The House of the Worm

CHAPTER VI The Three Enchantments

The apprentice Lir is aged beyond even Wisdom’s ripeness, and the wonderful memories he once possessed Time has long since snatched away. But the bright sand that flows down to the azure Cerenerian Sea below long wharves of teak he remembers still: where the turbaned fishers sit and mend their nets and watch the day pass flaming into the West with the first pale stars that follow, and where Lir came often as a little boy, to play upon the white sand and hear the quaint speech of the mariners. Lir was apprenticed to that very Dlareb who used to sell carpets in Lhosk, and had duties more pressing than to watch the ships sailing for fabulous ports where the sea joins the sky, as Dlareb was wont to remind him with his knotted stick; but Lir was only a small boy and loved the rose-tinted sails.

Here it was that once pausing in his solitary games, Lir spied a brightness half covered by the white sea-sand, and found that famous silver ball with its three cunning glyphs. The ball was tarnished and very old, but even very ordinary things cast up by the sea are objects of wonder when one is a very little boy; and the thoughts of Lir as he examined his treasure were far off with the drowned, perilous halls of that evilly aquatic One, dead Kthulhut to whom the frightened sailors allude only with furtive glances and meaningful nods, or the hoards of splendid galleons pulled down by the muttering waves…. And then Dlareb came by with his knotted stick, from discovering the family of round golden spiders busily spinning in the rolled, blood-coloured rug from remote Sona-Nyl, which Lir had neglected to sweep away. Instantly Lir forgot his prize to dodge his master’s ill-aimed blows, and escaped back to Lhosk and the little shop of Dlareb, where he fell asleep hiding behind the rolled carpets, sorely perplexing the spiders.

And that rug-merchant only spat into the sea and muttered something under his breath very like a curse, and turned to hobble back to the high seawall and the city. But the lengthening shadows had long since allied themselves with Night ere ever he came home again or lit a little candle; and Lir rubbed the sleep from his eyes and peeped out from his hiding place to see what his master was about, whether he was drunk, and perhaps to allay a little fear. And there was Dlareb with the sea still dripping from him, clutching that silver ball; but with subtle alterations in his manner, and something obviously terrible about his eyes; and the light on his puffy face was more than any single candle could account for. Then Dlareb took a burned stick and traced the least of the three glyphs on the blood-coloured carpet of Sona-Nyl. Lir covered his head with the ends of rugs and stuffed their corners in his ears.

When several of Dlareb’s clients, those with unsettled accounts, fell ill with discomforts of the least pleasant description, there were those who said that certain dolls which the rug-merchant displayed in his shop-window strangely resembled these clients, who screamed of pains in precisely those places where bamboo splinters transfixed the dolls. Only the unimaginative remarked upon this odd coincidence, all others swore nervously and hurried away.

One morning the gulls flew perilously low above the broad towers and gambrel roofs of Lhosk, away from the fitful sea; people heard only a brief flurry of wings and the wind. But those who went to take out their boats were puzzled by his ominous migration of the gulls; and seeing also that peculiar aura around the Moon, they wondered. Some spoke of storms, but this explanation satisfied no one when they remembered the colour of the Moon before it passed, and the shocking expression it had presented to the watchers.

Only four boats sailed with their nets and their crews from the long wharves of teak when the sun had attained a comfortable altitude. The others lay untended on the beach, while their owners watched from high up along the great seawall, murmering snatches of half-remembered legends concerning the sleep of certain discreditable gods, or praying when the clouds began to assume a more definite shape. The sun climbed higher, and still they watched for the return of the boats. And when the sun began to fall all their little hopes went with it; the day passed with annoying speed behind the distant Tanarian hills, where in his jewelled palace at Celephais King Kuranes noted its shrunken appearance but did not inquire to the priests.

(Once out at sea the nets were cast and drawn back curiously slashed and gnawed; but the net of one boat was less easy to draw back, and men had scrambled frantically to cut it loose, and died horribly.)

Dreams were not pleasant that night, and the candles burned far into the small dark hours, and the morning did not bring the relief looked for. The shadow intruding into the fitful sea was a city beyond any doubt, and people were very grateful now for that white fog which had driven men mad for a glimpse of the clean sky, because it disclosed only shadows. In hushed taverns sailors whispered fearfully of what may be seen by moonlight in the queer waters six nights out of Bahama. Their listeners were not eager to leave, because of what had come out with the fog; squat rubbery things that were felt but seldom seen, wet things that came up Lhosk’s winding streets from the sea. Nothing human skulked in the crooked sea-ward alleys, dragging unmentionable burdens, for nothing human slides plump tentacles behind it in the dark. And men wisely refrained from following their foul, slimy trails where they might have led them between the tottering sheds in the fog.

During this period few would have cared to notice how the rug-merchant had altered the singular display in his shop-window: the customary dolls were not there at all, but only the crude waxen images of nothing human, with long silver pins thrust into each uncouth belly in an undeniable pattern: each pin the vertex of a pentagon, or perhaps the point of a five-pointed star, which is sometimes more meaningful. But their maker was observed to be in a state of great unease, and had even overlooked the beating of Lir for some new truancy. Only once had Dlareb glanced at the stars in the vicinity of Orion, then screamed and gone to hide that blasphemous silver ball lest its Owner should send for it; if its Owner should come personally he could not hope to escape. Then, mumbling pitifully to himself, he had molded those repellent little dolls. But even as he had worked the changes began, his body assumed that unhealthy flabbiness so loathsomely apparent later, and the other peculiarities that caused Lir to flee that little shop and never return.

Who found that unfortunate seller of carpets crouching grotesquely beneath a blood-coloured rug in his shop, is not remembered now. Certain horrible doubts were cast upon the identity of the corpse, because of the scaliness of the bloated features, and what had become of the hands. They attached no significance to those two curious glyphs drawn on the carpet with a burnt stick, or the third one done in blood, supposing that someone had slipped in with the Night for no better purpose than murder; though few reputable human assassins would ever resort to a method so dubiously effective as jabbing with many long silver pins. Having discussed these matters in hushed voices, they wound him in the blood-coloured rug and buried him with a scandalous lack of ceremony.

But it was not until they returned to close up Dlareb’s shop that they realized whence the pins had come. Some wanted to burn those repellent little dolls, detesting the way they postured and leered, while others thought their sculpting somewhat less crude than it had been before. But the dolls only made odd squealing noises on the fire, and had to be cast into the fitful sea beneath the fog-veiled stars.

Inscrutable are the ways of the gods, that men cannot hope to know. Even as the last of those effigies was cast into the muttering sea a gentle bubbling began, as if something with questionable intentions were laughing just beneath the surface. And so they moved away more quickly than they might otherwise have done, and never saw, until too late, what it was that crawled nastily behind them, its black, rubbery hide glistening wetly, across the beach and up the sheer seawall, slipping unobtrusively up the crooked alleys in the dark and the fog.

And only Lir, whose old head is decidedly queer because of something he has seen, can tell of that shocking final horror: what it was that wriggled out of the night to flop sickeningly over Dlareb’s grave and open it with distasteful sucking noises; what snatched the struggling, screaming corpse from its secret burrow in the mud, and dragged it still gibbering and cursing back towards the shunned wharves and the seething, uncomfortable water; and how, hours later, both were drawn up into a weedy tower through a tiny lighted window, by something that bore a fiendish resemblance to the tentacle of a devil-fish.