THE HOUSE OF CTHULHU

Brian Lumley

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INTRODUCTION

Of Teh Atht, White Sorcerer of the Great Primal Continent of Theem’hdra, and of Sundry Matters Concerning an Age Forgotten Except in his Prehistoric Document, Legends of the Olden Runes.

by Brian Lumley [based on the
original notes of Thelred Gustau,
whose introduction follows]:

Long before Atlantis, before Uthmal and Mu, so distant in time past that a very great majority of today’s scientists might never be persuaded of its existence, there was in primal Theem’hdra an hitherto unknown, unguessed Age of Man. How long ago exactly? I could say that this mighty continent existed twenty millions of years ago, but that would be pure guesswork. Perhaps it was forty millions, a hundred … I do not know.

I only know that in 1963, while observing at comparatively close range the fantastic eruptions of Surtsey as that island rose up from the sea off Iceland, I fished aboard my boat a massive piece of volcanic flotsam whose fortunate recovery seemed destined to reshape the thinking of the entire anthropological world!

The thing was both astonishing and awesome. Astonishing in that, embedded in the mass of grey-white, foamlike rock, a ball of blue glass like an eye clearly showed through the wash of waves. Awesome in that this mass (whose glassy passenger was, even at first glance, quite obviously an artifact of some sort) had recently been ejected from the heart of a newborn volcano.

Once they had the thing on board, my men were quick to break away the still warm lava crusts about its large glass core, then to carefully carry that nucleus to my cabin. Grey droplets of sea water still clung to its surface, and the soapy scum of lava and volcanic dust obscured its true colour and … contents. But when I had cleaned it with a towel, then those of my crew with me gaped and gasped and for a moment the magic of Surtsey’s fiery birth was almost entirely forgotten.

For here was something that surely could not be! Locked in the bluish glass was a box of dull yellow metal in the shape of a nine inch cube. It had hasps and hinges and was covered with mystic symbols and the grimacing faces of krakens and dragons, hybrid dwarves and giants, serpents and demons and other night-things from all four corners of myth and legend. Without opening that box – indeed, before ever I stole my first glance at its interior and contents – I knew that it was ancient … but I could never have guessed that it predated the very dinosaurs, at least those sorrily defunct creatures whose bones decorate today’s museums. ‘But,’ you are thinking, ‘the very earliest of men had not yet evolved, would not for ten millions of years after the dinosaurs had disappeared …’ Oh? Well, I once thought so, too.

We put into port in Reykjavik and I took the glass ball with me to an hotel. It was solid, this sphere, and yet curiously light, made of glass unknown to modern science. After I had taken many photographs and shown the thing to a number of friends and colleagues – all evidence to support any claims I might later wish to make – then I sat down to determine a way to get at the golden box within.

Had the sphere been hollow, then a simple shattering of the glass might suffice, but it was not, and I had no wish to damage the box. In the end, nine frustrated days later in London, I procured a jeweller’s diamond-tipped drill and commenced what I thought must prove an almost intolerably long process of drilling. In this I was mistaken.

I had drilled no more than two holes into the sphere, each to within an inch or so of its box nucleus, when there began to flow from the second hole an oily blue substance that smoked on contact with the air. Patently in drilling the second hole fractionally deeper than the first, I had broken through to this previously invisible agent which must surround the golden box. It must, too, be under some pressure, for it bubbled up the drilled hole and bled thinly down the outside of the sphere – and wherever it flowed the glass melted away like butter!

So acrid were the fumes that rose up ever thicker, I was soon driven to desert the house and had to abide in ignorance the passing of whatever catalytic reaction was taking place within. When the smoke had cleared some minutes later, on rushing to my work table, there I saw the golden box lying in a few slivers of evaporating glass. Even these rounded ice-like chips I tried to save, washing them under cold water; but to no avail, the catalyst had an unbreakable hold on them. And so finally I turned my attention to the box …

How my fingers trembled when, having wiped down the work-bench top and removed the box to my study proper, I eased back the hasps and lifted the lid on hinges which were as well oiled as if attended to only yesterday! For a long moment I could only stand and stare, all atremble and breaking out in a sweat of fevered anticipation, but then I forced myself to a semblance of calmness and set about to take more photographs … and more yet as I lifted each item from the box to spread across the table.

There was a tiny silver whistle whose mouth was sealed with hardened wax; several small dark bottles of thick liquid, each marked in redly glowing hieroglyphs on a sort of leathery label; a magnifying glass in a square golden frame delicately filigreed with intriguing arabesques and inlaid at the corners with iridescent mother-of-pearl; a tiny skull, as of a monkey, but with only one eye-socket central in the forehead, all covered in gold leaf except for the eye, which was a ruby big as my small fingernail; a folded map of sorts on a type of parchment which began to disintegrate as soon as I attempted to spread it (mercifully, I was able to get a photograph, though not a good one, before the thing had completely crumbled away to a fine dust, and merciful too that this was the only item in the box to be wasted in this manner); a set of silver dividers in perfect working condition; a beautiful bamboo flute of exquisite workmanship, carved with miniature mountains and forests, and with seascapes where boats bore curiously rigged sails whose like are elsewhere unknown in all Man’s history; a lead pendant in the shape of a lizard devouring its own tail; the great, needle-sharp, curved ivory tooth of some beast of prey, with a hardwood handle set into its root end making of it a deadly dagger; and finally, beneath all of these lesser treasures, runebooks and scrolls and documents, all of fine skins no thicker than paper but lubricated in a way which left them supple after God-only-knows how vast a stretch of time.

Several loose leaves there were, too, finely hieroglyphed in figures completely new to me and almost certainly beyond the talents of any of today’s cryptographers or runic interpreters; and as I laid these carefully on my table a draught disturbed them, threatening to blow them onto the floor. I used the first thing to hand – the ancient glass in its square frame – to pin them down, and so accidentally stumbled across a most fantastic revelation.

Whoever had stocked this golden box and sealed it within its now completely disappeared shell, had not only wisely and deliberately protected it against its journey into future aeons but had also foreseen certain of the difficulties its discoverer must eventually face. Beyond doubt he had been a scientist of sorts, this man, but this was surely much more than mere science!

My head swam dizzily and I clutched at the table’s edge, steadying myself. I blinked my eyes and looked again … then stared … And finally, rubbing furiously at my eyes, I shakily pulled up a chair and sat down to peer yet again, unbelievingly (or at least believing myself to be suffering the most astonishing delusions) at the hieroglyphs that now swam up large through the blue-tinged glass of the magnifier.

They were hieroglyphs no longer!

Now I could read those immemorial minuscules as easily as if I had written them myself, for now – or so it appeared through the impossible lens of the magnifier – they were in German, the language of my youth! Eagerly I read a page, two, three, unbelievingly copying the words down in scratchy English as I scanned them through that incredible glass, watching the blurred, alien and unknown characters and symbols writhing into clearly discernible words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs as I slowly slid the magnifier over them where they lay.

Then a tragedy. My hand was so a-shake, my eyes watering with the strain of staring at this continual, mesmerising metamorphosis, that I dropped the glass and gasped horrified as it cracked sharply against a corner of the golden box. Instantly a thin trickle of oily blue liquid seeped out from the interior of the lens – and need I relate what next took place? Less than twenty seconds later no trace remained of that miraculous lens, only its square golden frame and a rapidly dispersing mist of acrid smoke …

For a moment I despaired, cursing myself for a clumsy fool and almost crying out loud in my frustration; but then I snatched up my scribbled notes, three pages of them, and realised that all was not lost! In these few scraps of paper I had a key, one which would unlock the secrets of the manuscripts just as surely as any magical magnifier – but much more slowly. Oh, so very slowly.

For nine long years I have laboured – not only over my translations but also to gain recognition of an Age of Man predating prehistory! – but while I have successfully translated a good third of Teh Atht’s runebooks and manuscripts, I have failed dismally to impress any real authority with the enormity of the treasure I found in a lava bomb hurled from the throat of a volcano.

Perhaps if my find had been less spectacular … if I had told no one of the disappearing sphere and lens of glass … and certainly had I made no mention of the magnifier’s wondrous powers of translation, things might have been different. As it is: still I am irked considerably to be looked upon as ‘somewhat peculiar,’ or as ‘quaintly eccentric,’ and this despite my previous reputation and the fact that I have photographic evidence and friends who will vouchsafe the truth of what I say. My photographs must of course be ‘fakes,’ and all of my good friends mere ‘dupes.’

And so what more can I say or do? Well, if I cannot tell the world of Theem’hdra, the Primal Continent at Earth’s Dawn, in the way it should be told – as by a scientist above the lowly japes and deceptions of which I stand accused – then I am obliged to tell of it in some other manner. If I cannot present Teh Atht’s words as statements of fact or at very least fragments of myth or fable from a time beyond time, then I must present them as modern fiction.

In this my good friend and collaborator Brian Lumley has been of tremendous assistance, colouring the legends as I unfold them and preparing them one by one for popular publication. If this was not Teh Atht’s purpose, that this tomorrow-world of ours know of his own dimly fabulous time, then I am at a loss to say what his purpose was. Surely he had some such in mind when, placing his treasures in the golden box, he sealed it in its glassy sphere, and taking whatever other precautions were necessary for its aeon-lasting protection he sent it winging down all the ages of time from dim and distant but no longer forgotten Theem’hdra!

Thelred Gustau

What shall we say of that continent at the dawn of time, in the first ‘civilised’ Age of Man? Its inhabitants called it Theem’hdra, which is a name beyond translation; but how may we, looking back into the bottomless abyss of the past, name or classify a landmass which must, by now, have been above and below great oceans many times, returning in the main to its individual rocks and pebbles, and those in their cycle to finely sifted sands? Atlantis by comparison was yesterday …

We might perhaps think of Theem’hdra as Pangaea, but not the Pangaea visualised by today’s experts. And that is not to castigate or belittle in any way those authorities whose choice it has been to turn blind eyes upon Thelred Gustau’s work. No, I merely point out that their Pangaea, the ‘popular’ Pangaea, was, in the grand scale of things, last week. In the same scale Theem’hdra was probably months ago.

And yet for me, as for Gustau, the Primal Continent no longer lies in the dim and fabulous past. Working as I have upon my colleague’s translations, preparing them for publication as modern ‘fictions,’ I have grown to know Theem’hdra as I know my own England. It is a place to which I might journey simply by closing my eyes and sending my thoughts winging out on a mission of … race memory? I know the mammoth plains as well as I know the woods of my own childhood, the twisty alleys of Klühn as thoroughly as the steep streets of Durham City.

… Theem’hdra is of volcanic origin. Two volcanoes are mentioned in Teh Atht’s manuscripts, both active in his time, but we base our claim in respect of the continent’s origin mainly on what Thelred Gustau remembers of the map from his golden box; in that and in the photographs, however poor, which he managed to obtain before the parchment map disintegrated.

From Gustau’s reproduction it can be seen that central Theem’hdra is a vast inland sea, almost circular, of about five hundred miles in diameter and ringed by the Great Circle Mountains. South-west of this inner ocean and within the surrounding range lies a mighty volcano which is in fact a secondary cone, still quietly active and now and then disturbingly grumbly. Surely the throat of the original volcano is now the mighty inner sea itself, and the crater walls, eroded by the winds, rains and tremors of a young planet, are now those same Great Circle Mountains?

But what a volcano that must have been! A fire-spewing cauldron five hundred miles across: Krakatoa itself would be the merest squib by comparison! Thus, in what was probably the most violent of all primal convulsions, Theem’hdra was born. And as the ages ticked by there were men …

On a line due west of the inner sea’s centre lies the continent’s second active volcano, an island cone standing off in the Unknown Ocean. This volcano, in its birthing, brought down and destroyed and buried beneath a lava plain the city of Bhur-esh, which knew its heyday when Klühn, the modern capital on the eastern coast almost three thousand miles away, was merely a fishing village. Nevertheless, and while Bhur-esh is to Klühn what Ur is to, say, modern Cairo, legends of Bhur-esh came down to Teh Atht in his wizardly apartments overlooking Klühn’s great bay, and he dutifully recorded them in his runebooks. And so we know the story of Kank Thad the barbarian, who departed slowly from and returned quickly to Bhur-esh all in the same day, and thereafter wandered no more …

To return to the eastern coast:

Almost eight hundred miles south of Klühn – across the Lohr and several smaller rivers, surrounded by dense coastal forests – lies the city of Yhemnis. It is a splendidly barbaric city of gold, ivory and ironwood, home and citadel of swart Yhemni slavers and pirates. East again, across the stormy Straits of Yhem and eighty sea-miles distant, the jungle-island Shadarabar (with Shad, its capital, squarely facing Yhemnis on the mainland) is also home to Yhemni tribes. Mercifully these dark brown peoples are as often at each other’s throats as at war with the rest of the Primal Continent’s more civilised people. But from this it must not be reckoned that the Yhemni are Theem’hdra’s only barbarians – no!

For diagonally across the continent, at its north-westerly extreme, is a land of fjords and lochs and chilly waters. Nomadic woolly mammoths wander the great plains to the west of this region, hunted by towering white savages who – while there are many individual tribes and families – generally go under the group name of Northmen. More commonly, however, they are known simply as Barbarians!

The true Northern Barbarian is easily recognised: by his massive strength, his lightly browned skin, his love of soft women and hard drink, his rapidly alternating moods (between soaring high spirits and deepest, darkest depressions), his dread of sorcery, and by the distinctive mane of hair he wears, short and bristly, from nape of neck to base of spine.

Fishermen famed for their hunting of the great whales, sailors crafted in boat-building, warriors dreaded for the sheer madness of their berserker rages – yes, and traders, too, whose pelts and ivory are valued highly in Khrissa and Thandopolis – the Northmen are colourful, heroic characters, with a whole-hearted love of piratical adventurings and tall-tale telling and song-singing. They are also wanderers who may be found far from their chill homeland, in almost every part of Theem’hdra.

Of Khrissa (mentioned above, a cold and lonely city of basalt slabs at the mouth of the Greater Marl River four hundred miles east of the mammoth plains): its gaunt, sparsely-clad priest-inhabitants are a race aside from the majority of Theem’hdra’s peoples. Tall and thin they are, bald-pated and shaven of all bodily hair; and equally austere their lives. Aye, for their sole task in life would seem to be the sending of prayers to their many gods that the ice barrier to the north might encroach no closer to the northern shores of Theem’hdra.

In the Year of the White Whales – when the ice only stopped after mounting the thousand mile reef, while to the east it even cast its creeping frosty-silver cloak about the feet of Tharamoon – Khrissa’s priests sacrificed no less than three hundred of their women in order to still the deadly white advance. Woe betide any stranger in Khrissa when the ice crackles out of the north and the winter snows drift deep and ominous!

North-east of Khrissa, indeed, at the most northerly point of the mainland, there, ten miles out in the Chill Sea, Tharamoon the Mountain Island rises silent, forbidding and forbidden. Atop the highest needle peak a massive castle of grey stone glooms against greyer skies, and even though its one-time wizard inhabitant, Mylakhrion the Elder, is long dead and blown as dust in the wind, still the island lies vacant; for no man would tempt the monstrous magicks and curses Mylakhrion doubtless called down upon that blasted rock in his last days. No, not for all the wizard’s treasures, fabled to rest with his bones, broken at the base of the castle’s walls …

But while Mylakhrion, ancestor of Teh Atht himself, was old in Theem’hdra’s youth (he had been dead eleven hundred years when Teh Atht dreamed his dreams of the BEGINNING and the END), nevertheless other, darker magicks had survived the centuries, creeping down the years to modern Theem’hdra.

Until recently the most hideous of all of these dark forces was chained, by rune and spell of Elder God, in a bottomless crypt upon Arlyeh, island of nameless ruins mid-ocean between the Frostlands and Klühn. And it was the reaver Zar-Thule who, together with the men of his dragonships, sailed in unto and landed upon the island, seeking out the priceless treasures of the House of Cthulhu … But that is another story.

Of the Frostlands, bitter regions to the east of the Great Ice Barrier:

Yaht-Haal was the only city beyond the confines of the Primal Continent proper known to Theem’hdra’s peoples: Yaht-Haal, the Silver City at the edge of the Frostlands, which Zar-Thule sacked before his ill-omened landing upon Arlyeh. He sacked Yaht-Haal and burned it down, torturing and killing all of the city’s priests and doing worse things to its gentle, fur-clad snow-folk. And following the rape of the Silver City, the very next winter, the Great Ice Barrier came down and buried its desecrated temples and houses deep beneath crystal glaciers; for there were no longer priests and wizardlings to keep the ice away with their chants and spell-spinnings.

Now, I may seem to be making a lot of Theem’hdra’s magicians and wizards and sorcerers, and I know that in our 20th Century such are frowned upon as the stuff of fairy tales and fables. But I repeat that Theem’hdra was millions of years ago, when this world of ours was still a very young one, whereon Nature experimented and created and did myriads of strange and nightmarish things. After all, Nature herself was in her youth, and she had not yet decided which talents men should have and which should be forbidden, discontinued.

In some men, in certain women, too, the wild workings of capricious Nature wrought weird wonders, giving them senses and powers additional to the usual five. Often these powers were carried down through many generations; aye, and occasionally such a man would mate with just such a woman, and then, eventually, through genealogical patterns and permutations long forgotten to 20th Century scientists, along would come the seventh son of a seventh son, or the ninth daughter of a ninth daughter … and then?

Oh, yes, there was certainly magick in those times, though perhaps today, in our ‘enlightened’ age, we would find different names for such as wizards, lamias, weirdlings and warlocks. For Nature has never truly ceased her dabbling, and now we casually acknowledge such words as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and so on. And was not Einstein himself a magician, whose runes were just as powerful as any wizard’s in old Theem’hdra?

But that is to labour a point … And so let us now return to the topography and anthropology of Theem’hdra:

North of the Bay of Monsters, between the mighty River Luhr and the Great Eastern Peaks, lie the Steppes of Hrossa where dwell the fierce Hrossaks. Tremendously skilled riders of fearsome lizard mounts, warriors almost without peer, the Hrossaks feud intermittently with the armies of massive-walled Grypha at the mouth of the Luhr, and with the Yhemni in their coastal forests. Other than the occasional raid or skirmish, however, the bronze Hrossaks are content to live at peace in their steppes where they farm and pride themselves in practicing the arts of war, and where they breed their lizard herds, providing leather and meat and sport a-plenty. The River Luhr is sacred to them and they will not cross it, and the peaks of the eastern range are much too high for them; generally, they are not good climbers.

Across the Luhr to the west, two hundred and fifty miles away rise the foothills of the Great Circle Mountains, within which, to the east of the inner sea, oozes the slimy Marsh of Slugs. Even the wildest, loudest adventurers dare only mention this vast and boggy nightmare of a region in the merest whispers, for that’s the sort of place the Marsh of Slugs is – all forty thousand square miles of it! And so we’ll linger there no longer but move on west across the great crater sea to the Inner Isles.

Central in that enclosed sea which was once the throat of a vast volcano, like green jewels strewn on a mantle of beautiful blue, the Inner Isles reach up their lava mountains to touch the sky. Here, rumour has it, dwells a tall, slender, comb-headed race of silver-grey beings who are not entirely human. Their houses are wooden and nestle on the slopes of their mountains; their needs are simple and are all supplied by the islands themselves and the teeming sea; their ways are gentle, even though they have strengths not immediately apparent, and their lives are ones of quiet and peaceful contemplation.

Yes, and their minds are the finest in all Theem’hdra, with senses that reach beyond the normal range of those we know. They are called the Suhm-yi, which means ‘the Rarely Seen,’ and it is because they are so rarely seen that we can offer no real proof of their existence, only the tales of wandering barbarians whose travels have taken them over the high northern rim of the Great Circle Mountains and across the deep blue inner sea.

Thus the area enclosed by these volcanic mountains holds both terror and beauty … but it also holds mystery. Mystery in the shape of massive stone cubes, featureless blocks with sides hundreds of feet long, which stand amidst the inner foothills all along the western range and are fabled to be the long-vacated houses of the world’s first race, which was not human but came down to Earth from the stars in Theem’hdra’s prehistory. Great mystery there, aye, and mystery too in the Black Isle, standing dark and still in a subsidiary lake of the inner sea to the north-east; but of that place, so far, we know nothing except that it is there …

And that in the main is Theem’hdra. From the bay of Klühn in the north-east to the Paps of Mam, Mother of Gods, at the continent’s southwesterly extreme, and from the grim Teeth of Yibb and the fjords of the north-west to Shadarabar off the south-east coast. In all, the continent is about 2400 miles east to west and 2000 miles north to south, with a total land area of about 3,750,000 square miles.

Including the peoples of Yaht-Haal (if any remain alive) Theem’hdra houses six distinct races: the Northern Barbarians, the scattered white settlers of the coastal cities, the fabled Suhm-yi of the Inner Isles, the Hrossaks of the steppes, the swart and fiery Yhemni, and a pigmy race fabled to dwell in the Marsh of Slugs. Its gods are many, and some of them are in no way gods for prayers, rather for cursing by. Gleeth, blind Moon God, is believed to be benevolent, as is Shoosh, Goddess of the Still Slumbers, and Mam, Mother of Gods; but Ghatanothoa is a dark and doomful god – and even more so Cthulhu, though His worship is mercifully restricted to small, secret sects – Yibb-Tstll, too. Then there are the Ice-Gods, whose names are kept secret by the priests of cold Khrissa, except for Baroom, God of the Avalanche, whose name is often invoked at the great drinking festivals of the Northmen.

And so little more remains to be told of Theem’hdra. Oh, there are rivers and lakes, towns and cities and other places that I have not mentioned; yes, and others I myself do not yet know, will not until Thelred Gustau translates more of Teh Atht’s runebooks – but that lies in the future.

Thus I welcome you to the fables and legends of a time long dead and hitherto forgotten. If you choose to think of them as ‘fictions’ in the modern vein, well, that is your choice. For myself: I have come to know Theem’hdra quite intimately and can go there simply by closing my eyes and sending my mind winging back across the aeons. Why not join me there, now, in that raw adventurous world in an age before all other ages of man, in the Primal Continent at the dawn of time?

POSTSCRIPT

… Since penning the above, for use as an introduction to an original book of Thelred Gustau’s translations, the fantastic, the inexplicable has occurred. No, on second thought perhaps the occurrence was not entirely inexplicable; but if my guess is correct, certainly it was fantastic.

I had known for weeks that Thelred was excited about something, and, in respect of his age, I had warned him against the excessive amount of work he was putting in on Teh Atht’s Legends of the Olden Runes. It had seemed to me that he was neither eating nor sleeping normally and that something – some aspect of his work of which he had made no mention – had become an obsession with him.

On the day in question his housekeeper, Mrs Petersen, prepared a breakfast which he no more than glanced at before hurrying to his study. There, as the morning grew towards noon, he sat at his desk with scratchily moving pen in hand and all the paraphernalia of his golden box within easy reach.

All through the forenoon he sat, disposing of a continuous supply of coffee, climbing from one level of high excitement to the next, until noon when he left the study and retired to his bedroom. The look on his face as he passed by Mrs Petersen was: ‘wild, flushed, exultant! – but he was also plainly very tired.’ He asked that she rouse him at 7 P.M. and place coffee and sandwiches in his study before going home.

She followed his instructions to a point, but was so concerned by her employer’s behaviour that she did not immediately go home. Instead she sat in her little kitchen and listened to the muffled sounds of the professor stirring in his study … to those, and to his frequent, excited exclamations.

She must have drowsed, for her next memory is of a terrific blast of sound, of a triumphant cry in the professor’s voice, of a deeper, bass booming which could only barely be described as a voice, and finally of a splintering, crashing impact that shook the very house.

Rushing to his study she threw open the door on a scene of chaotic disorder. In the ceiling the chandelier swung on its chain and cast flickering shadows from light-bulbs made faulty by whatever blast had wrecked the room. Books and documents lay scattered all about; loose leaves still fluttered to the carpeted floor; the great bay window had been forced outwards from its frame into the garden, where even now a great shadow stirred black against the night.

Mrs Petersen staggered to that unnaturally shattered window in time to see … a shape! A shape like that of a monstrous bird or bat that loomed up massive before rising into darkness to the whirring thrum of great wings, a black silhouette bearing upon its back the lesser shape of … a man!

I was among the few, called upon by the police early the next day, to go along and make what I could of Mrs Petersen’s story. Did I have any idea exactly what the professor was working on? – they wanted to know – and had I known that he was experimenting with explosives? And what sort of explosives might they have been? These and many other questions, all of which I could only answer by shaking my head in utter bafflement. Plainly it had been an explosion of some sort that caused the damage to the professor’s study, particularly the window, but that did not explain his total absence.

Surely there should be a body, or at least – traces of one! But no, there was nothing like that, no sign of any harm done to his person. What then had happened? And if he lived, where was Thelred Gustau now?

Later I was allowed to gather all of his scattered notes, documents, books and miscellaneous curiosa together, examining each item for damage … and then the puzzle began to piece itself into a pattern. Some weeks were to pass, however, before my conclusions were concrete, and even then they were not such as I might pass on to the police.

The clues were in Thelred’s notes, in those copious if disjointed scribblings formed partly of translated fragments from Teh Atht, mainly of his own excitement at some tremendous breakthrough which he was sure was coming. And of course that breakthrough had come, on the night of the blasted study, the bass alien ‘voice,’ and the bat-bird shape that bore a triumphant manlike figure away into unknown dimensions.

For Thelred had written of the strange properties he believed to lie hidden in the stopped-up silver whistle, and of the potent energies locked in a tiny bottle of golden-yellow liquid from Teh Atht’s box. He had likened these items to certain things hinted at in the peculiar, almost esoteric works of Dr. Laban Schrewsbury, and at the same time had jotted down notes concerning gigantic flying creatures called ‘Byakhee’ and a tentacled, immemorially worshipped God-thing named Hastur.

Tenuous clues, all of them; and yet had he not recently complained bitterly of the ever increasing scorn with which erstwhile colleagues now greeted his work? And had he not often stated his desire to be ‘away from all this …?’ Never at peace with the hustle and bustle of our 20th Century, always seeking the solitude of vast ocean vistas and the lure of distant desert places, what was there to hold him here? And by ‘here’ I mean in this world of men, at least in the present-day world of here and now.

Often he had declared his admiration for those tales of olden Arabia, where djinni might be found in magic lamps and brave men sought adventure high above the world on arabesqued, gravity-defying carpets. And now … has he discovered a magic carpet of his own, astride the back of a trans-dimensional Byakhee, which might fly him to those worlds of wonder he so admired?

Deny me if you will, but in my mind’s eye I see him working at his desk, see him leap to his feet with an astounded exclamation to tremulously sip of the golden mead. I hear him hoarsely chant the invocation to Hastur and blow on the whistle so recently unstoppered. Aye, and then the blast of energy that heralds the coming of the Byakhee, tumbling the contents of the study and blowing out the windows while yet the summoner stands unharmed.

I see it all and know that it must have been so, for of all the incunabula of the golden box only the silver whistle – that and one of the tiny bottles – were absent upon my investigation …

And now I alone am executor to the estate, and I know that soon I shall have mastered the legends writ so many aeons ago in alien cyphers upon the fine skins of Teh Atht’s runebooks. What Thelred Gustau started I shall finish, but until then there are those fables already translated which, as I have said before, you may accept for what they are or, if you so desire, name ‘fictions’ in the modern vein. The choice is yours.