Title: The Black Stone

Author: Robert E. Howard

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The Black Stone

Robert E. Howard







They say foul things of Old Tunes still lurk In dark forgotten corners

of the world, And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights, Shapes

pent in Hell.--JUSTIN





I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German

eccentric who lived so curiously mid died in such grisly and

mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless

Cults in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in

Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the

author. Collectors of rare literature were familiar with Nameless

Cults mainly through the cheap and faulty translation which was

pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated

edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York, 1909. But the

volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with

heavy leather covers arid rusty iron hasps. I doubt if there are more

than half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today, for the

quantity issued leas not great, and when the manner of the author's

demise was bruited about, many possessors of the book burned their

volumes in panic.



Von Junzt spent his entire fife (1795-1840) delving into forbidden

subjects; lie traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into

innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and

esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of

the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to

murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of

a thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt dared put in print arouses

uneasy speculations as to what it was that he dared not tell. What

dark matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written

pages that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked

unceasingly for months before his death, and which lay torn and

scattered all over the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which

Von Junzt was found dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his

throat? It will never be known, for the author's closest friend, the

Frenchman Alexis Ladeau, after having spent a whole night piecing the

fragments together and reading what was written, burnt them to ashes

and cut his own throat with a razor.



But the contents of the published matter are shudder-some enough, even

if one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of

a madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black

Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains

of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt

did not devote much space to it-the bulk of his grim work concerns

cults and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his

day, and it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or

being lost and for-otters centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of

the keys-a phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and

constituting one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly

at curious sights to be seen about the monolith on midsummer's night.

He mentioned Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant

of the Hunnish invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory

of Attila over the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion

without giving any refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute

the origin of the Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming

that William the Conqueror reared Stonehenge.



This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely

and after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and

moldering copy of Dostmann's Remnants of Lost Empires (Berlin, 1809,

Der Drachenhaus Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann

referred to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt,

dismissing it with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in

contrast with the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor, which were his pet

theme. He admitted inability to make out the defaced characters on the

monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little

as I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village

adjacent to the Black Stone-Stregoicavar-an ominous naive, meaning

something like Witch-Town.



A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles give me no further

information-Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a

wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists.

But I did find subject for thought in Dornly's Magyar Folklore. In his

chapter on Dream Myths he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some

curious superstitions regarding it-especially the belief that if

anyone sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be

haunted by monstrous nightmares for ever after; and lie cited tales of

the peasants regarding too-curious people, who ventured to visit the

Stone on Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of something

they saw there.



That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more

intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the

Stone. The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of

unnatural events on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct

in my being, as one senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some

dark subterraneous river in the night.



And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird

and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: The

People of the Monolith. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey

had indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could

not doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which lie

referred in his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once

more the strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had

noticed when first reading of the Stone.



I had been casting about for a place to spend short vacation and I

made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style

carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my

objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to

the little village which lay in a fertile valley--high up in the fir-

clad mountains.



The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day we passed

the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave Polish-Hungarian

knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and futile stand

against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the magnificent, when the

Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.



The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling

stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave

Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's Turkish Wars. "After

the skirmish" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back

the Turkish advance-guard) "the Count was standing beneath the half-

ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the

disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small

lacquered case which had been taken from the body of the famous

Turkish scribe and historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the

fight. The Count took therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read,

but he had not read far before he turned very, pale and without saying

a word, replaced the parchment in the case and thrust the case into

his cloak. At that very instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly

opened fire, and the balls striking the old castle, the Hungarians

were horrified to see the halls crash down in ruin, completely

covering the brave Count. Without a leader the gallant little army was

cut to pieces, and in the warswept years which followed, the bones of

the noblemen were never recovered. Today the natives point out a huge

and moldering pile of rains near Schomvaal beneath which, they say,

still rests all that the centuries have left of Count Boris

Vladinolf."



I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village

that apparently belied its sinister cognomen-a forgotten back-eddy

that Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress

and manners-of the people were those of an earlier century. They were

friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the

outside world were extremely rare.



"Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the

villa. Aye," said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, "a young

fellow and queer-acting-mumbled to himself-a poet, I think."



I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.



"Yes, he was a poet," I answered, "and he wrote a poem about a bit of

scenery near this very village."



"Indeed'-" Mine host's interest was aroused. "Then, since all great

poets are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved

great fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of

any man I ever knew."



"As is usual with artists," I answered, "most of his recognition has

come since his death."



"He is dead, then?"



"He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago." "Too bad, too bad,"

sighed mine host sympathetically. "Poor lad-he looked too long at the

Black Stone."



My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.

"I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this

village, is it not?"



"Nearer than Christian folk wish," he responded. "Look!" He drew me to

a latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the

brooding blue mountains. "There beyond where you see the bare face of

that jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were

ground to powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to

the deepest ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man

who laid hammer or maul against it came to an evil end."



"So now the people shun it."



"What is there so evil about it," I asked curiously. "It is a demon-

haunted thing," he answered uneasily and with the suggestion of a

shudder. "In my childhood I knew a young man who came up from below

and laughed at our traditions-in his foolhardiness he went to the

Stone on Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village again,

stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and sealed

his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after, he

spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.



"My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in

the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by

foul dreams so that at times he makes the night hideous with his

screams and wakes with cold sweat upon him.



"But let us talk of something else, Herr; it is not good to dwell upon

such things."



I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with

pride. "The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the

original house was the only one in the village which was not burned to

the ground when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in

the house that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the

scribe Selim Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country

hereabouts."



I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not

descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of

1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or

the vicinity, thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and

children they wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast

stretch of country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of

Stregoicavar are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys

who came into the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.



Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original

inhabitants with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors

in the lower levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more

hatred and aversion than they' regarded the Turks. He was rather vague

regarding the causes of this feud, but said that the original

inhabitants of Stregoicavar had been in the habit of makin; stealthy

raids on the lowlands and stealing girls and children. Moreover, he

said that they were not exactly of the same blood as his own people;

the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock had mixed and intermarried

with a degraded aboriginal race until the breeds had blended; composed

was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where it was not dinted and

roughened, created a curious illusion of semitransparency.



I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection

of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to

me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an

age distant and apart from human ken.



I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that

I had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted

to investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange

hands and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in

the long ago.



I sought out the tavernkeeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to

his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not

mind discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any

clarity. Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they

were hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on

his waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through

which huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flames and a black

drum bellowed incessantly. One thing only he had seen the Black Stone,

not on a mountain slope but set like a spire on a colossal black

castle.



As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk

about the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of

surprising education, who spent much more of his time out in the world

than any of the rest.



He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about

the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age

of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the

vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been

members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine

European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He

cited the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been

originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the

builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the

site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.



This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The

barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or

Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,

under natural circumstances, have belonged.



That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original

inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was

evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name

continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred

by the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome

breed.



He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith

but he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities,

and repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before

the Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate

villagers had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human

sacrifices, using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own

ancestors in the lower valleys.



He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as

a curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan

were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation

and slaughter.



He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he

would not fear to do so; whatever had existed or taken place there in

the past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion.

The Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and

dusty past.



It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night

about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden

recollection struck me-it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the

legends linked with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned

away from the tavern and strode swiftly through the village.

Stregoicavar lay silent; the villagers retired early. I saw no one as

I passed rapidly out of the village and up into the firs which masked

the mountains slopes with whispering darkness. A broad silver moon

hung above the valley, flooding the crags and slopes in a weird light

and etching the shadows blackly. No wind blew through the firs, but a

mysterious, intangible rustling and whispering was abroad. Surely on

such nights in past centuries, my whimsical imagination told me, naked

witches on magic broomsticks had flown across the valley, pursued by

jeering demoniac familiars.



I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the

illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed

before-in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and

more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting

from the mountain-slope.



Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau

and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of

the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like

an unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey. I

shook off the sensation-a natural one, considering the eeriness of the

place and its evil reputation-and made my way through the wood,

experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed,

and halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed

against my face in the darkness.



I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt

height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward

the cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. L sat

down, reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet,

Justin Geoffrey, had written his fantastic People of the Monolith.

Mine host thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's

insanity, but the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain

long before he ever came to Stregoicavar.



A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at

hand. I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might

appear. A thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs,

with an uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie

and evil tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the

monolith produced a sort of selfhypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I

fought this feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the

monolith seemed to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and

then I slept.



I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand

gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me: The glade was no

longer deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people,

and my distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume

which my reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this

backward land. Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come

here to hold some fantastic conclave-but another glance told me that

these people were not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter,

more squat race, whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and

duller. Some had Slavic or Magyar features, but those features were

degraded as from a mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not

classify. Many wore the hides of wild beasts, and their whole

appearance, both men and women, was one of sensual brutishness. They

terrified and repelled me, but they gave me no heed. They formed in a

vast half-circle in front of the monolith and began a sort of chant,

flinging their arms in unison and weaving their bodies rhythmically

from the waist upward. All eyes were fixed on the top of the Stone

which they seemed to be invoking. But the strangest of all was the

dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from me hundreds of men and

women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a wild chant, yet

those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable murmur as if from

across vast leagues of Space-or time.



Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile,

nauseous yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying

spiral around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.



On one side of this brazier lay two figures-a young girt, stark naked

and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months

old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with

a queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow,

light blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.



The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space

between the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her

eyes blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on

her toes, she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before

the Stone, where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic

figure followed her-a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose

features were entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge

wolf's head, so that he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being,

horribly compounded of elements both human and bestial. In his hand he

held a bunch of long fir switches bound together at the larger ends,

and the moonlight glinted on a chain of heavy gold looped about his

neck.



A smaller chain depending from it suggested a pendant of same sort,

but this was missing.



The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their

shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with

many a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before

the monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she

leaped up and spun into the wild steps of the most incredible dance I

have ever seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild

rhythm, matching her every shirl and bound, while incessantly raining

cruel blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single

word, over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see

the working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their

voices merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and

over with slobbering ecstasy. But what that one word was, I could not

make out.



In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing

still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying

bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eves of the capering

votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and

more extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance-it became

a bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the

drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.



Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the

lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous

motion; bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread

out tenuous tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to

merge with that foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into

plain view, closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she

shot into an indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and

on the very crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward,

quivering and panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied

exertions. The lashing continued with unabated violence and intensity

and she began to wriggle toward the monolith on her belly: The

priest--or such I will call him--followed, lashing her unprotected

body with all the power of his arm as she writhed along, leaving a

heavy track of blood on the trampled earth. She reached the monolith,

and gasping and panting, flung both arms about it and covered the cold

stone with fierce hot kisses, as in frenzied and unholy adoration.'



The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the red-

dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the

mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rendering one

another's garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The

priest swept up the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that

Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains

out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black

surface: Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open with his

bare brutish fingers and fling handfuls of blood on the shaft, then

toss the red and torn shape into the brazier, extinguishing flame and

smoke in a crimson rain, while the maddened brutes behind him howled

over and over the Name. Then suddenly they all fell prostrate,

writhing like snakes, while the priest flung wide his gory hands as in

triumph: I opened my mouth to scream my horror and loathing, but only

a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toadlike thing squatted on the

top of the monolith!



I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the

moonlight and set in what would have been the face of a natural

creature, its huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust,

abysmal greed, obscene cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the

sons of men since their ancestors mowed blind and hairless in the

tree-tops. In those grisly eyes were mirrored all the unholy things

and vile secrets that sleep in the cities under the sea, and that

skulk from the light of day in the blackness of primordial caverns.

And so that ghastly thing that the unhallowed ritual and sadism and

blood had evoked from the silence of the hills, leered and blinked

down on its bestial worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement

before it.



Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl

in his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the

monolith. And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and

slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful

faint.



I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night

rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.

The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved,

green and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took

me across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the

ground should have been trampled bare; and here had the votaress

wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth.

But no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,

shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial

priest had brained the stolen baby-but no dark stain nor grisly clot

showed there.



A dream! It had been a wild nightmare-or else-I shrugged my shoulders.

What vivid clarity for a dream! I returned quietly to the village and

entered the inn without being seen. And there I sat meditating over

the strange events of the night. More and more was I. prone to discard

the dream-theory. That what I had seen was illusion and without

material substance, was evident. But I believed that I had looked on

the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated in ghastly actuality in

bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof to show that my vision

had been a gathering of foul specters rather than a nightmare

originating in my brain?



As if for answer a name flashed into my mind-Selim Bahadur! According

to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had

commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated

Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone

straight from the blotted-out countrvside to the bloody field of

Schomvaal, and his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout-that

manuscript which was taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris

shuddered over-might it not contain some narration of what the

conquering Turks found in Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken

the iron nerves of the Polish adventurer? And since the bones of the

Count had never been recovered, what more certain than that the

lacquered case, with its mysterious contents, still lav hidden beneath

the ruins that covered Boris Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with

fierce haste.



Three days later found me esconced in a little village a few miles

from the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with

savage intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the

hill. It was back-breaking toil-looking back now I cannot see how I

accomplished it. I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn as

the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and

looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff-only a few,

pitiful fragments of crumbling bone-and among them, crushed out of all

original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from

complete decay through the centuries.



I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and back in my tavern chamber I

opened the case and found the parchment comparatively intact; and

there was something else in the case-a small squat object wrapped in

silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those yellowed pages, but

weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I had hardly slept at

all, and the terrific exertions of the previous night combined to

overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to stretch myself on my

bed, nor did I awake until sundown.



I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering

candle, I hasty supper, myself to read the near Turkish characters

that covered the parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply

versed in the language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled

me. But as I toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there

leaped at me and a dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent

my energies fiercely to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and

took more tangible form my blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up

and my tongue clove to my mouth.



At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I

laid down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the

bit of silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the

matter was clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity

of that terrible manuscript.



And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest or

sleep or eat until that case containing them had been weighted with

stones and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God

grant, carried them back into the Hell from which they came.



It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above

Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in

the sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly

conclave, his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own

reason held, I do not know.



No--it was no dream-I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,

come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a

ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god.



By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened

on that one eery night T do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And

I know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript

written in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what

he and his raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read,

set down in detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung

from the lips of screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost,

grim black cavern high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a

monstrous, bloated, wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame

and ancient steel blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with

incantations that were old when Arabia was young. And even staunch old

Selim's hand shook as he recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking

death-howls of the monstrosity, which died not alone; for half-score

of his slayers perished with him, in ways that Selim would not or

could not describe.



And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of

himself, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck

of the slain high priest of the mask.



Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and clean

steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong

to the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No-it is not fear of the

toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell

with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird

night of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none--

remains.



But it is the realization that such things once crouched beastlike

above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear

to peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I

understand his repeated phrase of keys!-aye! Keys to Outer Doors-links

with an abhorrent past and-who knows?-of abhorrent spheres of the

present. And I understand why the tavernkeeper's nightmare-haunted

nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire on a cyclopean

black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains they may find

incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave wherein the

Turks trapped the-thing-was not truly a cavern, and I shudder to

contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch between this

age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared up, like a

wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped unthinkable things.

May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire men call the Black

Stone!



A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has

faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black

dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted

at by Von Junzt-what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his

life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt

anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth-and

is he now? What nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places

of the world?







THE END