By this time Pasty had an arm round Joe's waist, one foot braced against the base of the clock, putting all his strength into an attempt to haul his companion away from whatever threatened in the swirling light of the now fearsome opening. He was fighting a losing battle. Joe was speechless with terror, all his energies concentrated on escape from the clock; great veins stuck out from his neck and his eyes seemed likely at any moment to pop from his head. He gave one bubbling scream as his head and neck jerked suddenly forward into the maw of the mechanical horror . . . and then his body went limp.
Pasty, still wildly struggling with. Joe's lower body, gave a last titanic heave at that now motionless torso and actually managed to retrieve for a moment Joe's head from the weirdly lit door.
Simultaneously Pasty and Titus Crow saw something - something that turned Pasty's muscles to water, causing him to relax his struggle so that Joe's entire body bar the legs vanished with a horrible hisss into the clock - something that caused Crow to throw up his hands before his eyes in the utmost horror!
In the brief second or so that Pasty's efforts had partly freed the sagging form of his companion in crime, the fruits of Joe's impulsiveness had made themselves hideously apparent. The cloth of his jacket near the left shoulder and that same area of the shirt immediately, beneath had been removed, seemingly dissolved or burnt away by some unknown agent; and in place of the flesh which should by all rights have been laid bare by this mysterious vanishment, there had been a great blistered, bubbling blotch of crimson and brown — and the neck and head had been in the same sickening state!
Surprisingly, Pasty recovered first from the shock. He made one last desperate, fatal, grab at Joe's disappearing legs — and the fingers of his right hand crossed the threshold of the opening into the throbbing light beyond. Being in a crouching position and considerably thinner than his now completely vanished friend, Pasty did not stand a chance. Simultaneous with Crow's cry, of horror and warning combined, he gave a sobbing shriek and seemed simply to dive headlong into the leering entrance.
Had there been an observer what happened next might have seemed something of an anticlimax. Titus Crow, as if in response to some agony beyond enduring, clapped his hands to his head and fell writhing to the floor. There he stayed, legs threshing wildly for some three seconds, before his body relaxed as the terror of his experience drove his mind to seek refuge in oblivion.
Shortly thereafter, of its own accord, the panel in the clock swung smoothly back into place and clicked shut; the four hands steadied to their previous, not quite so deranged motions, and the ticking of the hidden mechanism slowed and altered its rhythm from the monstrous to the merely abnormal...
Titus Crow's first reaction on waking was to believe himself the victim of a particularly horrible nightmare; but then he felt the carpet against his cheek and, opening his eyes, saw the scattered books littering the floor. hakily h he made himself a large jug of coffee and poured self a huge brandy, then sat, alternately sipping at oth until there was none of either left. And when both the jug and the glass were empty he started all over again. .
It goes without saying that Crow went nowhere near de Marigny's clock! For the moment, at least, his thirst for knowledge in that direction was slaked.
As far as possible he also kept from thinking back on the horrors of the previous night; particularly he wished to forget the hellish, psychic impressions received as Pasty went into the clock. For it appeared that de Marigny, Phillips and Walmsley had been right! The clock was, in fact, a space-time machine of sorts. Crow did not know exactly what had caused the hideous shock to his highly developed psychic sense; but in fact, even as he had felt that shock and clapped his hands to his head, somewhere out in the worlds of Aldebaran, at a junction of forces neither spatial, temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by man except in the wildest theories, the Lake of Hali sent up a few streamers of froth and fell quickly back into silence.
And Titus Crow was left with only the memory of the feel of unknown acids burning, of the wash of strange tides outside nature, and of the rushing and tearing of great beasts designed in a fashion beyond man's wildest conjecturing
NAME AND NUMBER
THIS PENULTIMATE TALE sprang from a personal interest in, numerology, cryptography, and biblical prophecy. So many stories had been written about the antichrist, and I wanted to do it differently. Later, after Francesco Cova had published it in Kadath, his superb semi-professional magazine, he wanted to know how I'd worked it out. I told him I hadn't, that Titus Crow must take the credit himself.
Flippant? -- you could say that — but it really is difficult to say how this one 'worked itself out'. It's one of those peculiar tales that has to be written backwards. Who was it said: 'You can prove anything with numbers'? And who, for that matter, asked, 'What's in a name?'
So here's Titus Crow posing a problem. Now put yourself in de Marigny's shoes and see how you make out. The clues are all there. Hey! — and no cheating!
I
Of course, nothing now remains of Blowne House, the sprawling bungalow retreat of my dear friend and mentor Titus Crow, destroyed by tempestuous winds in a 'freak storm' on the night of 4 October 1968, but . .
Knowing all I know, or knew, of Titus Crow, perhaps it has been too easy for me to pass off the disastrous events of that night simply as a vindictive attack of dark forces; and while that is exactly what they were, I am now given to wonder if perhaps there was not a lot more to it than met the eye.
Provoked by Crow's and my own involvement with the Wilmarth Foundation (that vast, august and amazingly covert body, dedicated to the detection and the destruction of Earth's elder evil, within and outside of Man himself, and working in the sure knowledge that Man is but a small and comparatively recent phenomenon in a cosmos which has known sentience, good and evil, through vast and immeasurable cycles of time), dark forces did indeed destroy Blowne House. In so doing they effectively removed Titus Crow from the scene, and as for myself . . . Tam but recently returned to it
But since visiting the ruins of Crow's old place all these later years (perhaps because the time flown in between means so very little to me?), I have come to wonder more and more about the nature of that so well-remembered attack, the nature of the very winds themselves — those twisting, rending, tearing winds —which fell with such intent and purpose upon the house and bore it to the ground. In considering them I find myself casting my mind back to a time even more remote, when Crow first outlined for me the facts in the strange case of Mr Sturm Magruser V.
Crow's letter — a single handwritten sheet in a blank, sealed envelope, delivered by a taxi-driver and the ink not quite dry — was at once terse and cryptic, which was not unusual and did not at all surprise me. When Titus Crow was idling, then all who wished anything to do with him must also bide their time, but when he was in a hurry —