The House of the Worm

CHAPTER VII Hazuth-Kleg

Out of the mocking shades of doubtful sleep slipped Sliph like only another shadow, to find the locked gate the sign on the stone had indicated. Sliph had beheld that sign in other dreams, and never chosen to disregard its cryptic warning, perceiving that it is unwise to act perversely when one knows not to whom he will have to answer later. But now he remembered the coral domes of antique Cathuria that departed the World long since, leaving only the stars in her place; he thought then of the bright pavilions, and perfumed gardens amid the ginkgo trees, and minstrels striking softly their little bells and playing sweetly their rosewood flutes; and of Matthew Phillips, whom Sliph had left dreaming in a little garret in Providence, with only books and dreams to ward off madness until he might learn whither Cathuria has flown. And Sliph went down to the locked gate, for the city behind it is named on no maps but the charts wherewith hooded astrologers consult the rebellious stars.

The design of that gate is nothing more conventional than a lofty, tangled web of verdigris-mottled serpents whose eyes are too moist for amethysts. Sliph sat cross-legged beside the gate, where he would not have to abide too closely the fearful gaze of the eyes.

There came by at this time that evil old woman in black dragging her fiendish bundle and reeking nauseously of embalming spices, and the musk of unwholesome slimy things that creep beneath dank stones. Sliph could hear quite plainly what she prattled to herself, or perhaps for the speculated ears of something that stirred nastily in her sack. But when she pulled the latch-string and scuttled through the gate, he rose and slipped in behind her (and of course brushed that tiny silver cord which tinkles a little bell in a small chamber very deep underground, where there dwells all alone in the dark outside the World One who, on hearing that little bell, took up in its paw a silver pen, and began to write).

Then that old woman turned and leered at Sliph in her repellent fashion, and flaffed her long, shapeless sleeves at him in gestures having clearly some reference to the stars. Sliph could not understand those gestures, but he guessed that they did not bode him any good. And when she actually bent to untie that disquieting sack, which was already snuffling towards him, he ran and hid behind a dune. And she only whistled for her sack, and hobbled away with it towards the watchful lamps of the city.

At what hour he knew only dimly, Sliph perceived the Night in his slinking retreat into the West and its mythical well, whence Night may come by legendary subterranean paths unto the East again. The stars sailed slowly, one by one, over the jagged edge of the World; and soon there were no more stars, for such jewels are the rightful possessions of Night only, and not of that grim twilight brooding eternally over the city. But Sliph thought not of these matters, only wondering why with Night flown the Day came not to usurp the empty sky. And he remembered the old woman’s eagerness that he should note a certain star. For one pale star had never sought the abyss, but hung watchfully above the shadowy basalt towers…

Meanwhile three figures were approaching him from the East. Sliph did not like the look of those figures, or the way one hopped queerly about on all fours when another prodded it. Their progress was silent and quick: Sliph did not have to wait long before they had come beneath his dune, up the difficult slope of which he had already crept to watch the Night: he could even read the hieroglyphs on the yellow robe of that first Thing whose scaly muzzle was all drawn up in a horrible grin; its long retainer went wrapped in a winding sheet and drove the third along at the tip of an iron goad; of this last being it would not be tasteful to speak. The first made a sign to its fellows, and hissed at them through rows of disturbingly numerous teeth, “There was whispering among the stars tonight.” “It is time, surely,” quoth that long retainer. The third being said nothing at all, but tittered and wiped the spittle from its soft, flabby chin. Then all three stole off across the plain to the city and its terrible star. Sliph descended quietly and followed at a prudent distance, and in consequence lost them in an alley winding off the Street of the Tobacconists.

The streets of that city are dark, narrow and winding, and in too many places the bleak houses lean perilously to shut in the lonely ways and bring certain shuttered attic windows into frightful proximaty with the slippery cobbles. Houses all of tottering, grey, lichen-crusted brick peer oddly through leaded panes, or mutter strangely with voices the wind ought not to have. Sliph detested the way those houses edged away and made the streets confusing. Sometimes the shadowy lanes discovered broad courts opening on the sky, where the hollowed flags still bore sardonic astrological symbols and names of many infamous daemons, and names of some lesser known but infinitely more terrible. But Sliph did not care to linger in those dark, suspicious courts either, because the disquieting windows overlooking them were open and trailed ladders of braided rope. At last he came upon a small iron gate fashioned all too obviously by the same craft as the gate of bronze beyond the plain; but he would not approach too closely, seeing how the eyes were more skillfully made. Also Sliph did not want to disturb the Watcher on the other side of the little gate. This alarming personage squatted with its back to him, performing certain appalling rituals with a stick.

Beyond the Watcher’s head and a little above what it used as a shoulder, Sliph looked out on a wide, cobbled avenue lit by the sinful red lamps of temples raised on either side to all disreputable gods whom men deny, foolishly supposing that worship could possibly matter to the gods In Ulthar they have strange accounts of unlawful idols who provide their own sacrifices without any observence of the proper seasons or which of her houses the Moon occupies, and covet other flesh than goats’. In that street also was a low, terrible house without any windows. Sliph noticed it first when a small, dark man with a jewelled sword and stealthy, slippered feet, left that low door and stole out into Pantheon Street on a business in which darkness and a fabulous gem figured not unimportantly.

After several minutes a second figure emerged from that same low, dreadful house… that evil old woman in black with her fiendish bundle. She seemed intent upon urgent matters, and scuttled towards the iron gate and cuffed the monstrous Watcher away; and that latter being only withdrew sulking and growling into a crack there was in the base of an onyx wall. Then she passed through the gate and down the narrow lane. But when Sliph turned to go out into the broad street with the temple lights, he found the Watcher already shifting its enormous bulk back into the proper position against the gate, which was shut. And fearing he might never find his way back through those winding lanes, dreading what might happen if he did not, Sliph hurried back in the one direction he most instinctively disliked: the one instinct said the witch had taken.

And just when the alleys had begun to play queer tricks with his sanity, he spied her muffled form only slipping around a corner, and that shapeless black sack shambling at her heels. But when he had hurried up to the place where he had seen her, she was already gone. Then a candle was lit in an upper room by whatever pressed its face against the window-glass, and somewhere behind Sliph a door whose hinges were in a deplorable state, opened slowly…

And in a broad court where madly sentient houses leaned shockingly away from something they feared, and queer, flaffing shadows rustled their black wings in the light of that one hellish star, which now appeared to squat upon a windowless tower, chuckling and dangling tentacles listlessly, Sliph found the old woman. She stood on the fifth step of a hoary dais whose steps were all unmentionably defiled by the less orthodox names of Azathoth, wrought in tiny emeralds; bent over that lichened, blasphemous altar, crooning softly and making certain curious patterns with the entrails of a child. Something she read in the entrails seemed to please her, and she spat thrice upon the altar and shouted a Name.

There watched seated from the shadows, apathetically, three whom Sliph had already met on the plain. On hearing that shouted Name they crept to the foot of the hoary dais, and made an obeisance on their faces before that evil old woman lolling on the fifth step, and that sack bulging limply across her knees. The sack whispered a terrible thing in the old woman’s ear, and she turned to glare at Sliph and shake her head, saying only, “There, there,” soothingly to her sack, and that perhaps Matthew Phillips, a name Sliph felt he should know for a reason no longer clear, had dined unwisely before sleep — (Here that hidden recorder in the deep, dark, secret chamber, being thoroughly bored with the proceedings, laid aside its silver pen. And in the morning a charwoman entered a certain Providence garret after repeated unanswered knockings, and screamed at what she found there.)