'Let's walk,' the smaller man finally said. 'Let's see, one last time, if we can't somehow resolve our differences, come to an agreement. I mean, when all's said and done, we do both serve the same Master.' They turned away from the ruined house, whose stone chimney stack, alone intact, poked at the sky like a skeleton finger. Beyond the garden, both lost in their own thoughts, they followed a path across the heath.
Arnold's mind had returned again to that morning eight years ago when, greatly daring, he had come to Leonard's-Walk Heath and passed himself off as a friend and colleague of Crow, actually assisting the police in their search of the ruins. For on the previous night Blowne House had suffered, a ferocious assault - a `localized freak storm' of unprecedented fury - which had quite literally torn the place to pieces. Of Titus Crow and his friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny, no slightest trace; but of the occultist's books and papers, remains aplenty! And these were the main reason Geoffrey Arnold was there, the magnet which had lured him to Blowne House. He had managed to steal certain documents and secrete them away with him; later he had discovered among them Crow's notes on The Black, that manifestation of Yibb-Tstll which years earlier Crow had turned back upon Arnold's one-time coven-master, James D. Gedney, to destroy him.
Yibb-Tstll, yes ...
Ben Gifford's mind also centred upon that dark, undimensioned god of lightless infinities - his mind and more than his mind - and he too remembered James Gedney and the man's use and misuse of black magic and powers born of alien universes. Power_s which had rebounded in the end.
In those days Gifford and Arnold had been senior members of Gedney's cult or coven. And they had prospered under the man's tutelage and had shared his ill-gotten gains as avidly as they had partaken of his dark rites and demoniac practices. For Gedney had been no mere dabbler; his studies had taken him to all the world's strange places, from which he rarely returned empty-handed. All the lore of elder earth lay in books, Gedney had claimed, and certainly his occult library had been second to none. But his power sprang from the way in which he understood and used those books.
It was as if, in James Gedney, a power had been born to penetrate even the blackest veils of myth and -mysticism; an ability to take the merest fragments of time-lost lore and weave them into working spells and enchantments; a masterly erudition in matters of linguistics and cryptography, which would unlock for him even the most carefully hidden charm or secret of the old mages, those wizards and necromancers long passed into dust, whose legacy lay in Gedney's decades-assembled library.
And uppermost in Gedney's itinerary of research and study had been the pantheon of Cthulhu and the star-spawned Old Ones, lords and masters of this Earth in its prime, before the advent of mere man and before the dinosaurs themselves. For in those ages before memory Cthulhu and his spawn had come down from strange stars to a largely inchoate, semi-plastic Earth and built their cities here, and they had been the greatest magicians of all!
Their 'magic,' according to Gedney, had been simply the inconceivable science of alien abysses, the knowledge of dark dimensions beyond the powers of men even to perceive; and yet something of their weird science had found its way down all the eons.
That would seem, on the surface, purely impossible; but Gedney had an answer for that, too. The CCD
were not dead, he had claimed. Men must not forget Alhazred's conjectural couplet:
'That is not dead which can forever lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.'
— and Teh Atht's much less cryptic fragment:
`Where weirdly angled ramparts loom,
Gaunt sentinels whose shadows gloom
Upon an undead hell-beasts tomb —
And gods and mortals fear to tread;
Where gateways to forbidden spheres
And times are closed, but monstrous fears
Await the passing of strange years —
When that will wake which is not dead . .
- in which the reference was surely to Cthulhu himself, dreaming but undead in his house in R'lyeh, ocean-buried in vast and pressured vaults of the mighty Pacific. Something had happened in those eon-hidden prehistoric times, some intervention perhaps of Nature, perhaps of alien races more powerful yet, whose result had been a suppression or sundering of the CCD; and they had either fled or been 'banished' into exile from a world already budding with life of its own.
The regions in which the 'gods' of the cycle had interred themselves or had been 'prisoned' (they could never really die) had been varied as the forms they themselves had taken. Cthulhu was locked in sunken R'lyeh; Hastur in the star-distant deeps of Hali; Ithaqua the Wind-Walker confined to icy Arctic wastes where, in five-year cycles, to this very day he is still known to make monstrous incursions; and so on.
Yet others of the cycle had been dealt with more harshly: the Tind'losi Hounds now dwelled beyond Times darkest angles, locked out from the three sane dimensions; and Yog-Sothoth had been encapsulated in a place bordering all time and space but impinging into neither facet of the continuum — except should some foolhardy wizard call him out! And Yibb-Tstll, too — he also had his place . . .
But if these gods or demons of the conjectural Cthulhu Mythology were largely inaccessible to men, certain manifestations of them were not. Masters of telepathy, the CCD had long discovered the vulnerable minds of men and insinuated themselves into the dreams of men. On occasion such dreamers would be 'rewarded', granted powers over lesser mortals or even elevated to the priesthood of the CCD. In ancient times, even as now, they would become great wizards and warlocks. And James Gedney had been one such, who had collected all the works of wizards gone before and learned them, -or as much of them as he might. Titus Crow- had been another, but where Gedney's magic had been black, Crow's had been white.
Looking back now, Gifford could see that it had been inevitable that the two must clash. Clash they had, and Darkness had lost to Light. And- for a little while the world had been a cleaner place ...
'Do you remember how it all came to a head?' Gifford asked. 'Crow and Gedney, I mean?'
The moon was fully up now, its disk silvering distant spires, turning the path to a night-white ribbon winding its way across the heath. And the path itself had grown narrower, warning that perhaps the two had chosen the wrong route, which might well peter out into tangles of gorse- and briar. But they made no effort to turn back.
`I remember,' said Arnold. 'Gedney had discovered a way to call an avatar of Yibb-Tstll up from hell. "The Black," he called it: putrid black blood of Yibb-Tstll, which would settle upon the victim like black snow, thicker and thicker, suffocating, destroying — and leaving not only a lifeless but a soulless shell behind. For the demon was a soul-eater, a wampir of psyche, of id!' He shuddered, and this time not alone from the chill of the night air. And his eyes were hooded where they glowed for a moment upon the other's dark silhouette where it strolled beside him. And in his mind he repeated certain strange words or sounds, a conjuration, ensuring that he had the rune right.
'Your memory serves you well,' said Gifford. 'He'd found a way to call The Black, all right — and he'd used it. I saw Symonds die that way, and I knew there had been others before him. People who'd crossed Gedney; and of course The Black was a perfect murder weapon.'