The Taint and Other Novellas

The House of the Temple

Let’s step hack a year or two from Lord of the Worms. In April 1980, while serving out my last year at the Training Centre of the Royal Military Police, I mistakenly sent out two copies of The House of the Temple…a genuine error on my part—in no way my usual practice—as double submissions of that sort are much frowned upon. However, one copy went to editor Lin Carter who was editing a line of newly revived, mass market paperback issues of “Weird Tales” under the Zebra imprint, and the other to my then good friend Francesco Cova in Genoa, Italy. Cova was looking for quality stories for his exceptional Italian/English-language semi-pro “Kadath” magazine, and I had promised to do my very best for him. This novella is one of my best, I fancy, not least because both Carter and Cova bought it and brought it out uncomfortably close together in respectively, “Weird Tales” vol. 48, No. 3, and “Kadath” vol. 1, No. 3—the latter being in fact the true first in November 1980. This last quarter century has seen the story reprinted more than once, most notably in my Fedogan & Bremer collection “A Coven of Vampires.”

(Incidentally, when that last-mentioned collection went out of print very quickly after publication, it became Fedogan & Bremer’s fastest selling hook. While there’s no direct association, F&B picked up the Best Small press award at the very next World Fantasy Convention.)

I. The Summons

I suppose under the circumstances it is only natural that the police should require this belated written statement from me; and I further suppose it to be in recognition of my present highly nervous condition and my totally unwarranted confinement in this place that they are allowing me to draw the thing up without supervision. But while every kindness has been shown me, still I most strongly protest my continued detainment here. Knowing what I now know, I would voice the same protest in respect of detention in any prison or institute anywhere in Scotland…anywhere in the entire British Isles.

Before I begin, let me clearly make the point that, since no charges have been levelled against me, I make this statement of my own free will, fully knowing that in so doing I may well extend my stay in this detestable place. I can only hope that upon its reading, it will be seen that I had no alternative but to follow the action I describe.

You the reader must therefore judge. My actual sanity—if indeed I am still sane—my very being, may well depend upon your findings…

• • •

I was in New York when the letter from my uncle’s solicitors reached me. Sent from an address in the Royal Mile, that great road which reaches steep and cobbled to the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle itself, the large, sealed manila envelope had all the hallmarks of officialdom, so that even before I opened it I feared the worst.

Not that I had been close to my uncle in recent years (my mother had brought me out of Scotland as a small child, on the death of my father, and I had never been back) but certainly I remembered Uncle Gavin. If anything I remembered him better than I did my father; for where Andrew McGilchrist had always been dry and introverted, Uncle Gavin had been just the opposite. Warm, outgoing and generous to a fault, he had spoilt me mercilessly.

Now, according to the letter, he was dead and I was named his sole heir and beneficiary; and the envelope contained a voucher which guaranteed me a flight to Edinburgh from anywhere in the world. And then of course there was the letter itself, the contents of which further guaranteed my use of that voucher; for only a fool could possibly refuse my uncle’s bequest, or fail to be interested in its attendant though at present unspecified conditions.

Quite simply, by presenting myself at the offices of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee in Edinburgh, I would already have fulfilled the first condition toward inheriting my uncle’s considerable fortune, his estate of over three hundred acres and his great house where it stood in wild and splendid solitude at the foot of the Pentlands in Lothian. All of which seemed a very far cry from New York…

As to what I was doing in New York in the first place:

Three months earlier, in mid-March of 1976—when I was living alone in Philadelphia in the home where my mother had raised me—my fiancée of two years had given me back my ring, run off and married a banker from Baltimore. The novel I was writing had immediately metamorphosed from a light-hearted love story into a doom-laden tragedy, became meaningless somewhere in the transformation, and ended up in my waste-paper basket. That was that. I sold up and moved to New York, where an artist friend had been willing to share his apartment until I could find a decent place of my own.

I had left no forwarding address, however, which explained the delayed delivery of the letter from my uncle’s solicitors; the letter itself was post-marked March 26th, and from the various marks, labels and redirections on the envelope, the US Mail had obviously gone to considerable trouble to find me. And they found me at a time when the lives of both myself and my artist friend, Carl Earlman, were at a very low ebb. I was not writing and Carl was not drawing, and despite the arrival of summer our spirits were on a rapid decline.

Which is probably why I jumped at the opportunity the letter presented, though, as I have said, certainly I would have been a fool to ignore or refuse the thing…Or so I thought at the time.

I invited Carl along if he so desired, and he too grasped at the chance with both hands. His funds were low and getting lower; he would soon be obliged to quit his apartment for something less ostentatious; and since he, too, had decided that he needed a change of locale—to put some life back into his artwork—the matter was soon decided and we packed our bags and headed for Edinburgh.

It was not until our journey was over, however—when we were settled in our hotel room in Princes Street—that I remembered my mother’s warning, delivered to me deliriously but persistently from her deathbed, that I should never return to Scotland, certainly not to the old house. And as I vainly attempted to adjust to the jet-lag and the fact that it was late evening while all my instincts told me it should now be day, so my mind went back over what little 1 knew of my family roots, of the McGilchrist line itself, of that old and rambling house in the Pentlands where I had been born, and especially of the peculiar reticence of Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee, the Scottish solicitors.

Reticence, yes, because I could almost feel the hesitancy in their letter. It seemed to me that they would have preferred not to find me; and yet, if I were asked what it was that gave me this impression, then I would be at a loss for an answer. Something in the way it was phrased, perhaps—in the dry, professional idiom of solicitors—which too often seems to me to put aside all matters of emotion or sensibility; so that I felt like a small boy offered a candy…and warned simultaneously that it would ruin my teeth. Yes, it seemed to me that Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee might actually be apprehensive about my acceptance of their conditions—or rather, of my uncle’s conditions—as if they were offering a cigar to an addict suffering from cancer of the lungs.

I fastened on that line of reasoning, seeing the conditions of the will as the root of the vague uneasiness which niggled at the back of my mind. The worst of it was that these conditions were not specified; other than to say that if I could not or would not meet them, still I would receive fifteen thousand pounds and my return ticket home, and that the residue of my uncle’s fortune would then be used to carry out his will in respect of “the property known as Temple House.”

Temple House, that rambling old seat of the McGilchrists where it stood locked in a steep re-entry; and the Pentland Hills a grey and green backdrop to its frowning, steep-gabled aspect; with something of the Gothic in its structure, something more of Renaissance Scotland, and an aura of antiquity all its own which, as a child, I could still remember loving dearly. But that had been almost twenty years ago and the place had been my home. A happy home, I had thought; at least until the death of my father, of which I could remember nothing at all.

But I did remember the pool—the deep, grey pool where it lapped at the raised, reinforced, east-facing garden wall—the pool and its ring of broken quartz pillars, the remains of the temple for which the house was named. Thinking back over the years to my infancy, I wondered if perhaps the pool had been the reason my mother had always hated the place. None of the McGilchrists had ever been swimmers, and yet water had always seemed to fascinate them. I would not have been the first of the line to be found floating face-down in that strange, pillar-encircled pool of deep and weedy water; and I had used to spend hours just sitting on the wall and staring across the breeze-rippled surface…

So my thoughts went as, tossing in my hotel bed late into the night, I turned matters over in my mind…And having retired late, so we rose late, Carl and I; and it was not until 2 P.M. that I presented myself at the office of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee on the Royal Mile.

II. The Will

Since Carl had climbed up to the esplanade to take in the view, I was alone when I reached my destination and entered MA and L’s offices through a door of yellow-tinted bull’s-eye panes, passing into the cool welcome of a dim and very Olde Worlde anteroom; and for all that this was the source of my enigmatic summons, still I found a reassuring air of charm and quiet sincerity about the place. A clerk led me into an inner chamber as much removed from my idea of a solicitor’s office as is Edinburgh from New York, and having been introduced to the firm’s Mr. Asquith I was offered a seat.

Asquith was tall, slender, high-browed and balding, with a mass of freckles which seemed oddly in contrast with his late middle years, and his handshake was firm and dry. While he busied himself getting various documents, I was given a minute or two to look about this large and bewilderingly cluttered room of shelves, filing cabinets, cupboards and three small desks. But for all that the place seemed grossly disordered, still Mr. Asquith quickly found what he was looking for and seated himself opposite me behind his desk. He was the only partner present and I the only client.

“Now, Mr. McGilchrist,” he began. “And so we managed to find you, did we? And doubtless you’re wondering what it’s all about, and you probably think there’s something of a mystery here? Well, so there is, and for me and my partners no less than for yourself.”

“I don’t quite follow,” I answered, searching his face for a clue.

“No, no of course you don’t. Well now, perhaps this will explain it better. It’s a copy of your uncle’s will. As you’ll see, he was rather short on words; hence the mystery. A more succinct document—which nevertheless hints at so much more—I’ve yet to see!”

• • •

“I Gavin McGilchrist,” (the will began) “of Temple House in Lothian, hereby revoke all Wills, Codicils or Testamentary Dispositions heretofore made by me, and I appoint my Nephew, John Hamish McGilchrist of Philadelphia in the United States of America, to be the Executor of this my Last Will and direct that all my Debts, Testamentary and Funeral Expenses shall be paid as soon as conveniently may be after my death.

“I give and bequeath unto the aforementioned John Hamish McGilchrist everything I possess, my Land and the Property standing thereon, with the following Condition: namely that he alone shall open and read the Deposition which shall accompany this Will into the hands of the Solicitors; and that furthermore he, being the Owner, shall destroy Temple House to its last stone within a Threemonth of accepting this Condition. In the event that he shall refuse this undertaking, then shall my Solicitors, Macdonald, Asquith and Lee of Edinburgh, become sole Executors of my Estate, who shall follow to the letter the Instructions simultaneously deposited with them.”

The will was dated and signed in my uncle’s scratchy scrawl.

I read it through a second time and looked up to find Mr. Asquith’s gaze fixed intently upon me. “Well,” he said, “and didn’t I say it was a mystery? Almost as strange as his death…” He saw the immediate change in my expression, the frown and the question my lips were beginning to frame, and held up his hands in apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, “so very sorry—for of course you know nothing of the circumstances of his death, do you? I had better explain:

“A year ago,” Asquith continued, “your uncle was one of the most hale and hearty men you could wish to meet. He was a man of independent means, as you know, and for a good many years he had been collecting data for a book. Ah! I see you’re surprised. Well, you shouldn’t be. Your great-grandfather wrote Notes on Nessie: the Secrets of Loch Ness; and your grandmother, under a pseudonym, was a fairly successful romanticist around the turn of the century. You, too, I believe, have published several romances? Indeed,” and he smiled and nodded, “it appears to be in the blood, you see?

“Like your great-grandfather, however, your Uncle Gavin McGilchrist had no romantic aspirations. He was a researcher, you see, and couldn’t abide a mystery to remain unsolved. And there he was at Temple House, a bachelor and time on his hands, and a marvellous family tree to explore and a great mystery to unravel.”

“Family tree?” I said. “He was researching the biography of a family? But which fam—” And I paused.

Asquith smiled. “You’ve guessed it, of course,” he said. “Yes, he was planning a book on the McGilchrists, with special reference to the curse…” And his smile quickly vanished.

It was as if a cold draught, coming from nowhere, fanned my cheek. “The curse? My family had…a curse?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. Not the classical sort of curse, by any means, but a curse nevertheless—or at least your uncle thought so. Perhaps he wasn’t really serious about it at first, but towards the end—”

“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “I remember now: the deaths by stroke, by drowning, by thrombosis. My mother mentioned them on her own deathbed. A curse on the McGilchrists, she said, on the old house.”

Again Asquith nodded, and finally he continued. “Well, your uncle had been collecting material for many years, I suspect since the death of your father; from local archives, historical annals, various chronicles, church records, military museums, and so on. He had even enlisted our aid, on occasion, in finding this or that old document. Our firm was founded one hundred and sixty years ago, you see, and we’ve had many McGilchrists as clients.

“As I’ve said, up to a time roughly a year ago, he was as hale and hearty a man as you could wish to meet. Then he travelled abroad; Hungary, Romania, all the old countries of antique myth and legend. He brought back many books with him, and on his return he was a changed man. He had become, in a matter of weeks, the merest shadow of his former self. Finally, nine weeks ago on March 22nd, he left his will in our hands, an additional set of instructions for us to follow in the event you couldn’t be found, and the sealed envelope which he mentions in his will. I shall give that to you in a moment. Two days later, when his gillie returned to Temple House from a short holiday—”

”He found my uncle dead,” I finished it for him. “I see…And the strange circumstances?”

“For a man of his years to die of a heart attack…” Asquith shook his head. “He wasn’t old. What?—an outdoors man, like him? And what of the shotgun, with both barrels discharged, and the spent cartridges lying at his feet just outside the porch? What had he fired at, eh, in the dead of night? And the look on his face—monstrous !”

“You saw him?”

“Oh, yes. That was part of our instructions; I was to see him. And not just myself but Mr. Lee also. And the doctor, of course, who declared it could only have been a heart attack. But then there was the post-mortem. That was also part of your uncle’s instructions…”

“And its findings?” I quietly asked.

“Why, that was the reason he wanted the autopsy, do you see? So that we should know he was in good health.”

“No heart attack?”

“No,” he shook his head, “not him. But dead, certainly. And that look on his face, Mr. McGilchrist—that terrible, pleading look in his wide, wide eyes…”

3. The House

Half an hour later I left Mr. Asquith in his office and saw myself out through the anteroom and into the hot, cobbled road that climbed to the great grey castle. In the interim I had opened the envelope left for me by my uncle and had given its contents a cursory scrutiny, but I intended to study them minutely at my earliest convenience.

I had also offered to let Asquith see the contents, only to have him wave my offer aside. It was a private thing, he said, for my eyes only. Then he had asked me what I intended to do now, and I had answered that I would go to Temple House and take up temporary residence there. He then produced the keys, assured me of the firm’s interest in my business—its complete confidentiality and its readiness to provide assistance should I need it—and bade me good day.

I found Carl Earlman leaning on the esplanade wall and gazing out over the city. Directly below his position the castle rock fell away for hundreds of feet to a busy road that wound round and down and into the maze of streets and junctions forming the city centre. He started when I took hold of his arm.

“What—? Oh, it’s you, John! I was lost in thought. This fantastic view; I’ve already stored away a dozen sketches in my head. Great!” Then he saw my face and frowned. “Is anything wrong? You don’t quite look yourself.”

As we made our way down from that high place I told him of my meeting with Asquith and all that had passed between us, so that by the time we found a cab (a “taxi”) and had ourselves driven to an automobile rental depot, I had managed to bring him fully up to date. Then it was simply a matter of hiring a car and driving out to Temple House…

• • •

We headed south-west out of Edinburgh with Carl driving our Range Rover at a leisurely pace, and within three-quarters of an hour turned right off the main road onto a narrow strip whose half-metalled surface climbed straight as an arrow toward the looming Pentlands. Bald and majestic, those grey domes rose from a scree of gorse-grown shale to cast their sooty, mid-afternoon shadows over lesser mounds, fields and streamlets alike. Over our vehicle, too, as it grew tiny in the frowning presence of the hills.

I was following a small-scale map of the area purchased from a filling station (a “garage”), for of course the district was completely strange to me. A lad of five on leaving Scotland—and protected by my mother’s exaggerated fears at that, which hardly ever let me out of her sight—I had never been allowed to stray very far from Temple House.

Temple House…and again the name conjured strange phantoms, stirred vague memories I had thought long dead.

Now the road narrowed more yet, swinging sharply to the right before passing round a rocky spur. The ground rose up beyond the spur and formed a shallow ridge, and my map told me that the gully or re-entry which guarded Temple House lay on the far side of this final rise. I knew that when we reached the crest the house would come into view, and I found myself holding my breath as the Range Rover’s wheels bit into the cinder surface of the track.

“There she is!” cried Carl as first the eaves of the place became visible, then its oak-beamed gables and greystone walls, and finally the entire frontage where it projected from behind the sheer rise of the gully’s wall. And now, as we accelerated down the slight decline and turned right to follow a course running parallel to the stream, the whole house came into view where it stood half in shadow. That strange old house in the silent gully, where no birds ever flew and not even a rabbit had been seen to sport in the long wild grass.

“Hey!” Carl cried, his voice full of enthusiasm. “And your uncle wanted this place pulled down? What in hell for? It’s beautiful—and it must be worth a fortune!”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I answered. “It might look all right from here, but wait till you get inside. Its foundations were waterlogged twenty years ago. There were always six inches of water in the cellar, and the panels of the lower rooms were mouldy even then. God only knows what it must be like now!”

“Does it look the way you remember it?” he asked.

“Not quite,” I frowned. “Seen through the eyes of an adult, there are differences.”

For one thing, the pool was different. The level of the water was lower, so that the wide, grass-grown wall of the dam seemed somehow taller. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the dam, without which the pool could not exist, or at best would be the merest pebble-bottomed pool and not the small lake which it now was. For the first time it dawned on me that the pool was artificial, not natural as I had always thought of it, and that Temple House had been built on top of the dam’s curving mound where it extended to the steep shale cliff of the defile itself.

With a skidding of loose chippings, Carl took the Range Rover up the ramp that formed the drive to the house, and a moment later we drew to a halt before the high-arched porch. We dismounted and entered, and now Carl went clattering away—almost irreverently, I thought—into cool rooms, dark stairwells and huge cupboards, his voice echoing back to me where I stood with mixed emotions, savouring the atmosphere of the old place, just inside the doorway to the house proper.

“But this is it!” he cried from somewhere. “This is for me! My studio, and no question. Come and look, John—look at the windows letting in all this good light. You’re right about the damp, I can feel it—but that aside, it’s perfect!”

I found him in what had once been the main living-room, standing in golden clouds of dust he had stirred up, motes illumined by the sun’s rays where they struck into the room through huge, leaded windows. “You”ll need to give the place a good dusting and sweeping out,” I told him.

“Oh, sure,” he answered, “but there’s a lot wants doing before that. Do you know where the master switch is?”

“Umm? Switch ?”

“For the electric light,” he frowned impatiently at me. “And surely there’s an icebox in the kitchen.”

“A refrigerator?” I answered. “Oh, yes, I’m sure there is…Look, you run around and explore the place and do whatever makes you happy. Me, I’m just going to potter about and try to waken a few old dreams.”

During the next hour or two—while I quite literally “pottered about” and familiarized myself once again with this old house so full of memories—Carl fixed himself up with a bed in his “studio,” found the main switch and got the electricity flowing, examined the refrigerator and satisfied himself that it was in working order, then searched me out where I sat in the mahogany-panelled study upstairs to tell me that he was driving into Penicuik to stock up with food.

From my window I watched him go, until the cloud of dust thrown up by his wheels disappeared over the rise to the south, then stirred myself into positive action. There were things to be done—things I must do for myself, others for my uncle—and the sooner I started the better. Not that there was any lack of time; I had three whole months to carry out Gavin McGilchrist’s instructions, or to fail to carry them out. And yet somehow…yes, there was this feeling of urgency in me.

And so I switched on the light against gathering shadows, took out the envelope left for me by my uncle—that envelope whose contents, a letter and a notebook, were for my eyes only—sat down at the great desk used by so many generations of McGilchrists, and began to read…

4. The Curse

“My dear, dear nephew,” the letter in my uncle’s uneven script began, “—so much I would like to say to you, and so little time in which to say it. And all these years grown in between since last I saw you.

“When first you left Scotland with your mother I would have written to you through her, but she forbade it. In early 1970 I learned of her death, so that even my condolences would have been six months too late; well, you have them now. She was a wonderful woman, and of course she was quite right to take you away out of it all. If I’m right in what I now suspect, her woman’s intuition will yet prove to have been nearer the mark than anyone ever could have guessed, and—

“But there I go, miles off the point and rambling as usual; and such a lot to say. Except—I’m damned if I know where to begin! I suppose the plain fact of the matter is quite simply stated—namely, that for you to be reading this is for me to be gone forever from the world of men. But gone…where? And how to explain?

“The fact is, I cannot tell it all, not and make it believable. Not the way I have come to believe it. Instead you will have to be satisfied with the barest essentials. The rest you can discover for yourself. There are books in the old library that tell it all—if a man has the patience to look. And if he’s capable of putting aside all matters of common knowledge, all laws of science and logic; capable of unlearning all that life has ever taught him of truth and beauty.

“Four hundred years ago we weren’t such a race of damned sceptics. They were burning witches in these parts then, and if they had suspected of anyone what I have come to suspect of Temple House and its grounds…

“Your mother may not have mentioned the curse—the curse of the McGilchrists. Oh, she believed in it, certainly, but it’s possible she thought that to tell of it might be to invoke the thing. That is to say, by telling you she might bring the curse down on your head. Perhaps she was right, for unless my death is seen to be entirely natural, then certainly I shall have brought it down upon myself.

“And what of you, Nephew?

“You have three months. Longer than that I do not deem safe, and nothing is guaranteed. Even three months might be dangerously overlong, but I pray not. Of course you are at liberty, if you so desire, simply to get the thing over and done with. In my study, in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, you will find sufficient fuses and explosive materials to bring down the wall of the defile onto the house, and the house itself into the pool, which should satisfactorily put an end to the thing.

“But…you had an enquiring mind as a child. If you look where I have looked and read what I have read, then you shall learn what I’ve learned and know that it is neither advanced senility nor madness but my own intelligence which leads me to the one, inescapable conclusion—that this House of the Temple, this Temple House of the McGilchrists, is accursed. Most terribly…

“I could flee this place, of course, but I doubt if that would save me. And if it did save me, still it would leave the final questions unanswered and the riddle unsolved. Also, I loved my brother, your father, and I saw his face when he was dead. If for nothing else, that look on your father’s dead face has been sufficient reason for me to pursue the thing thus far. I thought to seek it out, to know it, destroy it—but now…

“I have never been much of a religious man, Nephew, and so it comes doubly hard for me to say what I now say: that while your father is dead these twenty years and more, I now find myself wondering if he is truly at rest! And what will be the look on my face when the thing is over, one way or the other? Ask about that, Nephew, ask how I looked when they found me.

“Finally, as to your course of action from this point onward: do what you will, but in the last event be sure you bring about the utter dissolution of the seat of ancient evil known as Temple House. There are things hidden in the great deserts and mountains of the world, and others sunken under the deepest oceans, which never were meant to exist in any sane or ordered universe. Yes, and certain revenants of immemorial horror have even come among men. One such has anchored itself here in the Pentlands, and in a little while I may meet it face to face. If all goes well…But then you should not be reading this.

“And so the rest is up to you, John Hamish; and if indeed man has an immortal soul, I now place mine in your hands. Do what must be done and if you are a believer, then say a prayer for me…

Yr. Loving Uncle—

Gavin McGilchrist.”

I read the letter through a second time, then a third, and the shadows lengthened beyond the reach of the study’s electric lights. Finally, I turned to the notebook—a slim, ruled, board-covered book whose like might be purchased at any stationery store—and opened it to page upon page of scrawled and at first glance seemingly unconnected jottings, references, abbreviated notes and memoranda concerning…Concerning what? Black magic? Witchcraft? The “supernatural”? But what else would you call a curse if not supernatural?

Well, my uncle had mentioned a puzzle, a mystery, the McGilchrist curse, the thing he had tracked down almost to the finish. And here were all the pointers, the clues, the keys to his years of research. I stared at the great bookcases lining the walls, the leather spines of their contents dully agleam in the glow of the lights. Asquith had told me that my uncle brought many old books back with him from his wanderings abroad.

I stood up and felt momentarily dizzy, and was obliged to lean on the desk until the feeling passed. The mustiness of the deserted house, I supposed, the closeness of the room and the odour of old books. Books… yes, and I moved shakily across to the nearest bookcase and ran my fingers over titles rubbed and faded with age and wear. There were works here which seemed to stir faint memories—perhaps I had been allowed to play with those books as a child?—but others were almost tangibly strange to the place, whose titles alone would make aliens of them without ever a page being turned. These must be those volumes my uncle had discovered abroad. I frowned as I tried to make something of their less than commonplace names.

Here were such works as the German Unter-Zee Kulten and Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon in a French edition; and here Gaston le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths and a black-bound, iron-hasped copy of the Cthäat Aquadingen, its harsh title suggestive of both German and Latin roots. Here was Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, and here the Liber Miraculorem of the Monk and Chaplain Herbert of Clairvaux. Gothic letters proclaimed of one volume that it was Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, while another purported to be the suppressed and hideously disquieting Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt—titles which seemed to leap at me as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf in a sort of disbelieving stupefaction.

What possible connection could there be between these ancient, foreign volumes of elder madness and delirium and the solid, down-to-earth McGilchrist line of gentlemen, officers and scholars? There seemed only one way to find out. Choosing a book at random. I found it to be the Cthäat Aquadingen and returned with it to the desk. The light outside was failing now and the shadows of the hills were long and sooty. In less than an hour it would be dusk, and half an hour after that dark.

Then there would only be Carl and I and the night. And the old house. As if in answer to unspoken thoughts, settling timbers groaned somewhere overhead. Through the window, down below in the sharp shadows of the house, the dull green glint of water caught my eye.

Carl and I, the night and the old house—

And the deep, dark pool.

5. The Music

It was almost completely dark by the time Carl returned, but in between I had at least been able to discover my uncle’s system of reference. It was quite elementary, really. In his notebook, references such as “CA 121/7” simply indicated an item of interest in the Cthäat Aquadingen, page 121, the seventh paragraph. And in the work itself he had carefully underscored all such paragraphs or items of interest. At least a dozen such references concerning the Cthäat Aquadingen occurred in his notebook, and as night had drawn on I had examined each in turn.

Most of them were meaningless to me and several were in a tongue or glyph completely beyond my comprehension, but others were in a form of old English which I could transcribe with comparative ease. One such, which seemed a chant of sorts, had a brief annotation scrawled in the margin in my uncle’s hand. The passage I refer to, as nearly as I can remember, went like this:

“Rise, O Nameless Ones;

It is Thy Season

When Thine Own of Thy Choosing,

Through Thy Spells & Thy Magic,

Through Dreams & Enchantry,

May know Thou art come.

They rush to Thy Pleasure,

For the Love of Thy Masters—

—the Spawn of Cthulhu.”

And the accompanying annotation queried: “Would they have used such as this to call the Thing forth, I wonder, or was it simply a blood lure? What causes it to come forth now? When will it next come?”

It was while I was comparing references and text in this fashion that I began to get a glimmer as to just what the book was, and on further considering its title I saw that I had probably guessed correctly: “Cthäat” frankly baffled me, unless it had some connection with the language or being of the pre-Nacaal Kthatans; but “Aquadingen” was far less alien in its sound and formation. It meant (I believed), “water-things”, or “things of the waters”; and the—Cthäat Aquadingen was quite simply a compendium of myths and legends concerning water sprites, nymphs, demons, naiads and other supernatural creatures of lakes and oceans, and the spells or conjurations by which they might be evoked or called out of their watery haunts.

I had just arrived at this conclusion when Carl returned, the lights of his vehicle cutting a bright swath over the dark surface of the pool as he parked in front of the porch. Laden down, he entered the house and I went down to the spacious if somewhat old fashioned kitchen to find him filling shelves and cupboards and stocking the refrigerator with perishables. This done, bright and breezy in his enthusiasm, he enquired about the radio.

“Radio?” I answered. “I thought your prime concern was for peace and quiet? Why, you’ve made enough noise for ten since we got here !”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s not my noise I’m concerned about but yours. Or rather, the radio’s. I mean, you’ve obviously found one for I heard the music.”

Carl was big, blond and blue-eyed; a Viking if ever I saw one, and quite capable of displaying a Viking’s temper. He had been laughing when he asked me where the radio was, but now he was frowning. “Are you playing games with me, John?”

“No, of course I’m not,” I answered him. “Now what’s all this about? What music have you been hearing?”

His face suddenly brightened and he snapped his fingers. “There’s a radio in the Range Rover,” he said. “There has to be. It must have gotten switched on, very low, and I’ve been getting Bucharest or something.” He made as if to go back outside.

“Bucharest?” I repeated him.

“Hmm?” he paused in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, yes—gypsyish stuff. Tambourines and chanting—and fiddles. Dancing around campfires. Look, I’d better switch it off or the battery will run down.”

“I didn’t see a radio,” I told him, following him out through the porch and onto the drive.

He leaned inside the front of the vehicle, switched on the interior light and searched methodically. Finally he put the light out with an emphatic click. He turned to me and his jaw had a stubborn set to it. I looked back at him and raised my eyebrows. “No radio?”

He shook his head. “But I heard the music.”

“Lovers,” I said.

“Eh?”

“Lovers, out walking. A transistor radio. Perhaps they were sitting in the grass. After all, it is a beautiful summer night.”

Again he shook his head. “No, it was right there in the air. Sweet and clear. I heard it as I approached the house. It came from the house, I thought. And you heard nothing?”

“Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.

“Well then—damn it to hell!” he suddenly grinned. “I’ve started hearing things, that’s all! Skip it…Come on, let’s have supper…”

• • •

Carl stuck to his “studio” bedroom but I slept upstairs in a room adjacent to the study. Even with the windows thrown wide open, the night was very warm and the atmosphere sticky, so that sleep did not come easily. Carl must have found a similar problem for on two or three occasions I awakened from a restless half-sleep to sounds of his moving about downstairs. In the morning over breakfast both of us were a little bleary-eyed, but then he led me through into his room to display the reason for his nocturnal activity.

There on the makeshift easel, on one of a dozen old canvasses he had brought with him, Carl had started work on a picture…of sorts.

For the present he had done little more than lightly brush in the background, which was clearly the valley of the house, but the house itself was missing from the picture and I could see that the artist did not intend to include it. The pool was there, however, with its encircling ring of quartz columns complete and finished with lintels of a like material. The columns and lintels glowed luminously.

In between and around the columns vague figures writhed, at present insubstantial as smoke, and in the foreground the flames of a small fire were driven on a wind that blew from across the pool. Taken as a whole and for all its sketchiness, the scene gave a vivid impression of savagery and pagan excitement—strange indeed considering that as yet there seemed to be so little in it to excite any sort of emotion whatever.

“Well,” said Carl, his voice a trifle edgy, “what do you think?”

“I’m no artist, Carl,” I answered, which I suppose in the circumstances was saying too much.

“You don’t like it?” he sounded disappointed.

“I didn’t say that,” I countered. “Will it be a night scene?”

He nodded.

“And the dancers there, those wraiths…I suppose they are dancers?”

“Yes,” he answered, “and musicians. Tambourines, fiddles…”

“Ah!” I nodded. “Last night’s music.”

He looked at me curiously. “Probably…Anyway, I’m happy with it. At least I’ve started to work. What about you?”

“You do your thing,” I told him, “and I”ll do mine.”

“But what are you going to do?”

I shrugged. “Before I do anything I’m going to soak up a lot of atmosphere. But I don’t intend staying here very long. A month or so, and then—”

“And then you’ll burn this beautiful old place to the ground.” He had difficulty keeping the sour note out of his voice.

“It’s what my uncle wanted,” I said. “I’m not here to write a story. A story may come of it eventually, even a book, but that can wait. Anyway, I won’t burn the house.” I made a mushroom cloud with my hands. “She goes—up!”

Carl snorted. “You McGilchrists,” he said. “You’re all nuts!” But there was no malice in his statement.

There was a little in mine, however, when I answered “Maybe—but I don’t hear music when there isn’t any!”

But that was before I knew everything…

6. The Familiar

During the course of the next week Scotland began to feel the first effects of what is now being termed “a scourge on the British Isles,” the beginning of an intense, ferocious and prolonged period of drought. Sheltered by the Pentlands, a veritable suntrap for a full eight to ten hours a day, Temple House was no exception. Carl and I took to lounging around in shorts and T-shirts, and with his blond hair and fair skin he was particularly vulnerable. If we had been swimmers, then certainly we should have used the pool; as it was we had to content ourselves by sitting at its edge with our feet in the cool mountain water.

By the end of that first week, however, the drought’s effect upon the small stream which fed the pool could clearly be seen. Where before the water had rushed down from the heights of the defile, now it seeped, and the natural overflow from the sides of the dam was so reduced that the old course of the stream was now completely dry. As for our own needs: the large water tanks in the attic of the house were full and their source of supply seemed independent, possibly some reservoir higher in the hills.

In the cool of the late afternoon, when the house stood in its own and the Pentlands’ shade, then we worked; Carl at his drawing or painting, I with my uncle’s notebook and veritable library of esoteric books. We also did a little walking in the hills, but in the heat of this incredible summer that was far too exhausting and only served to accentuate a peculiar mood of depression which had taken both of us in its grip. We blamed the weather, of course, when at any other time we would have considered so much sunshine and fresh air a positive blessing.

By the middle of the second week I was beginning to make real sense of my uncle’s fragmentary record of his research. That is to say, his trail was becoming easier to follow as I grew used to his system and started to detect a pattern.

There were in fact two trails, both historic, one dealing with the McGilchrist line itself, the other more concerned with the family seat, with the House of the Temple. Because I seemed close to a definite discovery, I worked harder and became more absorbed with the work. And as if my own industry was contagious, Carl too began to put in longer hours at his easel or drawing board.

• • •

It was a Wednesday evening, I remember, the shadows lengthening and the atmosphere heavy when I began to see just how my uncle’s mind had been working. He had apparently decided that if there really was a curse on the McGilchrists, then that it had come about during the construction of Temple House. To discover why this was so, he had delved back into the years prior to its construction in this cleft in the hills, and his findings had been strange indeed.

It had seemed to start in England in 1594 with the advent of foreign refugees. These had been the members of a monkish order originating in the mountains of Romania, whose ranks had nevertheless been filled with many diverse creeds, colours and races. There were Chinamen amongst them, Hungarians, Arabs and Africans, but their leader had been a Romanian priest named Chorazos. As to why they had been hounded out of their own countries, that remained a mystery.

Chorazos and certain of his followers became regular visitors at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I—who had ever held an interest in astrology, alchemy and all similar magics and mysteries—and with her help they founded a temple “somewhere near Finchley.” Soon, however, couriers from foreign parts began to bring in accounts of the previous doings of this darkling sect, and so the Queen took advice.

Of all persons, she consulted with Dr John Dee, that more than dubious character whose own dabbling with the occult had brought him so close to disaster in 1555 during the reign of Queen Mary. Dee, at first enamoured of Chorazos and his followers, now turned against them. They were pagans, he said; their women were whores and their ceremonies orgiastic. They had brought with them a “familiar,” which would have “needs” of its own, and eventually the public would rise up against them and the “outrage” they must soon bring about in the country. The Queen should therefore sever all connections with the sect—and immediately!

Acting under Dee’s guidance, she at once issued orders for the arrest, detention and investigation of Chorazos and his members…but too late, for they had already flown. Their “temple” in Finchley—a “columned pavilion about a central lake”—was destroyed and the pool filled in. That was in late 1595.

In 1596 they turned up in Scotland, this time under the guise of travelling faith-healers and herbalists working out of Edinburgh. As a reward for their work among the poorer folk in the district, they were given a land grant and took up an austere residence in the Pentlands. There, following a pattern established abroad and carried on in England, Chorazos and his followers built their temple; except that this time they had to dam a stream in order to create a pool. The work took them several years; their ground was private property; they kept for the main well out of the limelight, and all was well…for a while.

Then came rumours of orgiastic rites in the hills, of children wandering away from home under the influence of strange, hypnotic music, of a monstrous being conjured up from hell to preside over ceremonial murder and receive its grisly tribute, and at last the truth was out. However covertly Chorazos had organized his perversions, there now existed the gravest suspicions as to what he and the others of his sect were about. And this in the Scotland of James IV, who five years earlier had charged an Edinburgh jury with “an Assize of Error” when they dismissed an action for witchcraft against one of the “notorious” North Berwick Witches. In this present matter, however, any decision of the authorities was pre-empted by persons unknown—possibly the inhabitants of nearby Penicuik, from which town several children had disappeared—and Chorazos’s order had been wiped out en masse one night and the temple reduced to ruins and shattered quartz stumps.

Quite obviously, the site of the temple had been here, and the place had been remembered by locals down the centuries; so that when the McGilchrist house was built in the mid-18th Century it automatically acquired the name of Temple House. The name had been retained…but what else had lingered over from those earlier times, and what exactly was the nature of the McGilchrist Curse?

I yawned and stretched. It was after eight and the sinking sun had turned the crests of the hills to bronze. A movement, seen in the corner of my eye through the window, attracted my attention. Carl was making his way to the rim of the pool. He paused with his hands on his hips to stand between two of the broken columns, staring out over the silent water. Then he laid back his head and breathed deeply. There was a tired but self-satisfied air about him that set me wondering.

I threw the window wide and leaned out, calling down through air which was still warm and cloying: “Hey, Carl—you look like the cat who got the cream!”

He turned and waved. “Maybe I am. It’s that painting of mine. I think I’ve got it beat. Not finished yet…but coming along.”

“Is it good?” I asked.

He shrugged, but it was a shrug of affirmation, not indifference. “Are you busy? Come down and see for yourself. I only came out to clear my head, so that I can view it in fresh perspective. Yours will be a second opinion.”

I went downstairs to find him back in his studio. Since the light was poor now, he switched on all of the electric lights and led the way to his easel. I had last looked at the painting some three or four days previously, at a time when it had still been very insubstantial. Now—

Nothing insubstantial about it now. The grass was green, long and wild, rising to nighted hills of grey and purple, silvered a little by a gibbous moon. The temple was almost luminous, its columns shining with an eerie light. Gone the wraithlike dancers; they capered in cassocks now, solid, wild and weird with leering faces. I started as I stared at those faces—yellow, black, and white faces, a half-dozen different races—but I started worse at the sight of the Thing rising over the pool within the circle of glowing columns. Still vague, that horror—that leprous grey, tentacled, mushroom-domed monstrosity—and as yet mainly amorphous; but formed enough to show that it was nothing of this good, sane Earth.

“What the hell is it?” I half-gasped, half-whispered.

“Hmm?” Carl turned to me and smiled with pleased surprise at the look of shock on my blanched face. “I’m damned if I know—but I think it’s pretty good! It will be when it’s finished. I’m going to call it The Familiar…”

7. The Face

For a long while I simply stood there taking in the contents of that hideous canvas and feeling the heat of the near-tropical night beating in through the open windows. It was all there: the foreign monks making their weird music, the temple glowing in the darkness, the dam, the pool and the hills as I had always known them, the Thing rising up in bloated loathsomeness from dark water, and a sense of realness I had never seen before and probably never again will see in any artist’s work.

My first impulse when the shock wore off a little was to turn on Carl in anger. This was too monstrous a joke. But no, his face bore only a look of astonishment now—astonishment at my reaction, which must be quite obvious to him. “Christ!” he said, “is it that good?”

“That—Thing—has nothing to do with Christ!” I finally managed to force the words out of a dry-throat. And again I felt myself on the verge of demanding an explanation. Had he been reading my uncle’s notes? Had he been secretly following my own line of research? But how could he, secretly or otherwise? The idea was preposterous.

“You really do feel it, don’t you?” he said, excitedly taking my arm. “I can see it in your face.”

“I…I feel it, yes,” I answered. “It’s a very…powerful piece of work.” Then, to fill the gap, I added: “Where did you dream it up?”

“Right first time,” he answered. “A dream—I think. Something left over from a nightmare. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The heat, I guess.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s too damned hot. Will you be doing any more tonight?”

He shook his head, his eyes still on the painting. “Not in this light. I don’t want to foul it up. No, I’m for bed. Besides, I have a headache.”

“What?” I said, glad now that I had made no wild accusation. “You?—a strapping great Viking like you, with a headache?”

“Viking?” he frowned. “You’ve called me that before. My looks must be deceptive. No, my ancestors came out of Hungary—a place called Stregoicavar. And I can tell you they burned more witches there than you ever did in Scotland!”

• • •

There was little sleep for me that night, though toward morning I did finally drop off, slumped across the great desk, drowsing fitfully in the soft glow of my desk light. Prior to that, however, in the silence of the night—driven on by a feeling of impending…something—I had delved deeper into the old books and documents amassed by my uncle, slowly but surely fitting together that great jigsaw whose pieces he had spent so many years collecting.

The work was more difficult now, his notes less coherent, his writing barely legible; but at least the material was or should be more familiar to me. Namely, I was studying the long line of McGilchrists gone before me, whose seat had been Temple House since its construction two hundred and forty years ago. And as I worked so my eyes would return again and again, almost involuntarily, to the dark pool with its ring of broken columns. Those stumps were white in the silver moonlight—as white as the columns in Carl’s picture—and so my thoughts returned to Carl.

By now he must be well asleep, but this new mystery filled my mind through the small hours. Carl Earlman…It certainly sounded Hungarian, German at any rate, and I wondered what the old family name had been. Ehrlichman, perhaps? Arlmann? And not Carl but Karl.

And his family hailed from Stregoicavar. That was a name I remembered from a glance into Von Junzt’s Unspeakable Cults, I was sure. Stregoicavar: it had stayed in my mind because of its meaning, which is “witch-town.” Certain of Chorazos’s order of pagan priests had been Hungarian. Was it possible that some dim ancestral memory lingered over in Carl’s mind, and that the pool with its quartz stumps had awakened that in his blood which harkened back to older times? And what of the gypsy music he had sworn to hearing on our first night in this old house? Young and strong he was certainly, but beneath an often brash exterior he had all the sensitivity of an artist born.

According to my uncle’s research my own great-grandfather, Robert Allan McGilchrist, had been just such a man. Sensitive, a dreamer, prone to hearing things in the dead of night which no one else could hear. Indeed, his wife had left him for his peculiar ways. She had taken her two sons with her; and so for many years the old man had lived here alone, writing and studying. He had been well known for his paper on the Lambton Worm legend of Northumberland: of a great worm or dragon that lived in a well and emerged at night to devour “bairns and beasties and foolhardy wanderers in the dark.” He had also published a pamphlet on the naiads of the lochs of Inverness; and his limited edition book, Notes on Nessie—the Secrets of Loch Ness had caused a minor sensation when first it saw print.

It was Robert Allan McGilchrist, too, who restored the old floodgate in the dam, so that the water level in the pool could be controlled; but that had been his last work. A shepherd had found him one morning slumped across the gate, one hand still grasping the wheel which controlled its elevation, his upper body floating face-down in the water. He must have slipped and fallen, and his heart had given out. But the look on his face had been a fearful thing; and since the embalmers had been unable to do anything with him, they had buried him immediately.

And as I studied this or that old record or consulted this or that musty book, so my eyes would return to the dam, the pool with its fanged columns, the old floodgate—rusted now and fixed firmly in place—and the growing sensation of an onrushing doom gnawed inside me until it became a knot of fear in my chest. If only the heat would let up, just for one day, and if only I could finish my research and solve the riddle once and for all.

It was then, as the first flush of dawn showed above the eastern hills, that I determined what I must do. The fact of the matter was that Temple House frightened me, as I suspected it had frightened many people before me. Well, I had neither the stamina nor the dedication of my uncle. He had resolved to track the thing down to the end, and something—sheer hard work, the “curse,” failing health, something—had killed him.

But his legacy to me had been a choice: continue his work or put an end to the puzzle for all time and blow Temple House to hell. So be it, that was what I would do. A day or two more—only a day or two, to let Carl finish his damnable painting—and then I would do what Gavin McGilchrist had ordered done. And with that resolution uppermost in my mind, relieved that at last I had made the decision, so I fell asleep where I sprawled at the desk.

The sound of splashing aroused me; that and my name called from below. The sun was just up and I felt dreadful, as if suffering from a hangover. For a long time I simply lay sprawled out. Then I stood up and eased my cramped limbs, and finally I turned to the open window. There was Carl, dressed only in his shorts, stretched out flat on a wide, thick plank, paddling out toward the middle of the pool!

“Carl!” I called down, my voice harsh with my own instinctive fear of the water. “Man, that’s dangerous—you can’t swim!”

He turned his head, craned his neck and grinned up at me. “Safe as houses,” he called, “so long as I hang on to the plank. And it’s cool, John, so wonderfully cool. This feels like the first time I’ve been cool in weeks!”

By now he had reached roughly the pool’s centre and there he stopped paddling and simply let his hands trail in green depths. The level of the water had gone down appreciably during the night and the streamlet which fed the pool was now quite dry. The plentiful weed of the pool, becoming concentrated as the water evaporated, seemed thicker than ever I remembered it. So void of life, that water, with never a fish or frog to cause a ripple on the morass-green of its surface.

And suddenly that tight knot of fear was back in my chest, making my voice a croak as I tried to call out: “Carl, get out of there!”

“What?” he faintly called back, but he didn’t turn his head. He was staring down into the water, staring intently at something he saw there. His hand brushed aside weed—

“Carl!” I found my voice. “For God’s sake get out of it!”

He started then, his head and limbs jerking as if scalded, setting the plank to rocking so that he half slid off it. Then—a scrambling back to safety and a frantic splashing and paddling; and galvanized into activity I sprang from the window and raced breakneck downstairs. And Carl laughing shakily as I stumbled knee-deep in hated water to drag him physically from the plank, both of us trembling despite the burning rays of the new-risen sun and the furnace heat of the air.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“I thought I saw something,” he answered. “In the pool. A reflection, that’s all, but it startled me.”

“What did you see?” I demanded, my back damp with cold sweat.

“Why, what would I see?” he answered, but his voice trembled for all that he tried to grin. “A face, of course—my own face framed by the weeds. But it didn’t look like me, that’s all…”

8. The Dweller

Looking back now in the light of what I already knew—certainly of what I should have guessed at that time—it must seem that I was guilty of an almost suicidal negligence in spending the rest of that day upstairs on my bed, tossing in nightmares brought on by the nervous exhaustion which beset me immediately after the incident at the pool. On the other hand, I had had little sleep the night before and Carl’s adventure had given me a terrific jolt; and so my failure to recognize the danger—how close it had drawn—may perhaps be forgiven.

In any event, I forced myself to wakefulness in the early evening, went downstairs and had coffee and a frugal meal of biscuits, and briefly visited Carl in his studio. He was busy—frantically busy, dripping with sweat and brushing away at his canvas—working on his loathsome painting, which he did not want me to see. That suited me perfectly for I had already seen more than enough of the thing. I did take time enough to tell him, though, that he should finish his work in the next two days; for on Friday or at the very latest Saturday morning I intended to blow the place sky high.

Then I went back upstairs, washed and shaved, and as the light began to fail so I returned to my uncle’s notebook. There were only three or four pages left unread, the first dated only days before his demise, but they were such a hodge-podge of scrambled and near-illegible miscellanea that I had the greatest difficulty making anything of them. Only that feeling of a burgeoning terror drove me on, though by now I had almost completely lost faith in making anything whatever of the puzzle.

As for my uncle’s notes: a basically orderly nature had kept me from leafing at random through his book, or perhaps I should have understood earlier. As it is, the notebook is lost forever, but as best I can I shall copy down what I remember of those last few pages. After that—and after I relate the remaining facts of the occurrences of that fateful hideous night—the reader must rely upon his own judgement. The notes then, or what little I remember of them:

“Levi’s or Mirandola’s invocation: “

Dasmass Jeschet Boene Doess Efar Duvema Enit Marous

.” If I could get the pronunciation right, perhaps…But what will the Thing be? And will it succumb to a double-barrelled blast? That remains to be seen. But if what I suspect is firmly founded…Is it a tick-thing, such as Von Junzt states inhabits the globular mantle of Yogg-Sothoth? (

Unaussprechlichen Kulten

, 78/16)—fearful hints—monstrous pantheon…And this merely a parasite to one of Them!

“The Cult of Cthulhu…immemorial horror spanning all the ages. The

Johansen Narrative

and the

Pnakotic Manuscript

. And the Innsmouth Raid of 1928; much was made of that, and yet nothing known for sure. Deep Ones, but…different again from this Thing.

“Entire myth-cycle…So many sources. Pure myth and legend? I think not. Too deep, interconnected, even plausible. According to Carter in SR, (AH ’59) p. 250-51,

They

were driven into this part of the universe (or into this time-dimension) by “Elder Gods” as punishment for a rebellion. Hastur the Unspeakable prisoned in Lake of Hali (again the lake or pool motif) in Carcosa; Great Cthulhu in R’lyeh, where he slumbers still in his death-sleep; Ithaqua sealed away behind icy Arctic barriers, and so on. But Yogg-Sothoth was sent

outside

, into a parallel place, conterminous with all space and time. Since YS is everywhere and when, if a man knew the gate he could call Him out…

“Did Chorazos and his acolytes, for some dark reason of their own, attempt thus to call Him out? And did they get this dweller in Him instead? And I believe I understand the reason for the pool. Grandfather knew. His interest in Nessie, the Lambton Worm, the Kraken of olden legend, naiads, Cthulhu…Wendy Smith’s burrowers feared water; and the sheer weight of the mighty Pacific helps keep C. prisoned in his place in R’lyeh—thank God! Water subdues these things…

“But if water confines It, why does It return to the water? And how may It leave the pool if not deliberately called out? No McGilchrist ever called it out, I’m sure, not willingly; though some may have suspected that something was here. No swimmers in the family—not a one—and I think I know why. It is an instinctive, an ancestral fear of the pool! No, of the unknown Thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…”

The thing which lurks beneath the pool’s surface…

Clammy with the heat, and with a debilitating terror springing from these words on the written page—these scribbled thought-fragments which, I was now sure, were anything but demented ravings—I sat at the old desk and read on. And as the house grew dark and quiet, as on the previous night, again I found my eyes drawn to gaze down through the open window to the surface of the still pool.

Except that the surface was no longer still!

Ripples were spreading in concentric rings from the pool’s dark centre, tiny mobile wavelets caused by—by what? Some disturbance beneath the surface? The water level was well down now and tendrils of mist drifted from the pool to lie soft, luminous and undulating in the moonlight, curling like the tentacles of some great plastic beast over the dam, across the drive to the foot of the house.

A sort of paralysis settled over me then, a dreadful lassitude, a mental and physical malaise brought on by excessive morbid study, culminating in this latest phenomenon of the old house and the aura of evil which now seemed to saturate its very stones. I should have done something—something to break the spell, anything rather than sit there and merely wait for what was happening to happen—and yet I was incapable of positive action.

Slowly I returned my eyes to the written page; and there I sat shivering and sweating, my skin crawling as I read on by the light of my desk lamp. But so deep my trancelike state that it was as much as I could do to force my eyes from one word to the next. I had no volition, no will of my own with which to fight that fatalistic spell; and the physical heat of the night was that of a furnace as sweat dripped from my forehead onto the pages of the notebook.

“…I have checked my findings and can’t believe my previous blindness! It should have been obvious. It happens when the water level falls below a certain point. It

has

happened every time there has been extremely hot weather—when the pool has started to

dry up

! The Thing needn’t be called out at all! As to why it returns to the pool after taking a victim: it must return before daylight. It is a fly-the-light. A haunter of the dark. A wampyre!…but not blood..Nowhere can I find mention of blood sacrifices. And no punctures or mutilations. What, then are Its “needs?” Did Dee know? Kelly knew, I’m sure, but his writings are lost…

“Eager now to try the invocation, but I wish that first I might know the true nature of the Thing. It takes the life of Its victim—but what else?”

“I have it!—God, I know—and I wish I did not know! But that

look

on my poor brother’s face…Andrew, Andrew…I know now why you looked that way. But if I can free you, you shall be freed. If I wondered at the nature of the Thing, then I wonder no longer. The answers are all there, in the

Cthäat A

. and

Hydrophinnae

, if only I had known exactly where to look. Yibb-Tstll is one such; Bugg-Shash, too. Yes, and the pool-thing is another…

“There have been a number down the centuries—the horror that dwelled in the mirror of Nitocris; the sucking, hunting thing that Count Magnus kept; the red, hairy slime used by Julian Scortz—familiars of the Great Old Ones, parasites that lived on

Them

as lice live on men. Or rather, on their life-force! This one has survived the ages, at least until now. It does not take the blood but the very essence of Its victim.

It is a soul-eater

!

“I can wait no longer. Tonight, when the sun goes down and the hills are in darkness…But if I succeed, and if the Thing comes for me…We’ll see how It faces up to my shotgun!”

My eyes were half-closed by the time I had finally scanned all that was written, of which the above is only a small part; and even having read it I had not fully taken it in. Rather, I had absorbed it automatically, without reading any immediate meaning into it. But as I re-read those last few lines, so I heard something which roused me up from my lassitude and snapped me alertly awake in an instant.

It was music: the faint but unmistakable strains of a whirling pagan tune that seemed to reach out to me from a time beyond time, from a hell beyond all known hells…

9. The Horror

Shocked back to mental alertness, still my limbs were stiff as a result of several hours crouched over the desk. Thus, as I sprang or attempted to spring to my feet, a cramp attacked both of my calves and threw me down by the window. I grabbed at the sill…and whatever I had been about to do was at once forgotten.

I gazed out the open window on a scene straight out of madness or nightmare. The broken columns where they now stood up from bases draped with weed seemed to glow with an inner light; and to my straining eyes it appeared that this haze of light extended uniformly upwards, so that I saw a revenant of the temple as it had once been. Through the light-haze I could also see the centre of the pool, from which the ripples spread outward with a rapidly increasing agitation.

There was a shape there now, a dark oblong illuminated both by the clean moonlight and by that supernatural glow; and even as I gazed, so the water slopping above the oblong seemed pushed aside and the slab showed its stained marble surface to the air. The music grew louder then, soaring wildly, and it seemed to me in my shocked and frightened condition that dim figures reeled and writhed around the perimeter of the pool.

Then—horror of horrors!—in one mad moment the slab tilted to reveal a black hole going down under the pool, like the entrance to some sunken tomb. There came an outpouring of miasmal gasps, visible in the eerie glow, and then—

Even before the thing emerged I knew what it would be; how it would look. It was that horror on Carl’s canvas, the soft-tentacled, mushroom-domed terror he had painted under the ancient, evil influence of this damned, doomed place. It was the dweller, the familiar, the tick-thing, the star-born wampyre…it was the curse of the McGilchrists. Except I understood now that this was not merely a curse on the McGilchrists but on the entire world. Of course it had seemed to plague the McGilchrists as a personal curse—but only because they had chosen to build Temple House here on the edge of its pool. They had been victims by virtue of their availability, for I was sure that the pool-thing was not naturally discriminative.

Then, with an additional thrill of horror, I saw that the thing was on the move, drifting across the surface of the pool, its flaccid tentacles reaching avidly in the direction of the house. The lights downstairs were out, which meant that Carl must be asleep…

Carl!

The thing was across the drive now, entering the porch, the house itself. I forced cramped limbs to agonized activity, lurched across the room, out onto the dark landing and stumbled blindly down the stairs. I slipped, fell, found my feet again—and my voice, too.

“Carl!” I cried, arriving at the door of his studio. “Carl, for God’s sake!”

The thing straddled him where he lay upon his bed. It glowed with an unearthly, a rotten luminescence which outlined his pale body in a sort of foxfire. Its tentacles writhed over his naked form and his limbs were filled with fitful motion. Then the dweller’s mushroom head settled over his face, which disappeared in folds of the thing’s gilled mantle.

“Carl!” I screamed yet again, and as I lurched forward in numb horror so my hand found the light switch on the wall. In another moment the room was bathed in sane and wholesome electric light. The thing bulged upward from Carl—rising like some monstrous amoeba, some sentient, poisonous jellyfish from an alien ocean—and turned toward me.

I saw a face, a face I knew across twenty years of time fled, my uncle’s face! Carved in horror, those well remembered features besought, pleaded with me, that an end be put to this horror and peace restored to this lonely valley; that the souls of countless victims be freed to pass on from this world to their rightful destinations.

The thing left Carl’s suddenly still form and moved forward, flowed toward me; and as it came so the face it wore melted and changed. Other faces were there, hidden in the thing, many with McGilchrist features and many without, dozens of them that came and went ceaselessly. There were children there, too, mere babies; but the last face of all, the one I shall remember above all others—that was the face of Carl Earlman himself! And it, too, wore that pleading, that imploring look—the look of a soul in hell, which prays only for its release.

Then the light won its unseen, unsung battle. Almost upon me, suddenly the dweller seemed to wilt. It shrank from the light, turned and flowed out of the room, through the porch, back toward the pool. Weak with reaction I watched it go, saw it move out across the now still water, saw the slab tilt down upon its descending shape and heard the music fade into silence. Then I turned to Carl…

• • •

I do not think I need mention the look on Carl’s lifeless face, or indeed say anything more about him. Except perhaps that it is my fervent prayer that he now rests in peace with the rest of the dweller’s many victims, taken down the centuries. That is my prayer, but…

As for the rest of it:

I dragged Carl from the house to the Range Rover, drove him to the crest of the rise, left him there and returned to the house. I took my uncle’s prepared charges from his study and set them in the base of the shale cliff where the house backed onto it. Then I lit the fuses, scrambled back into the Range Rover and drove to where Carl’s body lay in the cool of night. I tried not to look at his face.

In a little while the fuses were detonated, going off almost simultaneously, and the night was shot with fire and smoke and a rising cloud of dust. When the air cleared the whole scene was changed forever. The cliff had come down on the house, sending it crashing into the pool. The pool itself had disappeared, swallowed up in shale and debris; and it was as if the House of the Temple, the temple itself and the demon-cursed pool had never existed.

All was silence and desolation, where only the moonlight played on jagged stumps of centuried columns, projecting still from the scree- and rubble-filled depression which had been the pool. And now the moon silvered the bed of the old stream, running with water from the ruined pool—

And at last I was able to drive on.

10. The Unending Nightmare

That should have been the end of it, but such has not been the case. Perhaps I alone am to blame. The police in Penicuik listened to my story, locked me in a cell overnight and finally conveyed me to this place, where I have been now for more than a week. In a way I supposed that the actions of the police were understandable; for my wild appearance that night—not to mention the ghastly, naked corpse in the Range Rover and the incredible story I incoherently told—could hardly be expected to solicit their faith or understanding. But I do not understand the position of the alienists here at Oakdeene.

Surely they, too, can hear the damnable music?—that music which grows louder hour by hour, more definite and decisive every night—the music which in olden days summoned the pool-thing to its ritual sacrifice. Or is it simply that they disagree with my theory? I have mentioned it to them time and time again and repeat it now: that there are other pools in the Pentlands, watery havens to which the thing might have fled from the destruction of its weedy retreat beside the now fallen seat of the McGilchrists. Oh, yes, and I firmly believe that it did so flee. And the days are long and hot and a great drought is on the land…

And perhaps, too, over the years, a very real curse has loomed up large and monstrous over the McGilchrists. Do souls have a flavour, I wonder, a distinctive texture of their own? Is it possible that the pool-thing has developed an appetite, a taste for the souls of McGilchrists? If so, then it will surely seek me out; and yet here I am detained in this institute for the insane.

Or could it be that I am now in all truth mad? Perhaps the things I have experienced and know to be true have driven me mad, and the music I hear exists only in my mind. That is what the nurses tell me and dear God, I pray that it is so! But if not—if not…

For there is that other thing, which I have not mentioned until now. When I carried Carl from his studio after the pool-thing left him, I saw his finished painting. Not the whole painting but merely a part of it, for when it met my eyes they saw only one thing: the finished face which Carl had painted on the dweller.

This is the nightmare which haunts me worse than any other, the question I ask myself over and over in the dead of night, when the moonlight falls upon my high, barred window and the music floods into my padded cell:

If they should bring me my breakfast one morning and find me dead—will my face really look like that?