As the matches remaining in the box flared, I found my legs and bolted for the door, unlocked it, and flew upstairs. At the landing I shouted for the old servant, who came running out of the back in a dressing gown.
“Good Heavens, what is it, sir?” he asked, no doubt shocked at my appearance and the desperate manner in which I had called him.
“Light a lamp quickly, man, and come with me!” He did so, admirably quickly, I must say, for a man his age.
We both ran downstairs, I at the quicker pace. As I reached the bottom, the light carried by the servant was already spilling into the darkened room. I could not resist peering in—it was quite dark, though I could make out Sir Harold, still seated at the head of the table, in the same position I had left him. There was no ectoplasm to be seen. I breathed with relief; we had beaten it!
At length the old servant ambled up to me with the lamp. We both entered the room, I first, setting the lamp on the table.
I shall never forget the sight of Sir Harold. Despite the subsequent controversy, I never doubted that it was other than Sir Harold; at first the police believed me only because of the total lack of anything else that could be Sir Harold.
What sat before me was barely more than a skeleton. Its skin was stretched tightly to the bones, and its eyes were shrunken out of sight into their sockets. Sir Harold’s clothes hung loosely on his frame, and the hands that I had seen writhing in that lap only minutes before, were now inert, bony extremities that would belong under normal circumstances only to the long dead.
I involuntarily stepped back in horror, bumping into the servant who was muttering. “It can’t be, it can’t be,” he whispered, largely to himself.
I realized now that the demon had been able to materialize, but only at Sir Harold’s expense, and that it took sustenance not only from his mind and spirit, but from his body as well; every drop of ectoplasm that flowed from Sir Harold was a drop of his own life’s substance flowing out from him. That would explain why he was a shattered man after the first materialization, though his wounds were not so great as to account for such physical deterioration. But now, facing Sir Harold’s skeletal remains, I realized that his death could mean only one thing: the creature’s life!
I began to shake again, in the realization that the horrid thing must now be alive in that room. I grabbed the lamp and held it high, peering gingerly into the shadows of the far corners of the room.
The servant apparently gathered what I was about, and made quickly for the door.
“Don’t open it,” I shouted. “You’ll let it out.” I was wrong.
The creature was standing in the hall, just beyond the lip of light cast by the lamp I was holding. It was a sort of mottled yellow colour, perhaps cream—it’s hard to tell in the glow of a lamp—punctuated by blotches of a darker colour. It stood about eight or nine feet in height, and had a perfectly round head with no ears, long spindly arms that looked as if they might be jointed in two or three places, and huge, bony hands a good foot across. But its most arresting features were its eyes—great holes on either side of a dark spot that I assume could be a nose. And, as Sir Harold had said, they did indeed glow green, a dull, angry green mist that suggested a primordial fury that no man could hope to contain.
Before I could shout for the old man to come back into the circle of light, the creature snatched at him with one of those long, spiderly arms, catching him about the middle with a huge hand. The old man gasped once, and then, with an unspeakable crackling sound, the creature literally twisted him apart and then threw his crushed body back into the room at my feet. He lay there, a widening pool of blood issuing from the crumpled and torn body.
The creature eyed me malevolently and began to move closer. I held the lamp in front of me, realizing with a sinking heart that it was only about half full, with only enough oil to last a few hours. And I knew that when the lamp would begin to dim, the creature would move closer and closer until it could reach me and snap me in two with those loathsome arms.
Closer and closer it moved, as the time passed glacially and the light flickered. Occasionally it would reach in and flail at me, withdrawing quickly, as if the light caused it pain. I sat on the edge of the table, eyeing with horror the lamp’s dwindling oil reserve, my ears ringing with the preternatural silence and my head reeling from the terror of what I had been through and the fear of the outcome of my current trial. And the creature stood in the hallway, staring at me, its mouth leering in a wide, craggy grin. But at last, no doubt a matter of minutes before the light was to flicker its last, the dawn began to break, and light began to filter through the cellar room’s windows.
The creature began to move back into the hall, leaving me alone with my two ghastly companions. Knowing that the hall would remain dark throughout the day, I shook off my terror and fatigue and, possessed of the excess energy that we are sometimes blessed with at times of trial, I picked up a chair and hurled it through the windows. Clambering onto the table, I cleared the broken glass from the sill, and hoisted myself over it onto the cold ground.
London never looked so wonderful, and its air has never smelled so sweet. The sun had not yet brought warmth, but even at that early hour, I could see men making their way to work, wrapped in mufflers, their breaths rhythmically condensing into clouds of steam. Despite my light dress and my dampness from perspiration, I ran down the street shouting for help. When it finally arrived, I collapsed.
The police certainly expressed reservations about my story, though my shaken state and the unspeakable condition of the two corpses found in that God-forsaken room argued eloquently in favour of the truth of my story. The coroner stoutly insisted that Sir Harold had been dead many months, but had to admit that identification of rings and physical features as noted by Sir Harold’s physician, proved beyond a doubt that the body was his, and he had been seen as recently as a week earlier by Sir Clive Mathews, Bart., who had stopped by to discuss the sale of some property near Brighton. Moreover, I had in my possession Sir Harold’s letter, dated only a few days before the tragic night.
Furthermore, the old servant, whose name was Tom, was torn brutally limb from limb, and neither the coroner nor the chief of police could imagine what agency would have the power or ferocity to crumple a human being in that savage manner.
So the police reluctantly reported that “Person or persons unknown attacked and murdered Sir Harold Wolverton and his manservant Thomas Cooper for cause unknown.” And there’s an end on it.
But the creature, that living part of Sir Harold, whose full “birth” left that ghastly shell staring at the ceiling of the cellar room, has the run of London, and I am positive that the current wave of murders and maimings can be attributed to it.
I would expect that its quarters are the now empty Wolverton House. It was apparently a simple matter for it to have eluded the police search after the murders; it could have made its way to the attic, or into the wainscoting, or perhaps even underground. Who knows what its powers, capabilities and intelligence are?
Wolverton House is a desirable property in an excellent neighbourhood, but rumours persist about it, and I expect that it shall stand vacant for a long time to come.
MYTHOS
BY JOHN GLASBY
“WELL,” SAID MITCHELL, SUCKING ON HIS PIPE AND STARING intently across the desk, “what do you make of it? You think it could be a true record of what happened, or is it just another hoax?”
Nordhurst looked bored. He flung the manuscript onto the desk, then straightened in his chair, lit a cigarette, and stared out of the window as he blew smoke through his nostrils. “I was thinking of having a talk with you some time ago about this, Mitchell,” he said quietly. “I know you’ve applied for permission and finances, to fit out an expedition to this place. Personally, I think I ought to warn you that I’m against the entire project. I know you hold very firm, and fixed, views on this subject. You’ve spent the past two or three years delving into the records we have in the library here. I haven’t tried to stop you because you seemed to be doing no harm and it was always possible that you might, conceivably, turn up something new. But this—”