Thunstone threw himself forward from the chair, straight at the vision-door. As he came well away from where he had sat, he whipped his big body straight and, cat-light despite his wrestler’s bulk, spun around on the balls of his feet. Of the many strange spells and charms he had read in years of strange study, one came to his lips, from the Egyptian Secrets:
“Stand still, in the name of heaven! Give neither fire nor flame nor punishment!”
He saw the black shadowy shape, tall behind his chair, its crowning tendrils dangling down in the very space which his body had occupied. The light of the sinking fire made indistinct its details and outlines, but for the instant it was solid. Thunstone knew better than to retreat a step before such a thing, but he was within arm’s reach of a massive old desk. A quick clutch and heave opened a drawer, he thrust in his hand and closed it on a slender stick, no more than a rough-cut billet of whitethorn. Lifting the bit of wood like a dagger, he moved toward the half-blurred intruder. He thrust outward with the pointed end of the whitethorn stick.
“I command, I compel in the name of—” began Thunstone.
The entity writhed. Its tendrils spread and hovered, so that it seemed for the moment like a gigantic scrawny arm, spreading its fingers to signal for mercy. Even as Thunstone glared and held out his whitethorn, the black outline lost its clarity, dissolving as ink dissolves in water. The darkness became gray, stirred together and shrank away toward the door. It seemed to filter between panel and jamb. The air grew clearer, and Thunstone wiped his face with the hand that did not hold the whitethorn.
He stooped and picked up the book that had spilled from his lap. He faced the fire. The door, if it had ever existed otherwise than in Thunstone’s mind, had gone like the tendril-shape. Thunstone took a pipe from his smoking stand and put it in his mouth. His face was deadly pale, but the hand that struck a match was as steady as a bronze bracket.
Thunstone placed the book carefully on the desk. “Whoever you are who wrote the words,” he said aloud, “and wherever you are at this moment—thank you for helping me to warn myself.”
He moved around the study, peering at the rug on which that shadow image had reared itself, prodding the pile, even kneeling to sniff. He shook his head.
“No sign, no trace—yet for a moment it was real and potent enough—only one person I know has the wit and will to attack me like that—”
He straightened up.
“Rowley Thorne!”
Leaving the study, John Thunstone donned hat and coat. He descended through the lobby of his apartment house and stopped a taxi on the street outside.
“Take me to eighty-eight Musgrave Lane, in Greenwich Village,” he directed the driver.
* * *
The little bookshop looked like a dingy cave. To enter it, Thunstone must go down steps from the sidewalk, past an almost obliterated sign that read: BOOKS—ALL KINDS. Below ground the cave-motif was emphasized. It was as though one entered a ragged grotto among most peculiar natural deposits of books—shelves and stands and tables, and heaps of them on the floor like outcroppings. A bright naked bulb hung at the end of a ceiling cord, but it seemed to shed light only in the outer room. No beam, apparently, could penetrate beyond a threshold at the rear; yet Thunstone had, as always, the non-visual sense of a greater book-cave there, wherein perhaps clumps of volumes hung somehow from the ceiling, like stalactites…
“I thought you’d be here, Mr. Thunstone,” came a genial snarl from a far corner, and the old proprietress stumped forward. She was heavy-set, shabby, white-haired, but had a proud beaked face, and eyes and teeth like a girl of twenty. “Professor Rhine and Joseph Denninger can write the books and give the exhibitions of thought transference. I just sit here and practice it, with people whose minds can tune in to mine—like you, Mr. Thunstone. You came, I daresay, for a book.”
“Suppose,” said Thunstone, “that I wanted a copy of the Necronomicon?”
“Suppose,” rejoined the old woman, “that I gave it to you?” She turned to a shelf, pulled several books out, and poked her withered hand into the recess behind. “Nobody else that I know would be able to look into the Necronomicon without getting into trouble. To anyone else the price would be prohibitive. To you, Mr. Thun—”
“Leave that book where it is!” he bade her sharply. She glanced up with her bright youthful eyes, slid the volumes back into their place, and turned to wait for what he would say.
“I knew you had it,” said Thunstone. “I wanted to be sure that you still had it. And that you would keep it.”
“I’ll keep it, unless you ever want it,” promised the old woman.
“Does Rowley Thorne ever come here?”
“Thorne? The man like a burly old bald eagle? Not for months—he hasn’t the money to pay the prices I’d ask him for even cheap reprints of Albertus Magnus.”
“Good-by, Mrs. Harlan,” said Thunstone. “You’re very kind.”
“So are you kind,” said the old woman. “To me and to countless others. When you die, Mr. Thunstone, and may it be long ever from now, a whole generation will pray your soul into glory. Could I say something?”
“Please do.” He paused in the act of going.
“Thorne came here once, to ask me a favor. It was about a poor sick man who lives—if you can call it living—in a tenement across town. His name was Cavet Leslie, and Thorne said he would authorize me to pay any price for a book Cavet Leslie had.”
“Not the Necronomicon?” prompted Thunstone.
Her white head shook. “Thorne asked for the Necronomicon the day before, and I said I hadn’t one to sell him—which was the truth. I had it in mind that he thought Cavet Leslie’s book might be a substitute.”
“The name of Leslie’s book?”
She crinkled her face until it looked like a wise walnut. “He said it had no name. I was to say to Leslie, ‘your schoolbook.’”
“Mmmm,” hummed Thunstone, frowning. “What was the address?” She wrote it on a bit of paper. Thunstone took it and smiled down. “Good-by again, Mrs. Harlan. Some books must be kept in existence, I know, despite their danger. My sort of scholarship needs them. But you’re the best and wisest person to keep them.”
She stared after him for moments following his departure. A black cat came silently forth and rubbed its head against her.
“If I was really to do magic with these books,” she told the animal, “I’d cut years off my age—and rake John Thunstone clear away from that Countess Monteseco, who will never, never do him justice!”
* * *
There was not much to learn at the place where Cavet Leslie had kept his poor lodgings. The landlord could not understand English, and Thunstone had to try two other languages before he learned that Leslie had been ill, had been under treatment by a charity physician, and had died earlier that day, apparently from some sort of throttling spasm. For a dollar, Thunstone gained permission to visit the squalid death-chamber.
The body was gone, and Thunstone probed into every corner of the room. He found the ripped mattress, pulled away the flap of ticking and studied the rectangular recess among the wads of ancient padding. A book had been there. He touched the place—it had a strange chill. Then he turned quickly, gazing across the room.
Some sort of shape had been there, a shape that faded as he turned, but which left an impression. Thunstone whistled softly.
“Mrs. Harlan couldn’t get the book,” he decided. “Thorne came—and succeeded. Now, which way to Thorne?”
The street outside was dark. Thunstone stood for a moment in front of the dingy tenement, until he achieved again the sense of something watching, approaching. He turned again, and saw or sensed, the shrinking away of a stealthy shadow. He walked in that direction.