The Taint and Other Novellas

The Horror at Oakdeene

My first stories were published by August Derleth in 1968, so I was still a relative beginner in the first half of 1970 when I sent him this novella. I was also still in the British Army: a recruiting sergeant, of all things, in the city of Leicester. The story was published (eventually) by Derleth’s Arkham House, but I had to wait all of seven years to see it in print in the hardcover collection of the same name, a book which is now long out of print. The Horror at Oakdeene—quite obviously the work of a beginner and very heavily influenced by Lovecraft—is one of a quite small handful of stories that has not been reprinted until now…

In the summer of 1935 Martin Spellman went to work as a trainee mental nurse at Oakdeene Sanatorium. He was twenty-four years old and already dedicated—but not to nursing. Spellman’s one ambition since his early teens had been to be an author; and since a rather odd and macabre turn of mind had dictated for his first projected work a compilation of rare or outstanding mental cases, he had decided that the best way to gain a first-hand insight on his subject—the feel, as it were, of asylums—would be to work in such an institute.

Of course, Spellman’s real intention in applying for training was kept well hidden, but that did not mean that he was not going to try his best in the job to which he was committing himself. The minimum contract period was one year, with a further year of full-time nursing, and Martin cheerfully agreed to these terms in the furtherance of his project.

His colleagues and superior officers alike were quite astonished at the unaccustomed zeal with which young Spellman threw himself into his work, and every night that he was not on duty saw the light in his room burning well into the early hours. Martin had allotted his time off-duty in the following manner: for three hours he would study the theory of mental nursing, for five hours he would work on his book. This would leave him at least six hours for sleeping in any given twenty-four hour period. At those times when night-duty came around—once or twice each week—he would alter his schedule so as to spend the same amount of time in these aforementioned tasks.

Often Martin’s immediate superior and tutor, Dr. Welford, caught him in the late summer and early autumn of the year working on his manuscripts; but who could complain about a student mental nurse writing a series of “theses” or correlations on the stranger, more complex cases of his calling? If anything Martin was to be congratulated on his studious attention to all details of his sanatorium routine.

In fact Spellman soon discovered that he did not like his work at the institute; his night-duties were an especial abomination, when on occasion he had of necessity to wander those lower corridors of Oakdeene wherein the worst patients were held resident. His harder, more stoic colleagues called the basement ward “Hell,” and Martin Spellman would not have contested this seemingly harsh appellation. It was hell down there, with the corridor lights starkly illuminating the heavy doors with their little barred spy-holes and their labels bearing brief, typed case histories of the occupants of the cells. Behind those doors, separated from Martin by only the thickness of the oak panels and battens and the rubbery warm panels within, many of Britain’s most terrible lunatics dwelt in the perpetual horror of their own madness, and Martin Spellman made sure when on night-duty that his hourly tours of Hell were undertaken with a thoroughly efficient but speedy dispatch.

One of Spellman’s so-called “colleagues” at the sanatorium, Alan Barstowe (an ugly, squat-bodied, fully-trained nurse of some thirty-five years), was able on occasion to help the trainee out with his dread of the ward known as Hell. Barstowe, it seemed, had no fear of that part of night-duty whatever; indeed, in the eerie atmosphere of the nighted asylum, he appeared to welcome the hourly visits to the lower ward. He would often exchange duties with Spellman, saying that he did not mind working nights—that in fact he preferred such duties to those of the daylight hours. Every man to his own tastes!

Spellman’s room at the institute was on the ground floor—one of four bed-living-room combinations—separated from the two mental wards on the same floor by reinforced, soundproofed walls. With the recruiting of nurses at Oakdeene going badly, two of the four “living-in” rooms were empty. The other occupied room belonged to one Harold Moody, a fully-trained, middle-aged mental nurse whose partial deafness was certainly no handicap in living directly above Hell; the flooring of the ground-floor quarters was definitely not soundproof! Not that the sounds from below bothered Spellman often, but he did notice that Hell’s inmates were always exceptionally vociferous whenever Alan Barstowe was on night-duty; and at those times the screams, moans, and gibberings from the basement ward seemed to penetrate the stone floor beneath his bed with an insistence that bothered him inwardly as well as keeping him physically awake often until four and five in the morning.

Eventually there came a time when the student and Barstowe were detailed for night-duty together, and frankly the younger man was not at all happy with the arrangement. For all Barstowe’s apparent amicability, and quite apart from the contours of his face and body, there was something ugly about the man. And yet the evening shift started quite normally at 9:00 P.M., with nothing in Barstowe’s manner to substantiate Spellman’s feelings or cause him any untoward concern.

The orders for night-duty included the stipulation that each ward would be visited—each cell, room, and occupant checked and, as far as possible, inspected once every hour. Martin Spellman had been detailed for duty in the lower wards and Hell, while Barstowe had the upper wards and the rooms of the quieter, less permanent inmates. At 11:00 P.M., when the student nurse was about to descend for the second time to the dreaded basement ward with its padding-muted gibberings, curses and moans, he was hailed from above as he stood at the top of the stone steps.

“Young Spellman! Hold on a minute,” the guttural voice of the froggish Barstowe came down to him. Looking up towards the first-floor landing, the trainee saw the squat man making his way quickly down the stairs. In his hand Barstowe carried what looked like a black stick, about eighteen inches long and with a silver tip.

As he descended, the nurse saw Spellman staring at his weapon and held it closer to his body, concealing it as best he could. “Come prepared, I always say,” he muttered with a strained grin as he came to a halt beside the trainee. “Look, Martin,” he quickly changed the subject, “I know you don’t care much for the lower wards and Hell—so if you fancy I’ll stay down here and you can carry on upstairs. I was just about to do Ward Four—so if you’d care to—”

“Ward Four? I wouldn’t mind—but what’s that for, Barstowe?” Spellman pointedly indicated the stick which the older man had almost managed to hide in the clinical white folds of his smock. “I mean, it’s not as though they were about to break out!”

“No,” Barstowe answered, turning his eyes down and away, “it’s just that I feel more…more comfortable down there with a stick. You never know, do you?”

As Spellman climbed the stairs he retained in his mind’s eye a mental picture of that stick of Barstowe’s. If one of the officers got to know of the weapon, Barstowe would be in serious trouble. Not that the squat nurse could do the inmates any harm with the thing—if threatened through the bars of a spy-hole, an occupant would. only have to move to the back of his cell to be out of harms’s way—no, obviously it was as Barstowe had explained; his stick was simply a comforter.

Nonetheless, Spellman could not help but remember those screams he listened to deep into the night whenever Barstowe was on duty in the basement ward. The funny thing was that later that night—even on the second floor, in the open rooms of the more trusted patients and in the corridors between those comparatively homely billets—the trainee nurse could still hear those muted, tortured echoes from Hell….

• • •

Towards the end of October Martin Spellman’s reading and studying for his book had taken a turn toward rather more specialized cases: in particular aberrations apparently influenced by imaginary or hallucinatory “outside” forces. He had seen definite connections in a fair number of reasonably well authenticated cases—connections which were especially interesting inso far as they depicted almost carbon-copy fancies, dreams, and delusions in the afflicted parties.

There was for instance the very well documented case of Joe Slater, the Catskill Mountains trapper, whose lunatic actions in 1900-01 had seemed governed not by the moon but rather by the influence of a point or object in the heavens much farther out than the orbit of Earth’s satellite. The authenticity of this case, however, seemed to Spellman spoiled by its chronicler’s insistence that Slater was in fact inhabited by the mind of an alien being. Then there was the German Baron, Ernst Kant, who, before his hideous and inexplicable death in a Westphalian Bedlam, had believed his every insane action controlled by a creature he called Yibb-Tstll; described as being “huge and black with writhing breasts and an anus within its forehead, a black-blooded thing whose brains feed upon its own wastes….”

More recently there was Dr. David Stephenson’s recorded observations of one J. M. Freeth, a female zoophagous maniac whose declared intention was to absorb as many lives as she could. This she set about, like Bram Stoker’s Renfield, by feeding flies to spiders, spiders to sparrows, and finally by devouring the sparrows herself! She, too, as with the maniac in Stoker’s story, had been refused a cat once her intentions were quite clear! Her odd fancies had been part and parcel of her belief that she had watching over her a supernatural “God-creature” who would eventually come to release her. Miss Freeth’s obsessions and her “life-devouring” mania were far from unique, and the student collected and recorded a number of similar cases.

Again, this time from the records of a certain Canton madhouse in America, Spellman culled the horrible story of an innate who had been, before his escape and subsequent disappearance some seven years previously in 1928, completely sure of his immortality and of the fact that he would “dwell in Y’hanthlei amidst wonder and glory forever….” His destiny (he was righteous in his self-assurance) was governed by “the Deep Ones, Dagon, and Lord Cthulhu”—with the former of which he would serve in the worship and glorification of the latter—whoever or whatever these names were supposed. to signify! There was, though, a clue to this last poor unfortunate’s aberrations. He was pronouncedly ichthyic in appearance, with protuberant eyes and scaly skin, and it was believed that these physical abnormalities had led him to dwell too often and too long over certain obscure myths and legends involving oceanic deities. In this connection it seemed likely that his “Dagon” was that same fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, sometimes known as Oannes.

So Spellman’s studies grew more specific as the weeks passed, but he little dreamed that in a certain cell in Hell there resided a man whose case was as odd as any he had so far collected for his book….

• • •

In mid-November, knowing something of the new direction his pupil’s studies were taking, Dr. Welford invited Spellman to read the case-file of Wilfred Larner, usually one of the quieter residents of Hell but a man who could swiftly turn from a reasonably controlled individual to a raging, savage animal. Larner’s case, too, seemed to have had its genesis in those “outside” regions which so fascinated the student nurse.

Thus it happened that in his room above the basement ward Martin Spellman first came into close contact with Larner’s file, and from the first he became absorbed with the thing; particularly with those mentions of a certain “Black Book”—a thing called the Cthaat Aquadingen—purported to relate to the raising of water- and ocean-elementals and other “demons” of more obscure origins. Apparently this book was one of the main causes of Larner’s rapid mental decline some ten years previously; and, according to the file, its hints, suggestions, and the occasional blatantly blasphemous “revelation” could scarcely be considered safe reading for any man with a delicately balanced mind.

Spellman could hardly be blamed for not recognizing the title: Cthaat Aquadingen, for the book was known only to a scattered handful of men, most of them erudite antiquarians or students of rare and ancient works, some of them students of darker things: the occult sciences! Indeed, only five copies of the work in various forms existed in the whole world at that time; one in the private library of a London collector; one under lack and key—along with the Necronomicon, the G’harne Fragments, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Liber Ivonis, the dread Cultes des Goules, and the Revelations of Glaaki—in the British Museum, and two of the others in even more obscure and inaccessible places. The fifth copy: that one was soon to fall into Spellman’s unwitting hands.

But this book aside, during his decline and before his sister committed him to the institute’s care, Larner had also assembled something of a Fortean collection of cuttings from newspapers all over the world; cuttings which, especially if considered as from the often narrow viewpoint of a disordered psyche, might take on all sorts of disturbing aspects.

Spellman wondered just where the institute had gained its often detailed information regarding the events leading to Larner’s confinement; and in this he was lucky, for enquiries with Dr. Welford the next morning led him to discover that Larner’s sister had placed all documents relevant to her brother’s derangement in the hands of the institute’s alienists. Both Larner’s cuttings-file and his “Cthaat Aguadingen” (a great sheaf of stapled foolscap pages in Larner’s own handwriting; presumably copied from some other work) were still safely stored in a cupboard in Oakdeene’s spacious administrative offices—and Dr. Welford was not adverse to the idea of placing them, for a few days at least, at Spellman’s disposal.

Of the great manuscript in Larner’s hand the student could make very little; there were too many inconsistencies in its strange contents—odd juxtapositions in sentence-structure and so on—that seemed to point to its being a translation from some other language, possibly German, and done by a man none too well versed in the tongue, perhaps Larner himself. On the other hand, Larner could have copied his work from some other translated version; and then again, it was just possible that the entire work was his own, but that seemed hardly likely. There were lurid descriptions of rites—hideous magical ceremonies involving human and animal sacrifices—which, even suffering as they did through poor translation, were more than sufficient to convince the student nurse that the study of this work had indeed gone far to helping Larner on his way to the institute’s basement ward. Having a very well balanced mind himself, and therefore seeing no point in wading through three or four hundred pages of such material, Spellman passed quickly on to the cuttings-file.

Now this was something one could get one’s teeth into and what a bonus for Spellman’s book! Why, the cuttings-file was crammed full of stuff he was sure he could use. There were cuttings from sources scattered throughout the globe, from London, Edinburgh, and Dublin; from the Americas, Haiti, and Africa; from France, India, and Malta; from the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, the Australian Outback, and the Teutoburger Wald in West Germany; and the great majority of them involved the actions of persons—both singularly and in groups or “cults”—allegedly influenced by alien or “outside” forces!

They covered a period from early February 1925 to mid-1926—detailing cases of panic, mania, and weird eccentricity—and as Spellman read he quickly spotted connecting links in what at first had seemed dissociated stories. Two columns of the News of the World had been given over to coverage of the case of the man who uttered a hideous cry before leaping from a fourth-storey window to his death. His room showed proof on investigation that the suicide had been involved with some sort of magical rite; a pentacle had been chalked on the floor and the walls were painted with a crude representation of the blasphemous Nyhargo Code. In Africa missionary outposts had reported ominous mutterings from little-known desert and jungle tribes, and it was shown in one cutting how human sacrifices had been made to an earth-elemental called Shudmell. Spellman was quick to tie this report in with the fantastic and still unexplained disappearance of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and his nephew in Yorkshire in 1933; they, too, had seemed obsessed by the conviction that they were doomed to death at the devices of a similar “deity,” one Shudde-M’ell, “of gigantic, rubbery, snakelike, and tentacled appearance.” In California an entire theosophist colony donned white robes for a “glorious fulfillment” that never arrived, and in Northern Ireland white-robed youths sacked and burned three churches in outlying districts to make way for “the Temples of a greater Lord.” In the Philippines American officers had found certain tribes extremely bothersome throughout the entire period, and in Australia sixty percent of Aboriginal settlements had shut themselves off completely from contact with whites. Secret cults and societies all over the world had brought themselves into the open for the first time, admitting allegiance to various gods and forces and declaring that the vision of their faiths, an “ultimate resurrection,” was about to take place. Troubles in insane asylums were legion, and Spellman wondered at the stoicism of medical fraternities that they had not noted the parallelisms or drawn anything other than the most mundane conclusions.

On the first night of his serious study of the file, Spellman did not get to his bed until very late, leaving it at a correspondingly late hour in the morning. This was a rare indulgence for him; indeed, feeling somehow lethargic the whole day, he did not bother to study or even to work on his book. That evening, when the time came around for his late shift, he still felt sleepy and dull, and it was only then that he discovered he had been detailed once more for the abhorrent lower wards and Hell. Again Barstowe shared the night shift with the student nurse, and Spellman guessed that before midnight the froggish man would come down to make his usual offer.

At eleven he was in the basement ward, beginning his first hurried tour of the morbid place, when he was startled to hear his name called from the small barred spy-hole in the door of the second cell on the left. This was Larner’s cell, and apparently the man was in one of his more lucid states. This suited the student very well, for he had intended to talk to Larner at the first opportunity. Now he saw he had his chance.

“How are you, Larner?” he carefully enquired, moving over to peer at the white face framed in the tiny square spy-hole. “You certainly seem in good spirits.”

“I am, I am—and I trust you’ll help me stay that way….”

“Oh? And how might I be of service?”

“Tell me,” Larner secretively asked, “who is on duty with you tonight?”

“Nurse Barstowe,” Spellman answered. “Why do you ask?”

But Larner had scurried back away from the door on hearing Barstowe’s name spoken, so that Spellman had to peer in through the spy-hole to see him.

“What’s wrong, Larner? Don’t you get on with Barstowe, then?”

“Larner is a trouble-maker, Spellman—didn’t you know?” Barstowe’s guttural, strangely menacing voice came suddenly from close behind. Spellman jumped, startled by the unexpected sound, turning to face the squat nurse who must have crept up on him quiet as a mouse. “And anyway—” the ugly man continued, “since when is it your practice to discuss senior personnel with the inmates? Very odd behavior, that, Spellman.”

But the student was not a man to be easily intimidated, and the instinctive fear Barstowe’s appearance had aroused in him quickly turned to anger when he heard the veiled threat in the older man’s question. “You’re out of bounds, Barstowe—” he harshly answered, “—and what do you mean by sneaking about down here? If you’re thinking of changing duties with me you can forget it—I don’t like the way these people behave when you’re on duty!” Spellman made his oblique accusation and watched Barstowe’s reaction.

The fully-trained nurse had gone gray on hearing Spellman “tick him off,” and he was plainly at a loss as to how to answer. When he did speak he had dropped his “Spellman” attitude: “I—I—what are you getting at, Martin? Why! I only came down here to do you a service. I’m not blind, you know. It’s plain you don’t like it down here. But you’ve done yourself now, Martin. I won’t be offering to help you out again—you can bet your life on that.”

“That suits me fine, Barstowe—but hadn’t you better be getting back upstairs? By now half the inmates could be out running about the grounds—or are they too afraid of that stick of yours to try it?” Barstowe’s gray color took on an even lighter shade, and beneath the folds of his smock his right hand jerked involuntarily at mention of his stick. “Got it with you, have you?” Spellman pointedly stared at the tell-tale bulge in the froggish man’s clinical attire. “I shouldn’t have bothered if I were you. You won’t be needing it tonight—not down here at any rate.”

At that Barstowe seemed to shrink into himself, the color leaving his face completely, and he turned without another word and almost ran along the corridor and up the stone steps. For the first time, as the squat nurse hurriedly climbed those steps, Spellman noticed that all the spy-holes in the doors lining the corridor were occupied. Faces—in various stages of agitation or animation—with eyes all fixed on the retreating figure of the ugly man, were framed in those tiny barred openings. And Spellman shuddered at the positive hatred those mad faces and eyes reflected.

On his next visit to Hell one hour later, Martin Spellman tried to talk to the basement ward’s three or four occasionally articulate inmates; to no avail. Even Larner would have nothing to do with him. And yet the student nurse seemed somehow to detect an air of satisfaction; a peculiar feeling of security flowed out quite tangibly from behind those locked doors and padded walls….

• • •

For at least a week after the incident with Barstowe, Spellman felt tempted to mention the man’s odd ways to Dr. Welford; and yet he did not wish to cause Barstowe any real harm. After all, he had no genuine proof that the man was not carrying out his duties in anything other than a proper manner, and the fact that he carried a stick with him whenever he visited the basement ward could hardly be called conclusive evidence of any unprofessional intent; there was no way at all in which Barstowe could put his weapon to any use. It seemed purely and simply that the man was a rather nasty coward and nothing more—someone to be avoided and ignored, certainly, but not really worth bothering oneself about.

Beside, things were bad at that time; Spellman did not want a jobless Barstowe on his conscience. He did ask one or two discreet questions of the other nurses, however, and while it appeared that none of them particularly cared much for Barstowe, it was likewise evident that no one considered him especially evil or even a bad nurse. And so Spellman dismissed the matter….

• • •

Towards the end of November Spellman first heard the news of Barstowe’s projected move into “living-in” quarters; apparently the landlady with whom the squat man lodged was expecting her son home from abroad and needed Barstowe’s room. Only a few days later the unpleasant possibility became reality when the oddly offensive nurse did indeed move into one of the four ground-floor flatlets; and he had hardly settled in when, at the very end of a month, the first hint of the horror came to Oakdeene.

It happened in the small hours of the morning following one of those rare evenings when, unable to endure his surroundings for another night without a break of some sort, Martin Spellman had allowed himself to be persuaded by Harold Moody to go down into Oakdeene village for a drink. Martin was not a drinking man and his limit was usually only three or four beers, but that night he felt “in the mood,” and the result was that when he and Moody got back to the sanatorium just before midnight he was more than amply prepared for his bed.

It was, too, the beer that saved Martin Spellman from possible involvement when the horror came, for at any other time the hideous screams and demented shrieks from the basement ward would most certainly have shocked him from sleep. As it was, he missed all the “excitement,” as Harold Moody had it the next morning when he went into the student’s room to shake him awake.

The “excitement” was that four hours earlier, at about three in the morning, one of Hell’s worst inhabitants had died after throwing a particularly horrible fit. During his attack the man, one Gordon Merritt, a hopeless lunatic for twenty years, had somehow contrived to gouge out one of his own eyes!

It was only later that Spellman thought to enquire which of the nurses had been unfortunate enough to be on duty when Merritt took his last, fatal fit; and an almost subconscious tremor of strange apprehension went through him when he was told that it had been Barstowe!

• • •

For the two weeks following Merritt’s death Barstowe kept very much to himself; much more than ever before, and he had never been much of a mixer. In fact, had he not known better, Spellman might never have suspected that Barstowe was “living-in” at all. The truth was that the directors of Oakdeene had been far from happy at the enquiry, and it was thought that the squat nurse had been given a sound dressing down—something about his responses to the situation on the night of the incident being inefficient and altogether too slow. The general belief seemed to be that Merritt’s seizure might well have been avoided if Barstowe had been a bit “quicker off the mark”….

On the 13th December Spellman again found himself on nightduty, and once more it was his hourly lot to have to patrol the ward called Hell. Until that time he had never realized that there existed in his subconscious the slightest intention of trying to discover more details of the facts surrounding Merritt’s death—he only knew that something had been bothering him for far too long and that there were certain things he would like to know—and yet, on his first visit to the basement ward, he went straight to Larner’s cell and called the man to the spy-hole.

The cells were constructed in such a way as to make every interior corner visible from those small, barred windows; that is to say that each cell was wedge-shaped, with the “sharp” end of the wedge formed by the door itself. Larner had been lying on his bed at the far end of the cell staring silently at the ceiling when Spellman called out to him, but he quickly got up and went to the door on identifying his caller.

“Larner,” Spellman quietly questioned as soon as the other had greeted him, “—what happened to Merritt? Was it—was it the way they say, or—? Tell me what happened, will you?”

“Nurse Spellman, would you do me a great favor?” Larner apparently had not heard the student’s question—or perhaps, Spellman thought, he had simply chosen to ignore it!

“A favor? If I can, Larner—what is it you want me to do?”

“There is a matter of justice to be attended to!” the lunatic suddenly blurted out, so suddenly, with such urgency—with something so very akin to fervor in his voice—that the young nurse took a quick step back from the cell door.

“Justice, Larner ? Whatever do you mean?”

“Justice, yes!” The man peered out at Spellman through the bars, blinking rapidly, nervously as he spoke. And then, in the manner of certain lunatics, he abruptly changed the subject. “Dr. Welford has mentioned how you find the Cthaat Aquadingen of interest. I, too, once found it a very interesting work—but for a long time now the book has not been available to me. I suppose they believe its contents to be…well, ‘not in my best interests.’ Perhaps they’re right, I’m not sure. It’s true that the Cthaat Aquadingen put me in here. Oh, that’s true—quite definitely—yes, that’s why I’m here. I read the Sixth Sathlatta far too often, you see? I almost broke down the barrier completely. I mean, it’s all very well to see Yibb-Tstll in dreams—you can stand that much at least—but to have him breaking through the barrier!…Ah! There’s a monstrous thought. To have him breaking through—uncontrolled!”

As Larner spoke, something he said rang a bell in the student’s mind. Spellman had glimpsed in his brief scanning of the contents of the madman’s book a passage or two containing certain chants or invocations, the Sathlattae, and he made a mental note that later he must go back to that strange volume and discover whatever he could of them…and also of this— creature?—Yibb-Tstll.

But then, speaking again, Larner broke into his thoughts; and again the lunatic’s expression had changed, his eyes being wide and steady now in his white face. “Well, nurse Spellman, would it be possible for you to—to do me a little harmless service?”

“You’ll have to say what it is first.”

“Quite simply—I’d like you to make me a copy of the Sixth Sathlatta from the Cthaat Aquadingen, and bring it to me. No harm in that, is there?”

Spellman frowned: “But haven’t you just this moment blamed your being here on that very book?”

“Ah!” Larner made to explain. “But then I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s different now—except I can’t remember how the thing goes: the Sixth Sathlatta, I mean. It’s been almost ten years….”

“Well, I really don’t know,” Spellman carefully considered. “But see here, Larner, favors work two ways, you know? You still haven’t answered my question. I might be able to do as you ask, but are you willing to tell me what happened the night Merritt died?”

Larner’s eyes, however, had gone furtive, nervous again. He turned his face away. “We’ll handle it ourselves, Spellman, no matter the price,” he muttered. Then he glanced sharply back at the face of the student framed in the barred window, and again Spellman was amazed at the mercurial property of the man’s character. Now his eyes were penetrating, almost sane. “Nothing happened. Merritt took a fit, that’s all. He was a madman—you know?” Again Larner turned away, this time to walk over to his bed and lie down in his former position.

Spellman, knowing that their “chat” was over, continued slowly down the stark corridor, peering in at the barred spy-holes as he went.

The remainder of that night, despite the fact that he knew all was in order, Martin Spellman could not rid his subconscious of distant alarm bells, and as he walked the nighted halls he found himself occasionally glancing nervously over his shoulder.

• • •

Spellman had the next weekend free of duty, and he used his Saturday to track down Larner’s strange references in the Cthaat Aquadingen. He eventually found a decidedly alien-looking—chant?—hidden away in one of the manuscript’s four coded sections under the legible heading “Sixth Sathlatta.” Almost without knowing, he copied the weirdly jumbled letters down onto a sheet of paper, attempting a tongue-twisting pronounciation as he did so:

“Ghe ‘phnglui, mglw’ngh ghee’yh, Yibb-Tstll,

Fhtagn mglw y’tlette ngh’wgah, Yibb-Tstll,

Ghe’phnglui mglw-ngh ahkobhg’shg, Yibb-Tstll,

THABAITE!—YIBB-TSTLL, YIBB-TSTLL, YIBB-TSTLL!”

Then, before searching for further references to Yibb-Tstll, the young nurse spent a few more minutes vainly trying to make something of what he had written down. Finally he gave up the hopeless task, moving on eventually to find the notes he sought—crowded marginalia apparently deciphered from the coded pages, so-called methods of evocation—in another of the book’s sections. To clarify the “message” of these notes, and to make of them something of a readable passage, again, as with the Sixth Sathlatta, he neatly copied the words down onto paper:

(1) TO CALL THE BLACK:

This method involves a wafer, of (flour?) and water composition—printed with the Sixth Sathlatta in the

original

symbols—handed to the victim with the summoning chant (Necronomicon, p. 224, under heading

Hoy-Dhin)

called out aloud within the said victim’s hearing. This will not produce Yibb-Tstll but his Black Blood, which has the property of being able to live apart from Him; called from a universe so alien that it is known only to Yibb-Tstll and Yog-Sothoth, conterminous with all spaces and times. The victim is taken when the Black Blood settles like a mantle about him and smothers him. Then the juice of Yibb-Tstll returns with the soul of the victim to the body of The Drowner in His own continuum….

(2) TO SEE YIBB-TSTLL IN DREAMS:

…& the Sixth Sathlatta may be used…that one might scry in Dreams the Form of The Drowner, Yibb-Tstll, who walks in all Times & Spaces. It must however be observed that the Chant should be used sparingly—

once only—

before each Sleep wherein the Scrying is to be done, lest the Seer impart into That on which he gazes a Perception of the Gate of his Mind; & that, in using this Gate to enter from Outside, & in returning thither through this same Gate, Yibb-Tstll may

burn out

the Mind & Gate & all in His coming & going…for the Agony is great & Death certain. Nor, in such a visitation, would His Actions in this Sphere be controlled; The Drowner’s Appetite was well known to the Adepts of old….

(3) TO CALL YIBB-TSTLL:

This method again involves the use of the Sixth Sathlatta: called out three times by thirteen adepts in unison at midnight of any First Day. Note:

any

thirteen callers will find the ritual as described answered, provided at least one amongst them is an adept; but unless at least

seven

of the callers are adepts—and unless, on the night before the midnight of a calling, they first seal their souls with the Naach-Tith Barrier—they may well suffer hideous reversals and penalties!

• • •

There was a note here in red ink, added by Larner to the foregoing marginalia: “Must try to find the remainder of the words to raise the barrier of Naach-Tith….” Obviously, Spellman thought, at the time the man in the ward called Hell had written that last cryptic note, he had already been well along the strange paths of insanity.

For the rest of the afternoon Spellman left the pages of his rapidly shaping manuscript alone and turned to his studies, only making a break for a meal at about six and returning to his textbooks immediately after. At eight he brewed a pot of coffee, which, rather than giving him a lift, seemed to make him somewhat weary so that he lay down on his bed for a few minutes. He had been more tired than he thought, however, waking up cramped and chilly some three hours later when a nightmare—the nature of which he could not remember—shocked him from his sleep.

He turned on his gas fire then, brewing another cup of coffee before taking out his manuscript to make a few small alterations and further notes. He worked solidly until two in the morning, only undressing and climbing into bed when he was satisfied that the current chapter of his book was going well. But before sleeping he took up the loose sheets of paper bearing those notes copied earlier from the Cthaat Aquadingen.

Again, out loud, he commenced to attempt a pronounciation of that weird jumble of letters entitled the Sixth Sathlatta, fancying that his low utterances this time sounded more nearly like they should. But before reaching the end of the second line, when he felt a strange dread welling up inside him, he paused. An involuntary shudder ran the length of his spine.

What was it he had read of this so-called “invocation”? Yes, there it was, just as he had copied it down: “…& the Sixth Sathlatta may be used…that one night scry in Dreams the Form of The Drowner, Yibb-Tstll, who walks in all Times & Spaces.”

An odd dizziness seemed to come over him and he shook his head to clear it; but though this steadied him somewhat, nonetheless he put away his papers and settled himself down in bed. Something was wrong with his nerves, that was plain. It must be this place and its inmates. He would have to get himself down into Oakdeene village more often with Harold Moody.

Again Spellman dropped quickly off to sleep, and once more his dreams were of a nightmarish nature….

There were weird scenes of alien herbage and evil-looking monochrome flowers. Jungles of darkly exotic ferns stretched writhing fronds toward starless, dark green skies through which fantastic birds slid on veined and pulsating wings. There was a clearing close by in the hellish tangle of unknown growths, towards which Spellman’s subconscious spirit seemed drawn in some inexplicable fashion. Fungoid shrubs drew back from him as he moved toward the clearing, and huge insects buzzed evilly as they burst from the bells of poisonous-looking blooms at his approach. He realized that he was the alien in this monstrous dimension of dream, and that the reluctance of its denizens was such as his own might be were the roles reversed.

Soon he reached the clearing, a great scabrous area of bleached and sterile earth stretching for at least a mile before the jungle took up again on the other side. In the center of this hideous expanse The Thing stood, and at that distance Spellman judged It to be at least three times as tall as a man. As he drew closer across the crumbling and scabby ground he saw that The Thing was turning, slowly turning about on feet hidden from his view by a great green cloak, a cloak that bulged and jerked and writhed as it fell from just beneath the—head?—to the corroded and powdery surface on which it stood. Drawing still closer, the dream-Spellman felt a scream welling in his throat as the great figure turned towards him and he saw the face clearly for the first time. Had the terrible shape not gone on turning—had those eyes noticed him for a single moment—Martin Spellman knew he must shriek out loud, but no, The Thing in Green continued Its apparently aimless turning, and Its voluminous cloak was alive with uncanny motion….

When Spellman was very close to the giant, no more than a score of paces away, his movement towards It ceased. The Thing had still been turning away from him, but, as he came to a halt, Its motion also faltered.

Then The Thing stopped turning altogether!

For a moment the scene seemed frozen, the only movement being the fantastic billowing of the green cloak, then, slowly but inexorably, the monstrous form began to turn back towards the paralyzed dreamer.

Soon the great figure halted again, facing squarely in Spellman’s direction, and he screamed voicelessly as the blasphemous cloak billowed out more violently than ever, parting to permit the dreamer one mad glimpse beneath its green folds. There, about the pulsating black body of the Ancient One, hugely winged reptilian creatures without faces cluttered and clutched at a multitude of blackly writhing, pendulous breasts!

This much Martin Spellman saw—

—And the next thing he knew was that he was being roughly shaken and slapped awake!

Harold Moody, pleasantly drunk, having just returned on foot from Oakdeene village, had “dropped in” to see if Martin fancied a brew of coffee; he knew that Martin often worked quite late. But he had found his young friend in the throes of nightmare. Never was a man—half inebriated or not and despite the hour—more welcome than Harold Moody; for, even realizing now that he had only been dreaming, Spellman sat and shivered uncontrollably on his bed while has late visitor brewed hot coffee. He could remember his nightmare clearly, and what he remembered was quite the most hellish thing he had ever known.

The monstrous dream-jungle had been bad enough…and the blossom-bloated insects…and the clearing of dead and crumbling earth. Worse still had been the membranous, blind, winged creatures beneath the sickening green cloak of the giant. But worst of all had been the eyes in the head of that slowly turning colossus….

• • •

The next morning, despite an odd listlessness against which he had to fight very hard, Spellman set himself to the long task of searching diligently through the Cthaat Aquadingen. The dream of the previous night had been so real—and yet for his life he could not remember having seen in Larner’s “Black Book” a description of anything remotely like the nightmare vision he had experienced. Even in broad daylight, with a weak December sun shining in through his window facing the exercise yard, Spellman shuddered as he recalled The Thing of his dream. Other than Ernst Kant’s description of “a thing with black breasts and an anus within its forehead”—not from the Cthaat Aquadingen but a comparatively modern work on singular foreign mental cases, similar to the book Spellman was trying to write—there was nothing. From where, then, had his subconscious conjured up the monster of the dream?

Spellman realized that he must after all have a mind far more open to suggestion than he would ever have formerly believed. He had, of course, dreamed of The Thing after reading of the supposed method of “scrying Yibb-Tstll in Dreams.” Ridiculous though it all was, the idea had strongly influenced his subconscious, and the nightmare had been the result….

• • •

For the next ten days and through Christmas, Spellman’s time was taken up in the main with matters far less to his liking than the work he had thus far been doing. In short, while he was free most nights, his day-duties included being instructed in methods of keeping the more dangerous inmates “neat and tidy.” He had to learn how to feed and bathe violent patients, and how to clean out the cells of those disposed to animal-like habits. He was glad when the lessons had passed, when he could settle once more to his old routine.

It was the 27th December before Spellman found himself on night-duty again, and as the fates would have it his name appeared on the roster opposite that especially offensive duty: the lower wards, and particularly the one called Hell.

That night, on his very first visit to Hell, Spellman found Larner waiting for him at the spy-hole of his cell.

“Nurse Spellman—at last, it’s you! Did you…did you…?” Eagerly he peered out through the bars.

“Did I what, Larner?”

“I asked you to copy down the Sixth Sathlatta—from the Cthaat Aquadingen. Did you forget?”

“No, I didn’t forget, Larner,”—though in fact, he had—“but tell me—what do you intend to do with…with the, er, Sixth Sathlatta?”

“Do with it? Why!—it’s—it’s an experiment! Yes, that’s it, an experiment. In fact, Nurse Spellman, you might like to help us out with it?”

“Us, Larner?”

“Me—I meant me—you might like to help me with it!”

“In what way?” Spellman found himself interested, and despite the circumstances he was impressed with the lunatic’s apparent lucidity.

“I’ll let you know later—but you’ll have to let me have the Sixth Sathlatta soon—and a few sheets of paper and a pencil….”

“A pencil, Larner?” Spellman frowned suspiciously. “You know I can’t give you a pencil.”

“A crayon, then,” the man in the cell begged in seeming desperation. “Surely I can’t do any harm with a crayon?”

“No, I don’t suppose so. A crayon would be all right, I should think.”

“Good! Then you will—” The madman let the question hang.

“I can’t promise, Larner—but I’ll think about it.” It would be interesting, though, Spellman told himself, his hideous dream of a fortnight gone dim now in his memory, to see just what Larner would do with the Sixth Sathlatta.

“Well, all right—but think quickly!” the man’s voice cut into his thoughts. “I’ll have to have the things I need well before the end of the month. If I don’t—well, the experiment would be no good—not for another year, at any rate.”

Then Larner’s eyes quickly went wide and vacant, his positive expression altering until his features seemed vague and weak. He turned and walked slowly over to his bed with his hands behind his back.

“I’ll see what I can do for you, Larner,” Spellman spoke to the man’s back. “Probably tonight.” But Larner had apparently lost all interest in their conversation.

It was the same later, when Spellman returned to the basement ward after a quick visit to his room. He spoke to Larner, passing through the bars a crayon, blank paper, and that sheet with the Sixth Sathlatta copied from Larner’s book, but the lunatic sat on his bed and made no attempt to answer. Spellman had to let the articles the man had requested fall to the floor within the cell, and even then Larner showed not the slightest flicker of interest.

Toward morning, however, when the stain of approaching dawn was already making itself known through the snow-laden clouds to the east, the young nurse noticed that Larner was busy writing; working furiously with his crayon and paper, but as before he ignored all of Spellman’s efforts at communication.

• • •

It happened two days later that after his mid-morning break Spellman went down to his room for one of his rare cigarettes before beginning his afternoon duties. As he pulled at the cigarette he peered contemplatively out through the bars of his window (Harold Moody had once jovially explained that the bars were not to keep him in—no one doubted his sanity—but to keep exercising madmen out!) at the dozen inmates of Hell as they walked or shambled up and down the high-walled yard. The worst of them were shackled at the feet, so that their movements were restricted and much slowed down, but at least half of them knew no physical restrictions whatever—except the watchful vigilance of their half-dozen white-clad warders.

The latter seemed especially lethargic that day, or so it appeared to the curious observer, for from his vantage point it was plain to him that Larner was up to something. Spellman saw that every time Larner came within speaking distance of another inmate he would say something, and that then his hand would stray suspiciously close to that of the other. It looked for all the world as though he was passing something around. But what? Spellman believed he knew.

He also realized that it was his duty to warn the warders in the yard that something was up—and yet he did not do so. It was quite possible that, should he bring Larner’s activities to the attention of the others, he would in the end be causing trouble for himself; for he believed Larner to be passing around copies of the Sixth Sathlatta! Spellman smiled. No doubt the madman intended making an attempt at raising Yibb-Tstll. How the lunatic mind contradicts itself, he thought, turning away from the window. Why! You could hardy call the twelve creatures in the the exercise-yard “adepts,” now could you? And in any case, Larner was one man short!

At 4:00 P.M. Spellman was required to go down to the yard with five other warders to stand guard over Hell’s inmates as they took their second and last exercise of the day. One of the other five was Barstowe, looking extremely nervous and uncomfortable, but he kept well away from the younger man. Spellman had noticed before how when Barstowe was in the exercise-yard the madmen were always exceptionally subdued—and yet now, for the first time, there seemed to be an indefinable attitude of quiet defiance about them—quite as though they had an “ace,” as it were, up their collective sleeve. Barstowe had noticed it too, and his interest picked up when Larner went over to Spellman to talk to him.

“Not long now, Nurse Spellman,” Larner quietly said after exchanging reasonable greetings.

“Oh?” Spellman smiled. “Is that right, Larner? I saw you today, you know, passing round those copies you made.”

Larner’s face fell immediately. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“No, I didn’t tell anyone. When are you going to tell me what it’s all about?”

“Soon, soon—but isn’t it a pity I don’t know the Naach-Tith formula?”

“Er—a pity, yes,” Spellman agreed, wondering what on Earth the fellow was rambling on about now. Then he remembered seeing that mention of a so-called “Naach-Tith Barrier” in Larner’s notes in the Cthaat Aquadingen. “Will it spoil the experiment?”

“No, but…but it’s you I’m really sorry for….”

“Me?” Spellman frowned. “How do you mean, Larner?”

“It’s not for myself, you understand,” the madman quickly went on, “what happens to me can’t much matter in a place like this—and the others are as badly off. Not much hope for them here. Why! Some of them might even benefit from the reversals! But it’s you, Spellman, it’s you—and I’m really sorry for that….”

Spellman considered his next question carefully. “Is the—formula—is it so important then?” If only he could get through to the man, discover the twisted circles in which his mind moved.

But Larner was suddenly frowning. “You haven’t read the Cthaat Aquadingen, have you?” He made the question an accusation.

“Yes, yes of course I have—but it’s very difficult, and I’m no—” Spellman searched for the word: “I’m no adept!”

Larner nodded his head, the frown vanishing from his face: “That’s it exactly: you’re no adept. There should be seven but I’m the only one. The Naach-Tith Formula would help, of course, but even then—” Suddenly Larner caught sight of Barstowe edging closer. “Lethiktros Themiel, phitrith-te klep-thos!” he instantly muttered under his breath, then turned back to Spellman: “But I don’t know the rest of it, you see, Spellman? And even if I did—it’s not designed to keep his sort of evil away….”

The next day, on the one occasion Spellman snatched to watch the inmates of Hell through his barred window, he again noticed the odd camaraderie between them. He also noticed a thin red welt, absent the previous day, on Larner’s face, and wondered how the madman had come by such an injury. On a whim, not knowing exactly just why he did so, he checked the roster to find out who had been on duty the night before. And then he knew it had been no whim at all but a horrible suspicion—for Barstowe had been on duty the previous night, and in his mind’s eye Spellman pictured the squat, ugly nurse with his stick! And the old unease welled up in his heart as he thought again of the welt on Larner’s face, and of that other inmate who had somehow contrived to gouge out one of his own eyes in “a fatal lunatic fit….”

• • •

That night, late on New Year’s Eve—after a day of very limited festivities, marred for Spellman by his growing unease—he received what should have been his first definite warning of the horror soon to come. As it happened he paid little attention: he was off duty and working on his book, but after all the shouting had died down in the ward beneath, Harold Moody, on duty, came to his room to tell him about it.

“Never saw anything like that before!” he told Spellman after settling himself nervously on the younger man’s bed. “Did you hear it?”

“I heard some shouting, yes. What was it all about?” Spellman was not really interested; his book was coming well and he wanted to get on with it.

“Eh?” Moody cocked his good ear in his friend’s direction. “Shouting, did you say? Chanting, more like it—all of ’em together, at the top of their voices, so loud as to almost deafen me completely. Not words, mind you, Martin—at least not recognizable words—but gibberish! Utter gibberish!”

“Gibberish?” Spellman got up immediately, crossing his small room to be closer to the shaken Moody. “What sort of—gibberish?”

“Well, I really don’t know. I mean—”

“Was it like this—” Spellman cut him off, taking out the Cthaat Aquadingen from his bedside locker and flipping its pages until he found the one he wanted.

“Ghe ‘phnglui, mglw’ngh ghee’yh, Yibb-Tstll,

Fbtagn mglw y’tlette ngh’wgah, Yibb-Tstll,

Ghe’phnglui….”

He stopped abruptly, realizing that he did not need to read the thing from the book, that of a sudden it was imprinted indelibly on his mind! “Did it—did what they were chanting go like—like that?”

“Eh? No, no it was different from that—harsher syllables—not so guttural. And that Larner chap—my God, he’s a real case, that one! Kept ranting on about ‘not knowing the ending’!”

Moody got up to go. “Anyhow, it’s all over now—”

As Moody reached the door Spellman’s alarm clock began to clamor. The young nurse had set the mechanism to go off at midnight, simply so that he would know when to welcome in the New Year. Now he remembered and said “Happy New Year, Harold!” Then, as his friend answered in kind and closed the door behind him, he again took up the Cthaat Aquadingen.

New Year’s Eve—the night before the First Day of the year! So, Spellman silently mused, Larner had attempted to build the “Barrier of Naach-Tith”—but of course, he had not known all of the words. Spellman pondered, too, the odd fact that he was able to remember, without any effort worth mentioning, the Sixth Sathlatta; and that the weird consonants of those diseased lines seemed somehow clearer in his mind and on his tongue.

Well, all right—given that he had allowed himself a folly or two with Larner, that was over now—it was time the madman’s weird experiment came to an end. But for his foolish pandering to the lunatic’s crazed fancies the disturbance in the ward known as Hell would not have happened. And what of tomorrow night? In another twenty-four hours, would the inmates of Hell use the thrice-repeated Sixth Sathlatta in an attempt to call forth the dread Yibb-Tstll? Spellman thought so, and (damn the cunning of the lunatic mind), Larner had attempted to draw him into the—coven?

Not that Spellman believed for a single moment that any sort of harm, supernatural or other, could come from the concerted mouthings of madmen; but a repeat performance of this night’s disturbance might well alert the sanatorium’s hierarchy to his decidedly illegal dealings with Larner. He would then certainly find himself in some sort of trouble, if not actual hot water, and he did not want to damage the atmosphere between himself, Dr. Welford, and one or two others of his superiors. He was on duty in the upper wards in the morning, finishing at 4:00 P.M., but before he finished he would find a way to get down to see Larner. Perhaps a gentle word with the lunatic would do the trick.

In his bed before sleeping, Spellman thought again on his puzzling ability to recall in detail the chaotic Sixth Sathlatta, and no sooner had he pictured the thing in his mind than it was on his lips. Amazed at his unsuspected fluency he whispered the words through in the darkness of his room, and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep.

—He was back in the alien forest beneath dark green, weirdly populated skies. Again, far stronger than before, his dream-spirit felt the pull of The Thing in the scabrous clearing: Yibb-Tstll, huge and potent, turning inexorably, almost stupidly about His own axis, with His cloak billowing monstrously as the night-gaunts beneath its folds flapped and clung in blind horror to the black and writhing multiple breasts.

This time, as soon as Spellman drifted (his dream-motion was as eerie as the drift of weeds in some outré Sargasso morass) into the crumble-earthed clearing, the vast obscenity at its center stopped Its turning, and as he wafted closer he saw Its eyes full upon him….

The utter horror of the occurrence which followed as he drew closer to the loathsome Ancient One shocked Martin Spellman from his sleep, and if anything its simplicity only went toward heightening that horror. The wonder was that Spellman had been able to recognize the—writhings—of those hellish features for what they were!

“It smiled—the Thing smiled at me!” he screamed, sitting bolt upright and flinging the bedclothes from him. For a long moment he simply sat, staring about wide-eyed in the darkness of his room; then, limbs trembling and with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, he got up and shakily brewed coffee.

Two hours later, at about 4:00 A.M., with dawn still some way off, he managed with some trepidation to get back to sleep. For the remainder of the night his slumbers were mercifully undisturbed….

• • •

When Martin Spellman awoke on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1936, he had no time to pause in consideration of the occurrences of the previous night; he had slept late, was on duty soon, and the time was flying by. Spellman was not to know it but that day was to be the most eventful since his arrival at Oakdeene—and at the end of the day….

At ten-thirty in the morning he managed to find a way to get down to the basement ward, and once there in Hell he went straight to Larner’s cell. Through the barred spy-hole he saw that his mission was useless. Larner, frothing at the mouth, was flinging himself in a silent fit from wall to padded wall, his eyes bulging and his teeth bared through the foam of his madness in gnashing frenzy. The student left the ward and found the nurse whose duty it was to attend the lower wards. He made Larner’s silent raging known and then returned to his duties.

Toward the end of the lunch-break, after missing Spellman at the dinner table, Harold Moody found the young nurse prowling worriedly back and forth across the restricted but private floor of his room. Spellman would say nothing of what was on his mind. In fact, he did not himself know what was bothering him, except that he had feelings of an impending—something. Feelings which were somehow relieved a little when Moody delivered his news that Alan Barstowe had quit his job at the sanatorium. No one, it transpired, knew for sure why the squat nurse was throwing up his job; but apparently there had been rumors about his nerves for some time. Moody stated that in his opinion the place and the inmates must have been “getting on top” of the man….

• • •

Later, after finishing duty for the day, Spellman—still inordinately pleased at the news of Barstowe’s imminent departure, feeling more himself and easier in his mind by the minute—ate a quick meal before returning to his room and getting out his manuscripts. By nine in the evening, however, discovering that with the encroachment of the dark outside his queasy uneasiness had returned at the expense of his concentration, he put away his book and simply lay on his bed for a while. He spent some time in trying to detect unusual sounds from Hell, finding himself no happier to discover that all seemed very quiet down there. A few minutes later, catching himself beginning to nod, he got up and smoked a cigarette. He did not want to sleep; his aim was to stay awake until midnight, to see if the inhabitants of the basement ward would get up to any more Larner-inspired tricks.

By ten a powerful desire had taken hold of Spellman to read through the Cthaat Aquadingen again—particularly the Sixth Sathlatta—and he actually got the book out before managing to fight down the urge. For his life he could not see just what there might be in Larner’s “Black Book” to interest him now. He was feeling very tired, though, natural enough considering the disturbances of the previous night, and he had something of a headache coming on. But even following a hastily brewed cup of coffee and an aspirin, Spellman’s weariness and the pain behind his temples increased until he was forced to lie on his bed. He glanced at his watch, seeing that it was ten-fifty; and then, before he knew it—

—Someone, somewhere—a well-known voice—was muttering the chaotic words of the Sixth Sathlatta, and even as he fell into a deep sleep Spellman knew that the voice was his own!

He was at the edge of the poisoned clearing again, under dark-green skies and with the evil jungle already behind him; and to his front, in the center of the clearing, Yibb-Tstll waited, turning inexorably as ever on His own axis. Spellman wanted to turn and run, to get away from The Thing that waited in Its great green billowing cloak; and he fought—pitting all the strength of his subconscious mind and will against the awful magnetism radiating from the revolting, revolving monstrosity before him—fought and almost won….But not quite! Slowly, agonizingly slowly, with his sleeping mind squeezed to a tiny ball of concentration, Martin Spellman was pulled forward across the leprous earth. And as he pitted himself against the horror of the Ancient One, he could feel Its anger, could sense the urgency It engendered now in this hideous dream-region’s atmosphere.

For what seemed like hours Spellman fought his losing battle, and then Yibb-Tstll—tiring of the game and aware of the shortness of time—tried a different tactic. While he had yet a good distance to go to the center of the clearing, Spellman saw The Thing stop Its turning; and then, without warning, the horror threw back its cloak to release the hellish “pets” beneath!

Spellman could only fight one thing at a time, and Yibb-Tstll was not going to allow him to escape this time into wakefulness. Even knowing he was dreaming Spellman was at the mercy of his dream. He screamed voicelessly, lashing out at the flapping, blank-faced, vile-bodied night-gaunts as they buffeted him with skin-and-bone wings and tried to shove him off his feet. Finally they won and he fell, cowering down and wrapping his arms about his head as he felt himself swftly borne forward on his nightmare’s ghost-drift. When the noisome activity about him ceased, he fearfully looked up—and found himself at the feet of the colossal Thing in the green cloak!

Again those awful eyes—those red eyes that were not fixed in their places—the eyes that moved quickly, independently—sliding with vile viscosity over the whole rotten surface of Yibb-Tstll’s pulpy, glistening head!

Mercifully distracted from the horror before him, he saw suddenly that he was not alone. There were others with him—twelve of them—and even in the dream the features and shapes of some of the twelve were twisted, and some of them slavered and their eyes were strange, making their identities obvious.

Larner!—and the rest of Hell’s inmates—a complete coven, now, come to worship at the feet of a lunatic “God,” the loathly Yibb-Tstll!

Still kneeling, sickly turning his face away, Spellman saw a book lying open before him on the rotting ground. The Cthaat Aquadingen, Larner’s copy, and open at the Sixth Sathlatta!

“No—oh, no!” Spellman screamed voicelessly in sudden understanding. Why?—to what end should this—Thing—be allowed to walk upon Earth?

Larner got down beside him: “You know, in your heart, Nurse Spellman. You know!”

“But—”

“No time,” Larner cut off his protest. “Midnight is almost here! You’ll join us in The Calling?”

“No, damn you—no!” Spellman cried his mental denial.

“You will!” answered a booming, alien voice in his head, “Now!” And Yibb-Tstll reached out from under His cloak a green and black thing that might have been an arm, with a hand and fingers of sorts, pushing the tips into Spellman’s mouth and ears and nostrils—deep into his mind—searching and squeezing in certain places….

When the great Ancient One withdrew his slimy fingers Spellman’s eyes were very vacant and his mouth, trickling saliva, hung slack. Only then, at midnight—as if at a spoken command though none was given, simultaneously and in perfect unison—did the coven begin the invocation; with Spellman sitting bolt upright in his bed, and with the others below in their cells.

• • •

It was early February before the furor at Oakdeene died down, by which time the events of the night of 1st January 1936 had been carefully examined—as best they could be—and chronicled for future reference in various reports. By then, too, Dr. Welford had resigned; he had been unfortunate enough to be Duty Officer of the night in question; and while it was generally recognized that the responsibility had in no way been his, his resignation seemed to appease directors, newspapers and the relatives of many of the inmates alike.

Certainly, had Dr. Welford been a man without scruple, he might have turned at least part of the result of that night’s happenings to his advantage; for in the following month five of Hell’s inhabitants—three of them previously “hopeless” maniacs—were released as perfectly responsible citizens! Alas, five others, of which one was Larner, had been found dead in their cells shortly after the midnight disturbance—the victims of “frantic lunatic convulsions.” The remaining two—survived—but in states of deep and constant catatonia.

Such had been the upheaval at Oakdeene on the morning of the 2nd January, that at first it was believed Barstowe’s ghastly death on the lonely road between the sanatorium and Oakdeene village had been brought about by a madman escaped in the confusion. For some reason the squat nurse had not waited until morning to leave—perhaps he had some premonition of the horror to come—but had departed on foot with his case shortly after eleven that very night. Apparently Barstowe had tried to fight back before succumbing to his attacker: a black telescopic stick with a silver tip—an instrument that could be opened out to make a pointed weapon some nine feet long—was found near his body, but his efforts had been of no avail.

As soon as Barstowe’s body was discovered, a count of Oakdeene’s inmates, living and dead, served to put down any rumors that might have arisen in respect of the institute’s security; but certainly the squat nurse had suffered some sort of maniacal attack. No sane man, not even any ordinary sort of animal, could have savaged him so and chewed away half his head and brain!

In all, the occurrences of the night of the 1st-2nd January 1936 could have filled a whole chapter in Spellman’s book—had he ever finished that book. He did not finish it, nor will he ever. Having suffered a terrible reversal, Martin Spellman, now in late middle-age, still occupies the second cell on the left in Hell; and because, even in his more lucid moments, he only babbles and drools and screams, for the most part he is kept under sedation….