spoke of melting tallow candles and blending them with corpse-fat, whispered of the use to which animal sacrifice might be put. It spoke of meetings that could be arranged with various parties most people don’t . . . even believe in . . . {and contained} cold, deliberate directions for traffic with ancient evil”. Invocations are back in view, just as in “The Shambler from the Stars”, and with no more pleasant, though slightly less gory, results. Here deals are struck with devils, with the standard back-firing outcome.
Bloch mentions “Prinn’s Grimoire” (no fuller title is given) for the last time in his 1961 story “Philtre Tip.” This is one of his humorous (pun)chline stories, so it is not surprising that the use of the esoteric volume is scarcely traditional. This time we have to do with a “formula for a love philtre . . . Here—this one from Ludvig Prinn’s Grimoire, in the English edition.” The attentive reader will have noted that so far the only actual quoted words from Prinn have been Lovecraft’s incantation “To the Not-to-be-Named, signs of the black stars, and the seal of the toad-shaped Tsathoggua.” “Philtre Tip” provides us with the only Prinn logion to come from Bloch himself. Following a list of ingredients (not itself quoted), we hear of the predicted effects of the love potion: “The meerest droppe, if placed in a posset of wine or sack, will transforme ye beloved into a veritable bitche in heate.” (We leave it to the reader to figure out the trick ending.)
We started out mentioning how Lovecraft approved Bloch’s new volume and went on to mention it cheek-by-jowl with the Necronomicon in his own stories. In fact he mentions it three times, in “The Haunter of the Dark,” where Robert Blake stumbles across a treasure-trove of forbidden books in the Starry Wisdom Church, including “old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteriis.” Alonzo Typer finds “a first edition of old Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis” on the shelves of the van der Heyl house (“The Diary of Alonzo Typer), and protagonist Peaslee in “The Shadow Out of Ti
me” peruses the book among the special collection at Miskatonic University. In all three cases the book is simply included in a group of grimoires, and its contents are never described by HPL, except in a letter to Henry Kuttner (February 19, 1936) in which he says De Vermis Mysteriis is one of several books which “repeat the most hellish secrets learnt by early man” (SL V.226). It is interesting to note that, have produced the Latin title, HPL used it in every single reference, whether in letter or fiction, never once using Bloch’s original English title.
Another member of the Lovecraft Circle using De Vermis Mysteriis in his own fiction was Henry Kuttner, a friend of Bloch’s. He borrowed the musty text for his “The Invaders” (Strange Stories, February 1939, under the pseudonym Keith Hammond). It seems that weird fiction writer Michael Hayward gets his ideas for stories by using a drug to awaken ancestral memories. He has derived the formula from De Vermis Mysteriis, given with both Latin and English titles. “The Mysteries of the Worm gave a list of precautions to be taken before using the drug—the Pnakotic pentagon, the cabalistical signs of protection . . . The book gave terrible warnings of what might happen if those precautions weren’t taken—it specifically mentioned those things—the dwellers in the Hidden World, it called them.” These last are typically rugose and tentacled critters with a huge, single, faceted eye and a puckered orifice for a mouth.
One last item of idle curiosity. Though Robert Bloch wrote several entertaining tales in the Cthulhu Mythos, it is not for them that he is most widely known. Of course, he is most famous for the masterpiece Psycho. And in that novel there is one scene with special significance to Mythos buffs. When, near the end of the book, Lila Crane is furtively exploring the eerie old Bates house and stumbles onto Norman’s cache of old books, every Lovecraftian reader ought to experience a sense of déjà vu, especially since one of the titles is a favorite of Lovecraft’s, mentioned by him in precisely such contexts. “Here Lila found herself pausing, puzzling, then peering in perplexity at the incongruous contents of Norman Bates’ library. A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Dimension and Being.” One is tempted to wonder: may there possibly have been an earlier draft of Psycho in which Bloch nostalgically placed Mysteries of the Worm, Cultes des Goules, and the Cabala of Saboth, for example, on Norman Bates’ shelves? One is also tempted to pester Bloch with the question. We did. His answer: “Since there was no ‘earlier draft’ of Psycho, I couldn’t have mentioned the titles you list. Nor would I, in a novel where the accent is on realism rather than fantasy.” Oh, well.