I think I screamed. Realization flooded in upon me like a rising, slimy tide. In that moment I saw and understood the unholy motive that had lain behind the rites I had witnessed in the East Wing of Inneswich Priory. I knew, now, why my brother had wanted the body of Gratia Thane; I knew that the added power he might have gained through her beauty was only incidental. Claude Ashur had needed a new body. For the flesh in which his spirit had been housed since birth was riddled with disease, tottering on the brink of the grave.
The normal, healthy body of his wife had been his only hope of survival. He had wanted it in exchange for the putrescent thing I saw, now, in the mirror of the window. And, when I had destroyed his hope of claiming Gratia’s body, he had claimed mine, instead!
Reeling blindly to the steel-plated door, I pounded frantically at its heavy panels until the sickening pulp of those rotten hands bled. I felt these stiff lips working. I heard a voice that wasn’t mine screaming from this diseased, alien throat. Words crashed wildly against the nighted stillness of the asylum.
“My brother! Claude! Find Claude! My body… I tell you, he’s stolen my body! He’s won! He’s free! You’ve got to find him… He’ll destroy Gratia… He’ll claim her as he did me… Please! You’ve got to let me out! I’ve got to stop him! Please!”
They came. They came in their white tunics and shook their heads and talked in pitying undertones. They smiled kind, wise smiles that said: The poor devil is completely mad; humor him. They strapped me to the bed and went off a bit to whisper among themselves. After a while, the gray-haired one came over to me; he had the hypodermic in his right hand. I winced as the needle plunged into the crook of my arm. The gray-haired one spoke in a lulling voice.
“You must take things more calmly, Claude. Everything is all right, but you’re ill, and you must let us make you well…” He smiled automatically. “You’ve been a very naughty boy for nearly a month now. That’s why we must use the needle. I’ve told you many times; you must try to remember, Claude. Your brother, Richard, left the country nearly a week ago…”
I shook my head dully; my tongue worked in the foul-tasting hole that was my mouth.
“Gratia?” I gasped. “Where’s Gratia?”
The gray-haired one looked away; the blurred white figures of the other doctors shifted on uneasy feet and mumbled sympathetically. The hypo was beginning to take effect; the voices were only a thick murmur in my brain now. The gray-haired doctor was trying to explain something to me in the same calm tones. The words didn’t reach me. But I knew what he was saying. Soft, triumphant laughter gurgled bitterly in the white void, and I knew that, wherever my brother had gone, Gratia had gone with him. I knew that Claude Ashur had won.
There is no longer any fear in me. Fear died with the hope of saving Gratia. I know now that I could never have won out against the infernal evil of Claude Ashur. He was, and is, too strong. Too strong for all of us. I know that at this moment, somewhere, his foul mind lives on. Perhaps he has destroyed Gratia as he destroyed me. Often I wonder how many others have met the same monstrous fate. God only knows. But we, at least, are at rest; the destroyed have come to an end of horror. There is nothing left for us to do but give warning.
People will read this and scoff; they will call it the wild scrawling of a madman on the crumbling lip of the grave. They will laugh. But it will be a nervous, sickly laughter that doesn’t ring true. For in the end, when they have correlated the things I have told with the accepted facts, they will know that I am right. Claude Ashur will go on. For, strangely enough, insane as he is, I think perhaps he has captured the vagrant dream of every man—the only true immortality; the immortality of the mind that will not be imprisoned in one fleshly tomb, but will find others, and, somehow, forever escape the ravages of disease, the oblivion of the grave.
It is ironic and cruel that such a man should have made the discovery. But it is more than just that. It is dangerous. Not to me; not to Gratia and the others who have fought with Claude and lost. Nothing can touch us now. But Claude Ashur can touch you. Perhaps, even now, he is near you; perhaps he speaks with the lips of a lover, or watches through the eyes of an old and trusted friend, smiling that ancient, enigmatic smile. Laugh, if you will, but remember:
The will of Claude Ashur is possessed of a strength that goes beyond flesh and blood. One by one, it has met and vanquished every obstacle in his path. Before it, even Death has bowed a humbled head. And what it could not conquer, it has destroyed. If you doubt such power, you have only to think of me. It was that unholy strength of will that usurped my clean, healthy body, and left me entombed in this swollen, putrescent mass of flesh that has been rotting these twenty years with leprosy.
THE FINAL WAR
BY DAVID H. KELLER, M.D.
THOMPSON SAT IN HIS LONELY LIBRA RY READING A VERY OLD book. Written on vellum pages, it was bound with the tanned skin of a Chinaman killed by a magician in Gobi. The oriental liver had failed to unlock the past or give any information concerning the future. The skin, however, bound a book that was destined to save mankind.
The scholar had often read this very ancient tome, in what had been, so far, a useless effort to unravel its secret. Tonight, in the middle of the book he suddenly saw the solution to the mystery. He read on through the night with increasing fear grasping his soul in its icy clutches. At last he realized the terrific import of the message, hid so long in the old folio. The candle, fanned by the breath of impending doom, flickered over his shoulder. Death hung in hovering terror.
“The world and everything in it will be destroyed!” Thompson whispered. “I alone realize the danger. I am the only one who can save mankind. But I am only a dreamer. The scientists must help me. They only can win this final war.”
That night Thompson read of Saturn, the distant, mysterious, threatening planet; a land of lofty mountains and of chasms so deep that falling rocks took years to reach their final resting place.
He read of caverns carved in the rock by millions of hopeless slaves who prayed for nothing but death to end their torment; of tunnels illumined by the cold light of gigantic glow worms, each chained to a pillar, who fed on mushrooms mixed with phosphorus; of cities inhabited by very ancient races.
The book described these beings, not men, but living things with shapes that could only be imagined by the opium eater. Foul and unclean monsters who loved and worshiped a God from the beyond.
This God, malign, powerful, mighty in wrath, terrible in intelligence, brooded through an eternity of time with only one desire: to conquer the earth, make slaves of the bodies of men and take their souls to a place of everlasting torment.
Thompson continued to read. Finally he wrote a transcript of one page; wrote with a hand that trembled. Even as he wrote, he doubted his translation of the ancient code.
“Ruling Saturn does not content Great Cthulhu. The beautiful people of Venus have perished; the men in the building of underground cities, the women in laboratories from horrible genetic experiments. The scientists from Mercury toil making new forms of destruction while the armies of Mars are prepared for conquest of other worlds.