The room itself was dry as dust, but the air passing gently through held the merest promise of moisture, and perhaps this rare combination had helped preserve the object on the couch. There she lay - central in her curtain-veiled cave, behind a circle of worn, vaguely patterned stone tablets reminiscent of a miniature Stonehenge - a centuried mummy-parchment figure, arms crossed over her abdomen, remote in repose. And yet somehow... unquiet.
At her feet lay a leaden casket, a box with a hinged lid, closed, curiously like a small coffin. A design on the lid, obscure in the poor light, seemed to depict some mythic creature, half-toad, half-dog. Short tentacles or feelers fringed the thing's mouth. Harry traced the dusty raised outline of this chimera with a forefinger.
'It is said she had a pet- a companion creaturewhich slept beside her bed in that casket,' said M/~hrsen, again anticipating Harry's question.
Curiosity overcame Julia's natural aversion. 'Who is ... who was she?'
The last true Priestess of the Cult,' M/ihrsen answered. 'She died over four hundred years ago.' Re Turks?' Harry asked.
The Turks, yes. But if it had not been them... who can say? The cult has always had its opponents.'
The cult? Don't you mean the order?' Harry looked puzzled. 'I've heard that you're - ah - a man of God.
And if this place was once a church -'
'A man of God?' M(ihrsen laughed low in his throat. 'No, not of your God, my friend. And this was not a church but a temple. And not an order, a cult. I am its priest, one of the last, but one day there may be more. It is a cult which can never die.' His voice, quiet now, nevertheless echoed like a warning, intensified by the acoustics of the cave.
'I think,' said Julia, her own voice weak once more, 'that we should leave now, Harry.'
'Yes, yes,' said M/ihrsen, 'the air down here, it does not agree with you. By all means leave - but first there is the legend.'
'Legend?' Harry repeated him. 'Surely not another legend?'
'It is said,' Miihrsen quickly continued, 'that if one holds her hand and makes a wish...'
'No!' Julia cried, shrinking away from the mummy. '! couldn't touch that!'
'Please, please,' said M/ihrsen, holding out his arms to her, 'do not be afraid. It is only a myth, nothing more.'
Julia stumbled away from him into Harry's arms. He held her for a moment until she had regained control of herself, then turned to the old man. 'All right, how do I go about it? Let me hold her hand and make a wish - but then we must be on our way. I mean, you've been very hospitable, but -'
'I understand,' M/~hrsen answered. 'This is not the place for a gentle, sensitive lady. But did you say that you wished to take the hand of the priestess?'
'Yes,' Harry answered, thinking to himself: 'if that's the only way to get to hell out of here!'
Julia stepped uncertainly, shudderingly back against the curtained wall as Harry approached the couch.
M/~hrsen directed him to kneel; he did so, taking a leathery claw in his hand. The elbow joint of the mummy moved with suprising ease as he lifted the hand from her withered abdomen. It felt not at all dry but quite cool and firm. In his mind's eye Harry tried to look back through the centuries. He wondered who the girl had really been, what she had been like. 'I wish,' he said to himself, 'that I could know you as you were...'
Simultaneous with the unspoken thought, as if engendered of it, Julia's bubbling shriek of terror shattered the silence of the vault, setting Harry's hair on end and causing him to leap back away from the mummy. Furthermore, it had seemed that at the instant of Julia's scream, a tingle as of an electrical charge had travelled along his arm into his body.
Now Harry could see what had happened. As he had taken the mummy's withered claw in his hand, so Julia had been driven to clutch at the curtains for support. Those curtains had not been properly hung but merely draped over the stone surface of the cave's walls; Julia had brought them rustling down. Her scream had originated in being suddenly confronted by the hideous bas-reliefs which completely covered the walls, figures and shapes that seemed to leap and cavort in the flickering light of M~hrsen's candles.
Now Julia sobbed and threw herself once more into Harry's arms, clinging to him as he gazed in astonishment and revulsion at the monstrous carvings. The central theme of these was an octopod creature of vast proportions - winged, tentacled, and dragonlike, and yet with a vaguely anthropomorphic outline - and around it danced all the demons of hell. Worse than this main horror itself, however, was what its attendant minions were doing to the tiny but undeniably human figures which also littered the walls. And there, too, as if directing the nightmare activities of a group of these small, horned horrors, was a girl - with a leering dog-toad abortion that cavorted gleefully about her feet!
Hieronymus Bosch himself could scarcely have conceived such a scene of utterly depraved torture and degradation, and horror finally burst into livid rage in Harry as he turned on the exultant keeper of this nighted crypt. 'A temple, you said, you old devil! A temple to what? - to that obscenity?'
'To Him, yes!' M~hrsen exulted, thrusting his hooknose closer to the rock-cut carvings and holding up the candles the better to illuminate them. 'To Cthulhu of the tentacled face, and to all his lesser brethren.'
Without another word, more angry than he could ever remember being, Harry reached out and bunched up the front of the old man's coat in his clenched fist. He shook M~hrsen like a bundle of moth-eaten rags, cursing and threatening him in a manner which later he could scarcely recall.
'God!' he finally shouted. 'It's a damn shame the Turks didn't raze this whole nest of evil right down to the ground! You... you can lead the way out of here right now, at once, or I swear I'll break your neck where you stand!'
'If I drop the candles,' M~hrsen answered, his voice like black gas bubbles breaking the surface of a swamp, 'we will be in complete darkness!'
'No, please!' Julia cried. 'Just take us out of here...' 'If you value your dirty skin,' Harry added, 'you'll keep a good grip on those candles!'
M~hrsen's eyes blazed sulphurous yellow in the candlelight and he leered hideously. Harry turned him about, gripped the back of his grimy neck, and thrust him ahead, out of the blasphemous temple. With Julia stumbling in the rear, they made their way to a flight of steps that led up into daylight, emerging some twenty-five yards from the main entrance.
They came out through tangled cobwebs into low decaying vines and shrubbery that almost hid their exit. Julia gave one long shudder, as if shaking off a nightmare, and then hastened to the car.
Not once did she look back.
Harry released MShrsen who stood glaring at him, shielding his yellow eyes against the weak light.
They confronted each other in this fashion for a few moments, until Harry turned his back on the little man to follow Julia to the car. It was then that MShrsen whispered:
'Do not forget: I did not force you to do anything. I did not make you touch anything. You came here of your own free will.'
When Harry turned to throw a few final harsh words at him, the old man was already disappearing down into the bowels of the ruins.
In the car as they drove along the track through the sparsely clad trees to the road, Julia was very quiet. At last she said: 'That was quite horrible. I didn't know such people existed.'
'Nor did I,' Harry answered.
'I feel filthy,' she continued. 'I need a bath. What on earth did that creature want with us?'
'I haven't the faintest idea. I think he must be insane.'
'Harry, let's not go straight back to the inn. Just drive around for a while.' She rolled down her window, breathing deeply of the fresh air that flooded in before lying back in the seat and closing her eyes. He looked at her, thinking: 'God! - but you're certainly showing your age now, my sweet'