The Book of Iod

Beneath the Tombstone by Robert M. Price

This story began as a friendly parody of August Derleth's Lovecraftian fiction in Crypt of Cthulhu #6. In an expanded and rewritten form it became something more of a tribute to Derleth and appeared in the pages of Footsteps magazine. But it is equally a tribute to Henry Kuttner and employs some of his characteristic themes, such as the waiting occupant of a grave and the use of the Book of Iod. The controlling conception of that book hen is the Kabbalistic one, implied in Kuttner's use of terms like Tikkoun and kadesh. The Gnostic element derives from the similarity between “Iod” and “Iao”, a Hellenizedabbreviation of“Yahweh” often used in the syncrefistic magic of the Hellenistic age (see Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation andJohn Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World); cf. “lo Sabbaoth, Ialdabaoth” in Gnostic texts.

“Beneath the Tombstone” contains the first reference to the shunned hamlet ofTophet, Pennsylvania, later used in a story by Lin Carter. The name is one of the designations, used by the prophet Jeremiah, for the cursed Valley of Hinnom where Moloch-worshipers once sacrificed infants outside Jerusalem. It later became a garbage dump where bodies wen thrown which could not be given decent burial in sacredground. Tophet is the historical prototype for that place “where the worm dieth not and the fin is never quenched”

First publication: Footsteps TV, 1984.

I.

I cannot say precisely why my eccentric Uncle Absalom had chosen me to inherit what remained of his worldly estate. God knows there were other surviving kin who had been closer to him than I, or at least I supposed there must have been. At any rate I had had little contact with him that I could remember since the family reunions of my childhood. What interest he could have taken in me then I cannot readily imagine.

Nonetheless on the 5th of March I packed my belongings into my car (it was easy enough to do, there being so few of them), and set off for the old mansion amid the low hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Small towns had never been particularly to my liking, but times being what they were, I was not about to turn down a free house, no matter what shape it was in, nor how isolated it was.

The hamlet to which my uncle had retired was a bit difficult to find. Road maps did not list it, and even locals whom I stopped to ask did not seem to have heard of Tophet. Perhaps I was mispronouncing it. All I knew was that the name had a vaguely biblical ring to it, but then so did most of the towns and villages in this region. That fact became obvious as I drove aimlessly through several of them. If I had to be lost, Lancaster County was at least a picturesque place in which to lose oneself. But towards evening I did find Tophet with directions provided by the proprietor of a small general-store-and-gas-pump down the road.

It was tiny, a backwater really. Once there, it was not difficult to find Uncle Absalom’s homestead. It was actually situated some miles away from the rest of the town, so that I wondered if it were technically included in the municipal jurisdiction. The old mansion rose in all its decadent grandeur amid the wild countryside. It was in fairly good repair, though gloomy in general aspect. The effect was rounded out by the series of chalked and painted hex signs high up near the eaves. Of course, I had seen similar symbols and plaques all day, and appreciated them as true examples of folk art. But I had always wondered how seriously the Amish and Mennonite farmers of the region took their hex icons. These pious folk were not ones for frivolous decorations, but surely their religion was equally unfriendly to superstitious belief in hexes and curses.

The key with which I had been supplied fit, despite the rusty disrepair of the lock, with a ready click, and I roamed the house trying to make its acquaintance. And quite a bit of roaming would be necessary even to cover the floor plan once. Passing from the front hall through the drawing room and study, I was quite impressed with the decor. There was oaken paneling in abundance which should have lent the interior a certain deep warmth, but somehow did not. Perhaps this was due to the neglect the elaborate woodwork had apparently suffered. In the brief time since my uncle’s death, the finish could not have grown so dull unless it had been ignored long before. Uncle Absalom mustn’t have shared the previous generation’s fastidiousness. Perhaps he was, like many an eccentric recluse, altogether oblivious of things mundane, his mind being diverted to other channels. The corroded lock on the front door had already suggested his lack of care for minor repairs. In fact, the only housework with which he might have troubled himself was keeping the rug clean, and this I only noticed because the puzzling geometrical patterns in the rug weave caught my eye. They would not have been so distinct if old Absalom had not groomed the rug periodically. Something in that odd weave seemed familiar, perhaps a coincidental resemblance to the hex signs on the exterior of the house. Well, no matter.

In the study my eyes wandered from the dull finish of the paneling to the well stocked shelves, and finally to the framed portrait above the mantel. Of course it was Uncle Absalom himself. As I have said, I had not seen the man since my youth, yet the sight of the painting instantly filled in the holes the years had worn in my memory. That was he, all right. The skill of the painter had captured even the hint of bored irritation the old man must have evidenced as he sat for the portrait, a chore forced on him, no doubt, by some pestering relative. How must all of his relatives have annoyed this man who sought only silence, for him to have bypassed them, leaving his estate to me!

At any rate, I was his beneficiary, and my uncle’s bequest had been generous enough, despite his rather odd stipulation that I burn several listed volumes from his vast library and fill in the surprisingly large subcellar of the house.

I soon made ready to discharge the first of these obligations, starting a fire in the huge old hearth. I needed the warmth anyway, I reasoned, so why not take care of some business as well? The sooner my tasks were accomplished, the sooner the property would be legally mine.

It was not difficult to locate the books which my uncle had apparently hoped might follow him into whatever afterlife had claimed him. A few volumes were illustrated pornographic works of a quite spectacular character, exploring depths of perversion I had never even imagined. Into the flames they went. My glimpses of random pages had been enough to unsettle my stomach, so it was with relief that I turned to the rest of the books.

Several of the titles meant nothing to me, though languages had been a favorite interest of mine in college, and some of the strange tomes baited my curiosity. One called The Book of lod was written in a scramble of Greek and Coptic, and seemed to be a Gnostic work of some kind. The Cabala of Saboth was apparently a treatise on angelology composed in a kind of barbarous Yiddish of which I could make little sense. Another volume, the Confessions of the Mad Monk Clithanus, was in readable but debased Latin. I dimly recalled having heard of it, an obscure specimen of the vast vision literature of the Middle Ages.

Might not some of these books be worthy of preservation or sale? They might be of real interest to an expert who knew what to make of them. Still, I did not want to violate the conditions of the will and risk losing my inheritance. Nothing, however, was preventing me from a leisurely perusal of the collection.

At last I came to a volume that intrigued me more than any of the others. My first reaction was one of mild revulsion, as its leathery binding seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of human hide. No less disorienting was the utterly unfamiliar tongue (transliterated into English characters) in which it was composed. The only discernible English word occurred in a partial translation of the title, penned in my uncle’s handwriting on the title-page—the R’lyeh Text. I tried my skill at enunciating a few underlined words on the page where a bookmark had been placed: “mglw’ nafh fhthagn-ngah cf ’ayak ’vulgtmm vugtlag’n…”

The words echoed in the large room, then were lost amid the crackling of the fireplace. And it was there, after all, that the books should be going, but the hour had grown late, and I decided to resume my duties in the morning.

Preparing one of the beds upstairs, I turned in for the night. It had been a long day, and I soon fell asleep, disturbed only briefly by the abnormally loud chorus of frogs and whippoorwills in the woods at the edge of the lot. Yet perhaps they troubled my rest more than I realized at the time, for my dreams were shot through with visions of great forms, half saurian, half octopoid, ranged against backgrounds of forested slopes and carven masonry.

II.

Only partly rejuvenated by the night’s sleep, I rose, prepared a light, cold breakfast, and carried my plate to the study where I began again to peruse the contents of the library. Uncle Absalom had made a file of clippings from local papers dealing with bizarre, yet seemingly unrelated, matters. Several items from the Lancaster Record had to do with unexplained disappearances and cattle mutilations. All of these clippings looked to have been filler material from the back pages. What Uncle Absalom could have found to interest him in these peculiar scraps was beyond me, yet already I had seen adequate proof of the old man's salacious and prurient tastes.

My reverie was interrupted by a knock at the door. The noise startled me, shattering as it did the silence which had encompassed me since the previous evening. Opening the front door I was greeted by the sight of a local police officer. The middle-aged patrolman was eyeing me suspiciously, but seemed to relax a bit as we talked. It seemed that during the night some local farmer’s two prize bulls had disappeared. The officer was cruising about in search of any sign of the thieves when he noticed the smoke from my chimney. Knowing that Absalom Mueller had died a month or so earlier, he thought it best to investigate. When I introduced myself as old Absalom’s nephew and heir William, he seemed satisfied and willing to leave to continue his search. Halfway down the steps, however, he turned to ask if I planned on settling down in Tophet. A natural enough question, to be sure, even a polite one under ordinary circumstances, but I could not help noticing a certain anxiety in his manner as I said that yes, I did hope to establish myself in the community.

Closing the door, I wondered what the policeman’s question implied. A moment’s thought suggested that Uncle Absalom might have acquired some kind of unsavory reputation among the townspeople, and this was not hard to imagine given their rural piety and his rather outre tastes. Who knew, or cared, what he had done to earn such ill repute; what worried me was that I might well have inherited my uncle’s outcast status. And this was no way to start fresh in new surroundings. I decided that the books and papers could wait. Perhaps a visit to town would answer some of my questions.

I estimated that by the time I had made myself presentable and arrived on the main street of Tophet, most of the townspeople would be up and around, especially as this was primarily a community of small farmers who rose with the sun. True, most might be expected still to be busy with chores, but I hoped I might meet at least a few of my new neighbors. If I found no clues as to my (perhaps imaginary) mystery, still I might show myself to be no ogre and even make a few new acquaintances. With these calculations I set off for town.

But my hopes were disappointed. The friendliest response I could elicit from the few stragglers I accosted was a hurried “Nice to meet you,” and I suspected that even these scant words were not meant. Was it that they feared me as Uncle Absalom’s successor in some mischief? Or were they simply ignorant peasants who shrank from contact with any newcomer? The latter was not after all unlikely, since I believed I noticed enough similarity in the faces I saw to suspect inbreeding with the consequent mental decadence.

An idea occurred to me, and after picking up a few needed groceries, I returned to my car, heading for the roadside stand where yesterday I had gotten directions. The old fellow who ran the pumps there had at least known the location of Tophet, and he might know more. And not being a resident, he might be less tightlipped than the others.

But here, too, I was disappointed. When I arrived at the station, the door to the cottage was locked and the blinds drawn. Fresh tire-marks in the dust and other small clues made me wonder if the little store were not occupied after all. The silence of the place seemed laden with anxious tension, as of someone hiding—almost as if the proprietor and his customers had seen me approach and frantically sought concealment. Baffled, I went back to the car to return home (for that is how I had already come to regard the old place). But as I pulled out into the road, I caught a glimpse of something that had eluded me before. Suddenly I noticed a makeshift hex sign, painted on a large circle of zinc, perhaps recently the bottom of a wash tub, and nailed onto the front wall of the store, above the door. Somehow I had omitted to notice it just minutes before, but my preoccupation would explain this. What I was fairly sure of was that no such sign had been present the day before!

By noon I had returned to the house more mystified than before. I decided my answer, if answer there were, must be hidden in my uncle’s books, the very books I had almost consigned to the flames the previous night. There I read of fantastic entities with names like Leviathan, Demogorgon, Azathoth, Zeemebooch. Somehow I knew that it was of these very beings I had dreamt last night! Just what kind of researches had Uncle Absalom been engaged in? And, worse yet—what kind of deeds?

III.

Once more my thoughts were interrupted, this time by a strange sound—below me. The subcellar! In my absorption with my uncle’s hellish books I had completely forgotten it. Following the sound as best I could (it was now dying away), I found my way down to the subterranean chamber. By now there were only ringing echoes, which might have been those of a beast’s death agonies. But if the sound were no longer there to greet me, the sub-basement was filled with an equally horrifying stench, like that of a slaughterhouse. For scattered all about, almost concealing the traces of chalk circles and pentacles on the stone floor, were the carcasses of one or more cows, or—bulls?

The cover of night found me two miles further into the countryside, climbing over the rail fence of the Tophet Cemetery. You see, having returned to the pile of occult volumes in the study, I had searched them anew, doubly desperate for some clue. And in an underscored verse from The Book of Iod, I believed I had found it. If my conjectural translation were anywhere near the mark, I felt assured that the end of the whole horrific business lay here in my uncle’s final resting place.

After some searching I found the grave and set to work, swallowing my own disgust and self-revulsion as I did so. Finally, the wood of the coffin came into view. With some surprise I noticed that the casket had been laid so that the grave marker rose directly over the middle of the box, not at its head, as was the usual arrangement. Thus, to unearth the whole length of the casket, I had to displace the gravestone. The stone itself was of curious design, having neither the basic rectangular shape nor that of a cross, but rather of a five-pointed star, with some sort of pattern carved upon it. With the marker thus out of the way, freeing the coffin was comparatively simple.

I paused, momentarily startled by a swelling crescendo of whippoorwills that seemed to explode out of nowhere. Regaining as much composure as the surroundings allowed, I made ready to uncover the corpse. But I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me upon opening the box. For my uncle’s form was just as I had seen in the portrait. He seemed not dead, certainly not decayed, but merely asleep. Yet I had but a glimpse of him in this state. The coffin lid had come open only with difficulty, and I was forced to wrench it free with one great effort. As the lid fell all the way to the ground, the hinges shattered, as did the star-shaped stone, upon which it fell. At this, my Uncle Absalom’s eyes flew open in an expression of sheer terror, matched instantly by my own, as I beheld what followed. For his formerly inert form began to erupt in bloody furrows, rent and mutilated by unseen talons!

The authorities at this place where I am now confined accuse me of desecrating the corpse, but I know only too well that Uncle Absalom’s dismemberment was the work of whatever eldritch entity my idle mouthing of an ancient incantation had released, and which my clumsiness had given access to my uncle’s hitherto protected sleeping form!