And the sand in the hourglass ran out!
'Worm!' Carstairs cried as the others fell silent. 'Worm, I command thee — come out!'
Unable, not daring to turn his eyes away from the man, Crow's lips drew back in a snarl of sheer horror at the transition which now began to take place. For as Carstairs convulsed in a dreadful agony, and while his eyes stood out in his head as if he were splashed with molten metal, still the man's mouth fell open to issue a great baying laugh.
And out of that mouth — out from his ears, his nostrils, even the hair of his head — there now appeared a writhing pink flood of maggots, grave-worms erupting from his every orifice as he writhed and jerked in his hellish ecstasy!
'Now, Titus Crow, now!' cried Carstairs, his voice a glutinous gabble as he continued to spew maggots. 'Take my hand!' And he held out a trembling, quaking mass of crawling horror.
'No!' said Titus Crow. 'No, I will not!'
Carstairs gurgled, gasped, cried, 'What?' His cassock billowed with hideous movement. 'Give me your hand —I command it!'
'Do your worst, wizard,' Crow yelled back through gritted teeth.
'But ... I have your Number! You must obey!'
'Not my Number, wizard,' said Crow, shaking his head and at once the acolyte circle began to cower back, their sudden gasps of tenor filling the cellar.
'You lied!' Carstairs gurgled, seeming to shrink into himself. 'You ... cheated! No matter — a small thing.' In the air he shaped a figure with a forefinger. 'Worm, he is yours. I command you — take him!'
Now he pointed at Crow, and now the tomb-horde at his feet rolled like a flood across the floor — and drew back from Crow's circle as from a ring of fire. 'Go on!' Carstairs shrieked, crumbling into himself, his head wobbling madly, his cheeks in tatters from internal fretting. 'Who is he? What does he know? I command you!'
'I know many things,' said Crow. 'They do not want me — they dare not touch me. And I will tell you why: I was born not in 1912 but in 1916 — on 2nd December of that year. Your ritual was based on the wrong date, Mr Carstairs!'
The 2nd December 1916! A concerted gasp went up from the wavering acolytes. 'A Master!' Crow heard the whisper. 'A twenty-two!'
'No!' Carstairs fell to Ms knees. 'No!'
He crumpled, crawled to the rim of his circle, beckoned with a half-skeletal hand. 'Durrell, to me!' His voice was the rasp and rustle of blown leaves.
'Not me!' shrieked Durrell, flinging off Ms cassock and rushing for the cellar steps. 'Not me!' Wildly he clambered from sight — and eleven like him hot on Ms heels.
'No!' Carstairs gurgled once more.
Crow stared at him, still unable to avert Ms eyes. He saw his features melt and flow, changing through a series of identities and firming in the final — the first! — dark Arab visage of Ms origin. Then he fell on his side, turned that ravaged, sorcerer's face up to Crow. His eyes fell in and maggots seethed in the red orbits. The horde turned back, washed over him. In a moment nothing remained but bone and 'shreds of gristle, tossed and eddied on a ravenous tide.
Crow reeled from the cellar, his flesh crawling, his mind tottering on the brink. Only his Number saved him, the 22 of the Master Magician. And as he fumbled up the stone steps and through that empty, gibbering house, so he whispered words half-forgotten, which seemed to come to him from nowhere:
'For it is of old renown that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs ...'
Later, in his right mind but changed forever, Titus Crow drove away from The Barrows into the frosty night. No longer purposeless, he knew the course his life must now take. Along the gravel drive to the gates, a pinkish horde lay rimed in white death, frozen where they
crawled. Crow barely noticed them.
The tyres of his car paid them no heed whatever.
THE CALLER OF THE BLACK
THIS NEXT STORY was the first ever Titus Crow tale. It was the first time I used the character in a story; in fact I believe it was among the first half-dozen stories I submitted for professional consideration. And looking at it now, well, I realize what a beginner I was at that time. But it must have had something. August Derleth used it for the title of my first book.
On monoliths did ancients carve their warning
To those who use night's forces lest they bring
A doom upon themselves that when, in mourning,
They be the mourned . .
— Justin Geoffrey
One night, not so long ago, I was disturbed, during the study of some of the ancient books it is my pleasure to own, by a knock at the solid doors of my abode, Blowne House. Perhaps it would convey a more correct impression to say that the assault upon my door was more a frenzied hammering than a knock. I knew instinctively from that moment that something out of the ordinary was to come — nor did this premonition let me down.
It was blowing strongly that night and when I opened the door to, admit the gaunt stranger on my threshold the night wind gusted in with him a handful of autumn leaves which, with quick, jerky motions, he nervously brushed from his coat and combed from his hair. There was a perceptible aura of fear about this man and I wondered what it could be that inspired such fear. I was soon to learn. Somewhat shakily he introduced himself as being Cabot Chambers.
Calmed a little, under the influence of a good brandy,
Chambers sat himself down in front of my blazing fire and told a story which even I, and I have heard many strange things, found barely credible. I knew of certain legends which tell that such things once were, long ago in Earth's pre-dawn youth, but was of the belief that most of this Dark Wisdom had died at the onset of the present reign of civilized man — or, at the very latest, with the Biblical Burning of the Books. My own ample library of occult and forbidden things contains such works as Feery's Original Notes on The Necronomicon, the abhorrent Cthaat Aquadingen, Sir Amery Wendy-Smith's translation of the G'harne Fragments (incomplete and much abridged) — a tattered and torn copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts (possibly faked) — a literally priceless Cultes des Goules and many others, including such anthropological source books as the Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch Cult, yet my knowledge of the thing of which Chambers spoke was only very vague and fragmentary.
But I digress. Chambers, as I have said, was a badly frightened man and this is the story he told me:
'Mr Titus Crow,' he said, when he was sufficiently induced and when the night chill had left his bones, 'I honestly don't know why I've come to you for try as I might I can't see what you can do for me. I'm doomed. Doomed by Black Magic, and though I've brought it on myself and though I know I haven't led what could be called a very refined life, I certainly don't want things to end for me the way they did for poor Symonds.' Hearing that name, I was startled, for Symonds was a name which had featured very recently in the press and which had certain unpleasant connections. His alleged heart failure or brain seizure had been as unexpected as it was unexplained but now, to some extent, Chambers was able to explain it for me.
'It was that fiend Gedney,' Chambers said. 'He destroyed Symonds and now he's after me. Symonds and I, both quite well-to-do men you could say, joined Gedney's Devil-Cult. We did it out of boredom. We were both single and our lives had become an endless parade of night-clubs, sporting-clubs, men's-clubs and yet more clubs. Not a very boring life, you may think, but believe me, after a while even the greatest luxuries and the most splendid pleasures lose their flavours and the palate becomes insensitive to all but the most delicious — or perverse — sensations. So it was with Symonds and I when we were introduced to Gedney at a dub, and when he offered to supply those sensations, we were eager to become initiates of his cult.